Jung Chang lived out her childhood during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, the famine that it led to, and the subsequent Cultural Revolution. One year after leaving China behind, I read Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. I found the answer to that question, and the previous one, in a book. China beat me down, and I was lashing out at it in kind. I slept too much, I got fat off comfort foods, I grew complacent and stopped looking after myself. I screamed and shouted in frustration at so many difficult situations on a daily basis, and as a result my relationship with my partner, and my own mental and physical health, suffered. The rough skin that one needs to survive in Shanghai did grow on me in some ways as I learned to ignore my British instincts and cease queuing on the subway platform, otherwise risk never getting on a train and soon starving to death.īut it also failed to grow in other ways, as I found myself close to tears at the sight of cold-blooded middle-aged women selling caged, drugged, dying Labrador puppies to vulnerable and pitying tourists on street corners.Īs a result of this half-coarse, half-softened shell I had grown, I became angry.įurious. Before I get into the why, let me admit that I was not kind to China when I lived there.
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