“I know the past fairly well and I can see something is coming,” she said.Įvents in Hong Kong gave Ms. She hopes it will help bring closer attention to places such as Hong Kong, her adopted home, where Chinese history is being rewritten once again, this time under Mr.
The book is the culmination of decades of writing and rewriting her personal history. Her recent memoir, “The Secret Listener: An Ingenue in Mao’s Court,” was published last year. But her critics - mostly men - have raised doubts about the details of her recollections and accused her of being a fabulist. She says she wants to set the record straight. Chen is part of the increasingly small group of people still alive who endured the worst of Mao’s excesses. But her efforts have raised questions about whose voice matters when it comes to narrating Chinese history.
Her books, she said, are meant to add “blood and flesh” to the official party account and help readers empathize with the Chinese people who have suffered under an authoritarian system. Her voice drops, barely audible among the din of cutlery and diners in the restaurant: “When you do things in the spirit of Mao, that scares me,” she says, referring to China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. Chen disputes the Communist Party’s sanitized version of its past and worries it has allowed it to continue making mistakes with global consequences. Having lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in China’s recent history, Ms. Chen, 93, says she has a warning for the world. Now, sitting at a restaurant in one of Hong Kong’s most opulent hotels, Ms. Historians estimate that up to 45 million people died over the course of five years. Chen said, recalling the desperation and starvation caused by Mao’s experiment. “It wasn’t anyone’s exaggeration, it was as true as real life, but nobody would say it,” Ms. But living in a village during the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s calamitous attempt to catapult China into communist plenty in the late 1950s, changed her view on what extreme hunger could drive people to actually do. “I thought that was an exaggeration,” she said. Once, that tale had seemed unbelievable to her. HONG KONG - Yuan-tsung Chen, an author, leaned forward in an oversize velvet chair to tell the story of the man so hungry that he ate himself.
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