Life & Wisdom Quote by Jung Chang

The line reads like a shrug, but it’s a quiet power move: a claim of destiny that also sidesteps the messier truth of how hard it can be to become one. “Always” compresses years of uncertainty into a single, clean narrative arc. It offers the comfort of inevitability, the kind of sentence people reach for when they’ve survived enough chaos to want their life to look coherent in retrospect.

With Jung Chang, that coherence matters. She came of age inside Maoist China, where language wasn’t just expression; it was surveillance, propaganda, and risk. In that context, wanting to be a writer isn’t a cute childhood aspiration. It’s an appetite for the one thing an authoritarian system tries to ration: an independent account of reality. The understatement is the point. A more dramatic statement would invite a political reading too quickly. This one slips past defenses, then lands harder once you remember what “writer” can mean when the state wants you to be a mouthpiece.

There’s subtext, too, about legitimacy. Chang’s global success (especially with Wild Swans) positioned her as both witness and lightning rod, praised for testimony, criticized for politics. “I always wanted to be a writer” reframes the project away from ideology and toward vocation: not “I set out to indict,” but “I set out to tell.” It’s also a gendered insistence on ambition as something native, not granted - a declaration that the urge to author a life was there before anyone permitted it.