In an interview on Communist China

You’re obviously a fan of Jung Chang because another book on your list is her earlier book Wild Swans.

Yes, I am. This is much more of a personal story about Jung’s life and her mother’s and grandmother’s life. What we’re looking at is three generations of Chinese women describing their life in China. I don’t think that people in the outside world really understood what was going on in China. For example, the food, meat, eggs, even clothing – if you wanted to buy anything you needed a government-issued coupon. Everyone was suffering. Your life wasn’t your own. You even needed to ask permission to get married.

Wild Swans is talking about people who are living at the highest level of society but they are still suffering persecution and live in fear. And the peasants in the village became slaves, they became nothing. So what the book does brilliantly is give a real insight into what life was like for ordinary people against the backdrop of the ever-changing China.

In an interview on Asian Women

Let’s talk about China now. You’ve chosen Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, about a grandmother, a mother and a daughter.

To me Wild Swans is one of those iconic books for understanding the generations of Chinese women. She is from this amazing intellectual family and it’s about what happens to them. The book just has this tremendous power. It’s an amazing journey. It’s about what women do to survive and also how they suffer.

It’s been a while since I read it, but I was looking at it before speaking to you and I was reminded that the grandmother is a concubine with bound feet. So it’s also a reminder that for all its atrocities Maoism did a lot for the position of women in China.

There’s no question. We did a show about the Cultural Revolution here at the Asia Society. One of the things you find out is that the Cultural Revolution gave a sense of equality to women that they never had before. That doesn’t mean it’s going to stick across the board, but at least it’s expected that women are going to be educated, it’s expected that women are going to work. That’s a really dramatic change that took place in less than 100 years – a huge change between pre-1949 China and post-1949 China.

Yes, there are these extraordinary statistics that Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof cite about China in their book, Half the Sky. Apparently, 80% of factory workers in Guangdong are female, and six out of the 10 of the richest self-made women in the world are Chinese.

Exactly. They don’t always get credit for it, but that’s a different matter! The thing about Wild Swans is that it’s just so poignantly written. I’m partial to these kinds of personalised stories that also suggest a much bigger, grander narrative about women. You can see that in almost all of these books.