YouSaid · the spoken record

Jung Chang

lines on the record: 42
first: 2007-11-16
most recent: 2007-11-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Snoggling gear I discovered snoggling this year and I just absolutely love it and I hope in this desert island there are lovely you know corals and tropical fishes for me to enjoy.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would take Tugenev's first love because I read it when I was sixteen, when I was exiled to the edge of the Himalayas, and it lived in my memory.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Billy Holliday Lady sings the blues It's absolutely a wonderful piece of music and again Jong introduced me to Bid Holiday so I of course I listened to it always with John at the back of my mind I feel words fail me when I describe music and I think Billy Holiday is somebody who just sings for all of us”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean maybe if I come to think of it, but it was made impossible by my illness. But I love my husband. He loves me and we work together. We wrote Mao together and he helped me with wild swans. And we have these books as the product of our love and relationship. So I feel I'm extremely fortunate woman. I'm extremely fortunate.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before Wild Swans was published, my mother wrote me a letter My mother's role in writing Wild swans she was the engine, you know, but she wrote me and said the book might not do well, but you are not to worry she told me not to worry. She said writing the book she felt had brought us closer together and that was enough for her. I had made her a happy woman.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people have read them. I'm very pleased. I mean, both books are in Chinese. They are published in Hong Kong, so many copies have gone into China. And also now we have the internet. So enthusiasts have scanned the books into the website for other people to download.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It matters tremendously. The people who I most wanted to read my books at the Chinese, but unfortunately the Communist Party still has a party line on history, and so they are both banned.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It mow that coronation mass, and I listened to it many times when I was forced to have lie downs in the afternoons because of my cancer, and it just somehow it made me feel life is beautiful, is worthwhile, and I just wanted to live and enjoy music like this.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very hard question. And without writing wild swans, of course, I couldn't have written Mao. So Wild Swangs is very close to my heart. But I think Mao is certainly a more important book, particularly important for the Chinese, because it has re written modern Chinese history. I mean, it's bandy main in China, but it's published in Hong Kong. So people have been saying this is like an atom bomb, not in the sense of destruction, but in terms of its impact.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, our biography is not a bland bloodless word game. There is passion in our book. But this book is also a fair book to Mao. It's a portrayal of Mao's dramatic life.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but I didn't expect the process to be twelve years, but John and I did work very hard for twelve years writing this book, and together we travelled around the world and interviewed virtually everyone who had interesting and important dealings with Mao, including George Bush the senior, Henry Kissinger, the Dalai Lama, Emma Marcos of the Shu fame, and Mombuto, the tyrant of Zayir, now Congo, who”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I didn't think that much. I mean, in fact, writing wild swans help push the thought of breast cancer to the back of my head. I was much more preoccupied with the writing than with this unfortunate thing which now fortunately is behind me now, I think completely, because”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, I just love Ben Webster, and I was introduced to Ben Webster by John, my husband, and so the music is always associated with romance, if I may say, but also Mao and Mao's regime condemned jazz as particular bourgeois and decadent, so we never heard the sound of jazz. I just fell in love with it, and Ben Webster in particular.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was her first trip outside China, and it was her first opportunity to be outside the social and political confines of that society. And so my mother wanted to talk to me, so she sat down and started to tell me her life. A lot of things I didn't know, and she stayed with me for six months, and she left me sixty odds of tape recordings.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Age of 23, you'd see no. They weren't they were just the woman was just leaning her head on the shoulder of the man. I learned from growing up in China. so sad at myself not being able to do this and being deprived of this and when I met John for the first time I felt I could completely trust him, I could show all my feelings to him and I think I was transformed into another person.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, I remembered the first time I saw a man and a woman open hugging each other was in nineteen seventy five when I was twenty three, and they were foreigners. They were not foreigners, they were from Hong Kong. They were tourists.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we met in London. He was making a series about the Korean War in the early nineteen eighties, and I was working in the television series about China. So we were introduced. And I was supposed to help him opening doors in China, but of course I did nothing of the sort. I just fell in love.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This song is a boatman's song. Boatman did not live and still don't live comfortable life because often they had to pull the boat to the shore, and when I was a child I remember seeing those boatmen bending double almost to the ground, you know using all their effort to pull the heavy boat, and they would hum a kind of chunk which is very much like the boatman's song to give them energy and to make life easier for themselves.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One was not go out on your own, and one other was not go into an English pub, because the Chinese translation for pub suggested somewhere indecent with new dreaming gyrating, and I was torn with curiosity. I bet it was. And so I knew there was a pub opposite the college I was in. So one day I sneaked out, I dotted across the road, and I pushed the door of the pub open. Of course I saw nothing of the kind, only some old man sitting there drinking beer. How disappointed, boy?”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh absolutely, I mean particularly we were told if we violate the rules. When we first came there were so many rules we mustn't do this, we mustn't do that.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess you might subconscious that's what I thought, but I didn't tell it because he in those days this amounted to defection, you know, a traitor you would be carted off back to China in a judge and drugged. I mean that was the kind of little”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I instantly fell in love with it, and on the first occasion I was allowed out, not on my own, you know, stays we were not allowed to go out on our own. We had to go out in a group, but we went to the Hyde Park. And there, you know, every blade of grass, every petal of flowers made me mad with joy. You know, I just wanted this land of greenness. I think that piece of chopin also fitted so well into my mood at the time”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, my next piece of music it was Schopen Nocturn C sharp minor played by Fouton. It was one of the first pieces of music I heard when I first came to Britain in nineteen seventy eight, and Futung was one of my first friends, he was Chinese and he played Chopin beautifully. And I just fell in love with this piece of music. I felt, you know, wistful, I felt sadness, happiness all at the same time, and I just felt it was a heavenly piece of music.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes I only remember vague feeling which was a feeling of not knowing what to think. I remember I sort of use this metaphor like autumn leaves being swept from the trees by a gush of wind. But what is there to hold on to? What should I be thinking? I didn't know. I mean that was my first decent poem and afterwards I lay in bed again and I was thinking you know we were told communist China was paradise on earth and I thought if this is paradise what then is hell?”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At that time I never questioned Mao under the indoctrination we must condemn ourselves for any thought that went against Mao's teachings But my faith”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, that was just so sad and so absurd. You know, we were suddenly told to get out of the classroom and remove the grass from the school lawn, because Mao said that cultivating grass and flowers was a bourgeois habit that had to be got rid of.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe not conscious because the past obviously has gone, but I did love beautiful things, but I was deprived of beautiful things.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next piece of music was from the Shanghai Opera, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Now I heard this piece of music when I was a child before the Kauchu of Luxing when it was still allowed. And then after Mao died and the Couch Revolution was over after nineteen seventy six, I heard it again, and I was in tears. I just thought this was so wonderful, so beautiful.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for example, both he and my mother were subject to this ghastly denunciation meetings. The victims would be stood on the stage, and their arms would be ferociously twisted to the back, and their heads would be ferociously pushed down, and they would be kicked and beaten and tortured, and then they would be paraded in the streets and children spat at them and threw stones at them, and my father suffered particularly badly.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I was fourteen when the culture of Luxing started in nineteen sixty six and my life was turned upside down, when my father was one of the few who stood up against the mouth and protested against the Cultural Revolution, and as a result he was arrested, tortured, driven insane, exiled to a camp, and died prematurely.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd never seen it, I'd never heard this I was so shocked that's why I remembered very vividly now and another thing I remembered of course you know Mao needed steel So he ordered the whole population to take part you know I was six then but my major occupation was somehow to cook steel in the school kitchen and we had to feed all the nails and the cogs and saucepans and we had to collect all this to feed into the school kitchen which was turned into a giant some sort of furnace of course nothing like steel came out of these ventures but the stoves had to be attended to around the clock because you know the temperature should never drop”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I remembered very well I was six when the great leap happened. I encountered many sort of starving people, and I myself didn't starve because I was from a privileged background. But our maid, whose family was in the villages, her family all died during the famine, and I remember one night our maid's mother visited her to tell her daughter and my family that all her family had died, and soon afterwards our maid's mother herself died. I remember the night when our maid was crying, you know, really her heart out, and my grandmother was sitting in her bed in the mosquito net, and she was crying and she was cursing the communists who had brought this famine.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I felt my heart was expanding, I mean this music expresses so much of all my feelings and being brought out and being transformed into something beautiful and memorable.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Her grandmother was lovely, but she had a very sad life because when she was two her feet were bound, crushed and bound in a foot binding. I remember that, you know, when we went out shopping or something and when we came back my grandmother would always have a bowl of hot water and”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why he did care for my mother, and he did love my mother, as my mother realized later, but he always put his principles before the interest of his family.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother was really a fantastic character. My mother joined the communist when she was fifteen, and then when the communist took our city, she met my father and they got married. You know, my mother had a lot of bitterness against my father. When my mother was giving birth to me, doctors said that it was going to be a dangerous birth and my mother should be transferred to another hospital in another town, and my father was the governor of the region. He said his wife had to be treated like everybody else, so he vetoed it, and so my mother nearly died, and she thought bitterly against my father. She thought, you know, he didn't love me and he didn't care where I live or die.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father was quite high up. I mean they were really functionaries. I mean they didn't have any power to decide policies, but they had to carry out whatever policies that was made in Beijing or basically by Mao. But my father was looking after health, education, newspapers and so on.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My parents were communist officials, so I was growing up in this privileged environment of the communist elite. We lived in this armed compound with chauffeurs, gardeners, cooks, servants. I grew up so much taking privilege and hierarchy for granted that when I first came to England I thought England was wonderfully class less. Of course my views have been modified over the years, but”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, well I first heard this Gregory in chant when I was writing wild swans in Italy we were in the abbey and there was this music playing and I immediately felt somehow I was transported to another world and I felt a tremendous sense of elevation and tremendous lightness in my head and also it reminded me of that period when I was writing the book, you know, so I would never forget it.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know before I wrote Wao Swans, I just want you to forget about China. I mean, I actually, when I first came to Britain, I used to tell people I was from South Korea because I didn't want people to ask me questions about a past I wanted to forget. But Rao Swansa has brought China back to my heart and to my mind. I mean if I don't go back every year, if I don't see, you know, the Chinese around me, I just feel restless.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when I was writing wild swans there were still many nightmares because in a way writing wild swans brought back some of the past, but after I finished, you know, gradually I was able to recover my balance, psychological balance in my heart.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I did. I first came to Britain in nineteen seventy eight, I mean right after the end of the Cultural Revolution. I used to have lots of nightmares, and the past was just too painful. My father died in the Cultural Revolution, my grandmother died, and I saw so many atrocities and violence around me, and I was still living in that world, and then ten years later in nineteen eighty eight my mother came to visit me and for the first time she told me the stories of her life and stories of my grandmother. And as a result, I wrote wild swans, and I put, you know, the past two to rest, and I was able to live a much happier life.”
2007-11-16 · Desert Island Discs · Jung Chang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source