BOOKS


Author Interview Jung Chang


The modern fairytale of the Soong sisters is well known across China. Bestselling author Jung Chang looks set to bring the sisters’ stories to a global audience


Caroline Sanderson @CaroSanderson


W


hen Jung Chang was growing up in Mao Zedong’s China, the best-known modern fairytale told was of the three Soong sisters


from Shanghai. The story went that “one loved money, one loved power, and one loved her country”. “Every Chinese person in communities the world over knows about the sisters,” Chang tells me on the phone from New York, where she is on a visit from her home in London. Now the sisters are set to become familiar to non-Chinese readers too, with the publication of Chang’s uterly engrossing new book Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of 20th-Century China. Like her 1991 début Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China —one of my favourite ever memoirs—it also stars a trio of extraordinary women, each of whom enjoyed tremendous privilege and fame, but also endured constant atacks and mortal danger as well as heartbreak and despair. Their gripping collective story reads like Wild Swans meets the Mitfords; and the history feels remarkably close to our own times too, especially given that the youngest sister, May-ling (Litle Sister) died as recently as 2003, aged 105. In 1927, May-ling married Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, thus becoming first lady of pre-Communist China, and a political figure in her own right; while her eldest sister, Ei-ling (Big Sister)—along with her politician


26 26th July 2019


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