to stand outside in the rain – followed by imprisonment, her father's treatment leading to lasting physical and mental illness. Their careers were destroyed, and her family was forced to leave their home. Before her parents' denunciation and imprisonment, Chang had unquestioningly supported Mao and criticised herself for any momentary doubts. But by the time of his death, her respect for Mao, she writes, had been destroyed. Chang wrote that when she heard he had died, she had to bury her head in the shoulder of another student to pretend she was grieving. She explained her change on the stance of Mao with the following comments: Chang's depiction of the Chinese people as having been "programmed" by Maoism would ring forth in her subsequent writings. According to Wild Swans (chapter 23-chapter 28), Chang's life during the Cultural Revolution and the years immediately after the Cultural Revolution was one of both a victim and one of the privileged. Chang attended Sichuan University in 1973 and became one of the so-called "Students of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers". Her father's government-sponsored official funeral was held in 1975. Chang was able to leave China and study in the UK on a Chinese government scholarship in 1978, a year before the post-Mao Reforms began. Studying English The closing down of the university system led Chang, like most of her generation, away from the political maelstroms of the academy. Instead, she spent several years as a peasant, a barefoot doctor (a part-time peasant doctor), a steelworker and an electrician, though she received no formal training because of Mao's policy, which did not require formal instruction as a prerequisite for such work. The universities were eventually re-opened and she gained a place at Sichuan University to study English, later becoming an assistant lecturer there. After Mao's death, she passed an exam which allowed her to study in the West, and her application to leave China was approved once her father was politically rehabilitated. Life in Britain Academic background Chang left China in 1978 to study in Britain on a government scholarship, staying first in London. She later moved to Yorkshire, studying linguistics at the University of York with a scholarship from the university itself, living in Derwent College. She received her PhD in linguistics from York in 1982, becoming the first person from the People's Republic of China to be awarded a PhD from a British university.