It’s an odd sensation, sitting just off the Portobello Road, sharing little bowls of dumplings, hearing that story and trying to reconcile it with the precise and stylish woman who tells it. But there was never enough to keep a fire burning. We had to walk for a long time in the hills to find leaves and twigs. But the trees had all been burned, you know, in the Great Leap Forward, in the ridiculous effort to make steel in villages. I used to go before breakfast to collect firewood. “I learned cooking for the first time, but I’m afraid I was no good,” she says. You could feel the starvation around you.”ĭuring the Cultural Revolution, after her father was denounced and tortured for criticising Mao and her mother sent to a detention camp, Chang was exiled to a village in the Himalayan foothills. Once on the way to school, I was eating a bun and a child rushed out from nowhere, and snatched the bun from my hand and ate it. “Most people in my generation experienced starvation.
“That was a time of life and death,” she says. As a child, meals were a mark of privilege for her family – in the 1950s her father was a middle-ranking official in the communist hierarchy and on the compound in which they lived they were granted special rations.
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