Love Quote by Jung Chang

A single soft clause does the work of a whole memoir: the “perhaps” is a hedge, the “still” a confession. Jung Chang’s line doesn’t plant a flag of belonging so much as admit to a lingering attachment that refuses to behave. It’s the rhetoric of someone who has left a country physically but can’t fully exit it emotionally or imaginatively - and, crucially, someone aware that nostalgia can be both truthful and dangerous.

For a writer whose public identity has been shaped by China’s political upheavals and by life in the West, “my heart is still in China” functions as a counterweight to the simplifications audiences often want: dissident equals permanent exile; critique equals severance. Chang’s intent is more complicated. She suggests that distance doesn’t erase intimacy, and that a person can indict a system while remaining tethered to the place, language, and people caught inside it. The heart here isn’t romance; it’s memory, family, and the stubborn persistence of origin.

The subtext is also about permission. “Perhaps” signals the self-surveillance common to exile narratives: to admit longing risks being read as disloyal to your adopted home, or as softening your critique of the old one. Chang threads that needle by making the sentiment tentative, almost involuntary. The line lands because it refuses the clean arc of reinvention. It insists that migration often produces not closure, but an unfinished sentence you keep living inside.