Wild Swans author Jung Chang on growing up in Mao’s China, her new book Fly Wild Swans and her mother’s death

The Deirdre O'Shaughnessy Podcast · Aug 25, 2026 · 57m

Jung Chang achieved worldwide acclaim for her autobiographical work Wild Swans, published in 1992.The book told the story of her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine whose feet were bound, her mother, a Communist Party official who suffered under Mao, and herself, one of the first students permitted to leave China to study in the West in the 1970s.Since its publication Jung has become a prolific writer and historian of China but her biography of Mao, written with her Irish husband Jon Halliday, put her on the wrong side of the Communist Party’s propaganda.Her new book, Fly Wild Swans, tells the…