An ailment could be a blessing?

MM Chiu & Others

29 July 2013

MM Chiu: Metis, hope you're better now with your flu, & Bernard too. In Chinese, we say that "a mild ailment's a blessing" (Or it just could be, couldn't it?).

One reason perhaps is one lives to tell the tale, I just think.

A few days ago, a British writer named Jung Chang ±i¦¥ (author of Wild Swans, and Mao) appeared in HK. I had known little about her until I saw her in a forum in this annual HK book fair. She is Chinese from Sichuan and went in 1978 to study in U of York and got her PhD in linguistics there, the first mainland Chinese woman ever to get a doctorate in UK, so she said. She's married to Jon Holliday who co-authored the WildSwans. I was given as a gift a copy of WS, & I got her to sign in my copy & take a picture with me. I have an inkling that she might be a bit too critical about what went on during the Cultural Revolution (when she's a Red Gurad), & about Mao; I may be wrong.

Is she popular in your place? What do you think of her?

Metis Hon: Thanks for your concern. Bernard and I are now both on the mend. We're now just coughing, ha, ha.

There hasn't been a lot of news about Jung Chang after her last book, Mao: The Unknown Story, came out in 2005. I guess the reason why she surfaces in this year's HK book fair is she's got a new book coming out in the Autumn. It's called "Empress Dowager Cixi" which promised to be another `groundbreaking biography'.

I read Wild Swan when it first came out and enjoyed it but I haven't touched my copy of Mao which my son gave me as Xmas present. It's a bit too long plus I've lost interest reading about Mao.

Jung Chang is one of the first Chinese scholars sent to the UK on a government scholarship in the late seventies, it is probably true that she is the first mainland Chinese getting a PhD in Linguistics after the Cultural Revolution. There have been other Chinese scholars doing research in Oxbridge before 1950.