Jung Chang

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. When I was growing up I would observe the clouds in the sky and make up stories to myself, but in Mao’s China most writers were persecuted, and even writing privately was dangerous.

When I was 16 I wrote my first poem. My father’s tormentors came to the flat and I had to rush to the toilet to flush my poem away. We were told that Mao’s China was paradise, but afterwards I lay in bed and thought for the first time: if this is paradise, where, then, is hell?

I was exiled to the edge of the Himalayas, and worked as a peasant and a barefoot doctor, an electrician, a steelworker. When I was spreading manure in the paddy fields I would always be writing long passages in my head or short poems in the Chinese classical style.

My father was one of the few who stood up to Mao. He was tortured, imprisoned and driven insane. My mother was under tremendous pressure to denounce my father. She was subject to over 100 ghastly denunciation meetings, made to kneel on broken glass, and paraded in the streets, where children spat and threw stones at her. She survived, and she still lives in China.

When I came to Britain in 1978 I had the freedom to write, but at that moment I suddenly lost my urge to, because to write would mean to turn inwards and look at my past, and I didn’t want to look at the past; it was extremely painful to me.

When I first arrived at Heathrow I nearly walked into the men’s toilet. I had no idea the figure on the door wearing trousers was supposed to be a man. In the cultural revolution women were not supposed to wear skirts, and the man in front of me had long hair, so I followed him in.

One of my first impressions was that England was wonderfully classless compared with China. When I was beginning to do my doctorate at the University of York, my supervisor asked to see my thesis, and I said, ‘What are you talking about, I haven’t written it yet.’ He said, ‘But you already have all the conclusions.’ This single remark untied the knot that a totalitarian educational system had fastened in my brain. In China we were always told to write from the basis of what Mao said, or Marxist theories. An open mind was so hard to come by.

In 1988 my mother came to Britain and for the first time she told me the story of her life. She stayed for six months and talked every day. When she left for China she left me 60 hours of tape recordings and I started writing Wild Swans. My mother wanted me to understand her, and was helping me to fulfil my dreams of becoming a writer.

When I was researching Mao I interviewed Imelda Marcos. My husband asked her if she had found one western man who understood her, and she said only one man – Richard Nixon.

Mao is very strictly banned in China. When the Economist magazine carried a review of our book, those copies on sale in big hotels had the review physically torn out of the magazine.

Ken Livingstone said Mao had got rid of footbinding, and that that was enough to justify the Mao era. But Mao didn’t get rid of footbinding; and nothing justifies 70 million deaths.

I miss China more now than when I first came. I feel for Chinese people and feel very hppy when I go to China. People are beginning to have happy lives, and I see flowers. I saw the tea house which had been closed by pupils from my school reopened after nearly 20 years – and I felt indescribable joy at seeing all these little changes, people’s lives becoming better.

The day that Mao’s portrait is taken off Tiananmen Square will be the day that China truly becomes a wonderful place.

· Jung Chang’s Mao: The Unknown Story is published by Vintage, priced £15