Jung Chang Quotes

#1. I would love mainland Chinese to read my book. There is a Chinese translation which I worked on myself, published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many copies have gone into China but it is still banned.

Jung Chang

#2. So the story of Wild Fox Kang's attempted coup and murder of Cixi lay in darkness and obscurity for nearly a century, until the 1980s, when Chinese scholars discovered in Japanese archives the testimony of the designated killer, Bi, which established beyond doubt the existence of the plot.

Jung Chang

#3. For anyone to open their heart, they need the right atmosphere, and something to prompt them. For my mother it was her trip abroad: she was in a very relaxed, understanding environment. I was very sympathetic towards her.

Jung Chang

#4. I feel perhaps my heart is still in China.

Jung Chang

#5. The Japanese are a disease of the skin ... the Communists are a disease of the heart. Everything personal was political ... Two reds sandwiching a black ...

Jung Chang

#6. When a man gets power, even his chickens and dogs rise to heaven.

Jung Chang

#7. Every time she went home she found herself being criticized. She was accused of being "too attached to her family," which was condemned as a "bourgeois habit," and had to see less and less of her own mother.

Jung Chang

#8. When I was in China, Mao was Chairman, and parents were terrified to tell their children anything that differed from the party line in case the children repeated it and endangered the whole family.

Jung Chang

#9. Although my book is banned I am still allowed to go to China and travel. There is no longer the kind of control that Mao used to have-there have been deep fundamental changes in society.

Jung Chang

#10. According to tradition, my great-grandfather married early, at 14, with a woman six years older. It was considered to be one of the duties of the wife to raise her husband.

Jung Chang

#11. At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general.

Jung Chang

#12. We in China had been trained not to draw conclusions from facts, but to start with Marxist theories or Mao thoughts or the Party line and to deny, even condemn, the facts that did not suit them. I

Jung Chang

#13. If children were brought up to become non-conformists it would only ruin their lives. So parents all over China who loved their children told them to do as Chairman Mao said. It was not possible to tell them anything else.

Jung Chang

#14. She was a pious Buddhist and every day in her prayers asked Buddha not ro reincarnate her as a woman. "Let me become a cat or dog, but not a woman," was her constant murmur as she shuffled around the house, oozing apology with every step.

Jung Chang

#15. Boredom was as exhausting as backbreaking labor.

Jung Chang

#16. The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings.

Jung Chang

#17. My joy at the sensation of my mind opening up and expanding was beyond description.

Jung Chang

#18. In spring 1989 ... I saw the buildup of demonstrations from Chengdu to Tiananmen Square. It struck me that fear had been forgotten to such an extent that few of the millions of demonstrators perceived danger. Most seemed to be taken by surprise when the army opened fire.

Jung Chang

#19. I remember when my mother pointed to a stone, and she said this was the kind of stone people used to place on the feet of the baby girls to stop them trying to climb away and unbind their feet.

Jung Chang

#20. Father is close, Mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao.

Jung Chang

#21. One piece of information that made an impression on her was that individual Chinese lives mattered to the Westerners.

Jung Chang

#22. It's taken us 10 years, and it was constant excitement. I was constantly shocked by how evil he could be. Mao was very, very shrewd but he didn't have human feeling.

Jung Chang

#23. I was not allowed to take notes but my friend and I memorised those two and a half pages. Most people talked to me because of the warning. They knew this book was not going to be the official line.

Jung Chang

#24. Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels: before, reading a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of criticism about being a bourgeois intellectual.

Jung Chang

#25. If you have love, even plain cold water is sweet.

Jung Chang

#26. I no longer have the terrible nightmares that I used to have. Mao had just died in 1976, and China began to open up. For the first time scholarships to go to the West to study were awarded on academic merit.

Jung Chang

#27. While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister.

Jung Chang

#28. I could understand ignorance, but I could not accept its glorification, still less its right to rule.

Jung Chang

#29. What has marked Chinese society is its level of cruelty, not just revolutions and wars. We ought to reject it totally, otherwise in another upheaval there will be further cruelty.

Jung Chang

#30. When boys played "guerrilla warfare," which was their version of cowboys and Indians, the enemy side would have thorns glued onto their noses and say "hello" all the time.

Jung Chang

#31. We were not treated by our own government as proper human beings and consequently, some outsiders did not regard us as the same kind of humans as themselves.

Jung Chang

#32. I wanted to look calm, and to let them know that they could not demoralize us. I had no fear or sense of humiliation, only contempt for them. What had turned people into monsters? What

Jung Chang

#33. Making a lot of noise was considered essential for a good wedding, as keeping quiet would have been seen as suggesting that there was something shameful about the event.

Jung Chang

#34. I like to have Chinese furniture in my home as a constant and painful reminder of how much has been destroyed in China. The contrast between the beauty of the past and the ugliness of the modern is nowhere sharper than in China.

Jung Chang

#35. My grandmother's feet had been bound when she was two years old. Her mother ... first wound a piece of white cloth about twenty feet long round her feet, bending all the toes except the big toe inward and under the sole. Then she placed a large stone on top to crush the arch.

Jung Chang

#36. My father said he was going to write to the Jinzhou City Party Committee asking for permission to 'talk about love' ... My mother supposed it was a bit like asking permission from the head of the family ... the Communist Party was the new patriarch.

Jung Chang

#37. In certain areas where the media are still controlled, the changes have come to a halt, which is a very frustrating situation. I would like the changes to take place throughout China.

Jung Chang

#38. Inflation had risen to the unimaginable figure of just over 100,000 percent by the end of 1947
and it was to go to 2,870,000 percent by the end of 1948 ...

Jung Chang

#39. In league with a general called Feng Yuxiang, a Christian warlord, who entered legend by baptizing his troops en masse with a firehose,

Jung Chang

#40. The cult of Mao and the cult of Lei Feng were two faces of the same coin: one was the cult of personality; the other, its essential corollary, was the cult of impersonality

Jung Chang

#41. As the revolution was made by human beings, it was burdened with their failings.

Jung Chang

#42. Over the years of the Cultural Revolution, I was to witness people being attacked for saying "thank you" too often, which was branded as "bourgeois hypocrisy"; courtesy was on the brink of extinction.

Jung Chang

#43. A cautionary tale I had carried with me from China, and which I firmly believed, was that anyone who attempted to have a foreign lover would be drugged and carted back to China in a jute sack.

Jung Chang

#44. China is more prosperous than before. The people have better lives but they are not happy and confident because the scars are still there.

Jung Chang

#45. When he asked my grandmother if she would mind being poor, she said she would be happy just to have her daughter and himself: 'If you have love, even plain water is sweet.

Jung Chang

#46. I think because of their terrible past, particularly this century, the Chinese have come to accept cruelty more than many other people, which is something I feel very unhappy about.

Jung Chang

#47. ...go in the direction your head is pointed in.

Jung Chang

#48. For entertainment there were only Mao Thought Propaganda Teams, who sang Mao's quotations set to raucous music.

Jung Chang

#49. sitting happiness in...

Jung Chang