Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China | Jung Chang in conversation with Pallavi Aiyar

Thirty-five years after Wild Swans, Jung Chang returns with Fly, Wild Swans, a memoir of family, love, and survival amid China’s dramatic upheavals. Through the lives of her mother, grandmother, and father, she traces the Cultural Revolution, personal tragedies, and the rise of modern China. In conversation with Pallavi Aiyar, Chang explores the ways in which intimate lives are shaped by history and how memory carries both pain and hope across generations. Presented by Punjab Kesari Navodaya Times Jung Chang is the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, which has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide with the exception of China, where it is banned, as are all of her other books. She wrote a ground-breaking trilogy on the history and personalities of modern China: Mao: The Unknown Story, which was described by Time magazine as “an atom bomb of a book”. Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages. She has won many awards, including the UK Writers’ Guild Best Non-Fiction and Book of the Year UK, and has received honorary doctorates from a number of universities in the UK and USA. She has been awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for services to literature and to history. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Jung Chang worked as a peasant, a “barefoot” doctor, a steelworker, and an electrician, in the Sichuan Province, before becoming an English-language student at Sichuan University. Her latest book is, Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China. Pallavi Aiyar is a foreign correspondent, columnist, and author with a reporting career spanning more than two decades across China, Belgium, Japan, Indonesia, Spain, and beyond. She is the author of eight books, including Smoke and Mirrors, Punjabi Parmesan, Babies and Bylines, Orienting, and Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts. Pallavi writes a weekly Substack newsletter on global travel and culture titled The Global Jigsaw. Currently based in Beijing, she brings a deeply cross-cultural perspective to her work and writes in English, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish. Follow us on – Website - https://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/ Facebook -   / jaipurlitfest   YouTube -    / jprlitfest   Instagram -   / jaipurlitfest   Twitter -   / jaipurlitfest   #jaipurliteraturefestival2026 #literature #JungChang