The Great Wall of Jung Chang

Jung Chang went from Red Guard to celebrity author. Picture / Martin Sykes

How very bourgeois, not to mention girly of us but at the Jung Chang lunch we were much interested in her jewellery. You could hardly miss it. She is a tiny, chic lady - in that rich Chinese lady style which means bows on lapels and beautiful shoes - laden with what looked to be gold and diamonds and emeralds.

I see her up close later in the day and she is wearing a red silk jacket, a sort of mockery of the Mao jackets she spent her teenage years wearing - "I like beautiful clothes" - and the emerald and diamond earrings in the shape of fans.

Chang is very rich and I have been asking her about the extravagances in her life made possible by the more than ten million copies sold of her first book: Wild Swans, the story of her grandmother, mother and Chang herself. Those sales, she says, bought her 12 years to research and write her second book: Mao: The Unknown Story.

Jung lived through the Cultural Revolution, saw her father die - of, among other awful things, a broken heart - her grandmother die slowly and, obviously, many other dreadful things.

You could easily forgive her for having embraced capitalism, and its attendant material rewards, with gusto. She is not keen on that tack. She squeals "Well, no! No! I'm afraid, if you ask, this is all costume. I like interesting costume jewellery but I don't want to have expensive jewellery which I have to put in a safe."

She peels off one of the fan earrings and holds it out, rather fiercely, for inspection. She likes these earrings because the "fan shape, it reminds me of China".

When Chang went to Britain in 1978 she just wanted to forget about China. "It was full of terrible memories ... I didn't want to think about the place at all but after writing Wild Swans I think the past was laid to rest. I became tranquil."

This tranquillity made it possible for her to return to China, and, eventually, to co-write the biography. Which is the reason she is here, at the end of five weeks on the road with Mao, and husband Halliday, co-author of Mao, in a hotel suite at the Hilton, marvelling at the "spectacular view".

The marvel, really, is her life. She says she writes non-fiction because China's stories are "stranger than fiction, and more dramatic than fiction".

Her own story from Red Guard to celebrity author sounds like fiction. I wonder if it feels like that to her and she considers this and says: "I think that what was more like fiction is my life in China. And afterwards? I mean, one writes a book, one becomes successful. This happens every day."

It doesn't, as she must well know. So, I say, "well, no, not usually," and she says "yes, but to me, I find that very easy to cope with. It hasn't got into my head. I don't know. I don't know how this can affect me. I enjoy writing, I find sitting doing research and sitting in front of the word processor and putting all this information in and organising it immensely enjoyable."

Which wasn't where I was going with that line of inquiry. She is adept at this: the turning aside of even the slightest delving into anything beyond the book, or the process of making the book.

She has been telling me how when she goes back to China, which was every year during the 12 years it took to research and write Mao, "people say I haven't changed. Not my appearance" - and she giggles a little at this as the image of her in her drab Mao suits floats before us - "my character."

And how, I ask, do people describe this character? "Well, I don't know. We don't go into this sort of character analysis but I guess, you know, in the old days I feel the same frustrations as today. I want things to be better and they're not and I feel outraged."

Of course this habit of character analysis, or self-examination to give it another expression, has a different context for anyone who suffered through Mao's China. Chang says she and Halliday decided early on that there would be no attempt to analyse what made Mao the monster that he is in their book.

Responsibility

She posed a question in Wild Swans, about how much individual responsibility ordinary Chinese should share in what happened under Mao. I wonder whether, 14 years on, she's settled on an answer.

"It's a subject we didn't go into," she says, "because we decided this book is telling a story, it's a true story, but it's a story.

"We want the narrative, the drama, we don't want to go into analysis. But of course I know that ordinary people have a lot of responsibility. I mean all this torture, all these atrocities, Mao didn't do them with his own hands. Although I wouldn't say that it was a collective responsibility, because many people didn't [participate.]"

She was, by the way, she points out, a "lousy Red Guard. I don't have any militancy."

Through writing the books, Chang says she "came to realise how much the Chinese had been through and I developed more sympathy and understanding for them which I didn't have. In the Cultural Revolution I saw people behaving horribly to each other and naturally I blamed the Chinese. But through writing Mao I could see how much they had been brutalised. The research helped me understand the China and the Chinese."

That is a telling remark. One that only somebody who had lived a long time outside their home country could make. This is a profitable perch for the historian and from here Chang says she can see that there is another discussion about China which has yet to be properly had: "Cruelty is one aspect in the Chinese culture that has not been properly discussed and worked out of our system."

Think about the fact that "in China women used to have bound feet. For a culture to allow this to happen for more than a thousand years ... ", she throws up her hands.

This, I say, sounds like another book. Not for her: "No, I think I'm not very good at theorising." You can see why she might prefer facts: she didn't grow up with many true ones.

She tells a story about going to discuss her linguistics thesis with her supervisor at York University and "I told him: 'I don't like this view. I like that view. The third view is not quite right.' He said, 'Now show me your thesis.' I said, 'What are you talking about? I haven't written it yet.' And he said, 'But you already had all the conclusions,' and that single remark untied this knot that had fastened my brain through my totalitarian education."

She had suddenly glimpsed, she says, "how to keep an open mind and draw the conclusion from the facts".

She doesn't know whether she will be allowed back into China. What everyone wants to know is how it was she was allowed to do the research there in the first place. Wild Swans is still banned but "I think they allowed me into China partly thanks to the fame of Wild Swans. It just looks much better."

This is a paradox - "Well, you know, China is full of paradoxes today." And so, really, is Chang. She is, I suspect, as tough as the red boots she wears to lunch are pretty.

She is, after hundreds of interviews, accomplished at steering questions away from herself. She is both outwardly friendly, and appears guarded and nervous. She has said she is now tranquil about her life in China; you do wonder how it affected her. All of which, of course, is mere theorising.