Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China
by Jung Chang
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jung ChangEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-08-12
ISBN: 0743246985
Number of pages: 538
Publisher: Touchstone
Book Reviews of Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China
Book Review: An extraordinary work of non fiction
Summary: 5 Stars
I was sitting at a meeting for the launch of Jung Chang's Mao, the untold story. Chang sounded like she had really made some brand new discoveries with the co-author, her husband Halliday. She inspired me with a sense of wealth and aristocracy and had earned her laurels on this great work, Wild Swans, recommended to me by a good friend. For a long time, I thought about reading this, but was daunted by its great length (I also prefer the new warmer cover than the green original). When I finally got my teeth into it, I had no problem persisting with finishing it. It taught me so much about Chinese history and attitudes. The book can connect up history, politics, religion and geography (not to mention gardening and cookery) in several aspects, moods and colors, with a core based on duties, responsibilities and family within the Chinese context.
With China we have an alien canvas that many of us will be unfamiliar with, rich in culture, history and tradition. Chang helps us to see just how human the Chinese are as any others, and treats us to the generalised masks Chinese people wear, especially if they are politicians. It was potentially lethal for those in authority to display their individuality - following the party line, being loyal to the state and not betraying any opinions to the contrary seemed the safest bet. But in Mao's China, today's disciples could become yesterday's heretics and we can breathe a sigh of relief with the death of Mao.
This book begins around 1900, the age of female foot binding, with the story of Chang's grandmother's family. Her grandmother was a concubine sold by her great grandfather who desired connections, wealth and prestige. At this time, China was split and torn with warring political movements and the Japanese, vying for power. In this maelstrom, might was right and those with high connections had it easier than the peasantry in general. We realize that women had few privileges and could be sold to politicians or warlords, if they possessed the right attributes of beauty, virtue and submissiveness. Chang's mother is born within a polygamous environment and her grandmother manages to smuggle the baby from a situation where it could have been irrevocably lost to her.
Her grandmother as a young woman marries an old Dr Xia, a skilled physician, steeped in knowledge of traditional medicines in the teeth of opposition from his family. Xia represents a sensitive and skilled adoptive father for Chang's mother, as she grows up in the cold, grey squalor of Manchuria during the Japanese puppet regime of Emperor Pu Yi. Chang's mother becomes active in supporting the takeover of Mao's communists and it becomes clear that a transition of power from a sort of Colonial Chaos to Communism was supported by much of the populace. We get an impression of a nascent solidifying political stability - Chang's mother's relationships and her eventual marriage are portrayed with the beauty of a romantic tale.
Chang's father as a military commander and political officer has many sometimes horrific adventures at his career's inception, fighting with the Kuomitang and landowning classes. Eventually, he moves to his own familie's territory in Sichuan, an environment that is described as being warmer and more tropical in Yibin on the banks of the Yangzte. At that time, the city was mainly accessible by the river itself.
Chang herself is born into the jaws of China under Mao and we get an acute impression of how the propaganda machine succeeded in brainwashing the mass of the people. Just as Chang's parents become the energetic servants of a new China, Mao shifts gears into the Great Leap Forward, a time that involved killing sparrows and cutting wood to make steel, eventually resulting in the deaths of about 30 million through starvation given a neglect in food production. After a phase of stability, the pendulum shifts to another extreme of the Cultural Revolution, perhaps one of the worst phases in Chinese history with its book burning and desecration of history and culture, consigning much that was precious to extinction.
Chang explains how to her, Mao was like a God but how doubts started creeping in. This third phase of the book is very moving. The Chinese government under Mao and his cronies effectively hijacked Chinese society into a state of lawless anarchy where personal scores were settled with the expediency of politics. A great deal may be gleaned about the state craft of the communists, expedited with a religiously totalitarian fervor, not unlike similar systems in Iran or Nazi Germany. Chang states that Mao's genius was that he used ordinary people instead of a secret police to enact his desire for a perpetual state of conflict at the expense of culture and education. Anything considered beautiful or cultural was banned, Mao's status was all that mattered.
Through this, Chang's grandmother keeps the family fed with traditional Chinese delicacies. Her grandmother understands hospitality and maintains her hair and fashions in the teeth of dour modernity, somehow surviving until she can take no more.
When Mao dies, everyone pretends to cry, but Chang is so relieved, and so the story moves on to her education and improbable scholarship to the UK, a situation that enables her to share her story in freedom.
Chang's father, an educated man, loyal to the Party beyond all else is eventually demonised by the Party itself as a Rightist. He realizes he has neglected his wife and family in terms of love and tenderness and lives to see his precious books destroyed in front of him, eventually going insane in tragic circumstances. Through all the family upheavals it is Chang's mother who shines as a beacon of energy - pulling strings and establishing contacts to protect her colleagues and her family while maintaining responsible positions of authority that sometimes demand from her to sacrifice victims not conforming to the party line. Eventually, Chang's parents are punished with exile and hard labour and we see Chang having to fight for her own status - learning English and looking to go abroad. It would still not have happened without Chang's mother, and so much gratitude is expressed.
It is with this, filial support and the strength of a woman to raise five Children in communist China with all the challenges that could bring, that the book resonates and redeems itself. There seems to be a happy ending to a packed saga. Whereas not all the facts in this book may not have been cross-checked the substance appears accurate and thought provoking.
I agree that "the importance of this book cannot be exaggerated". Breathtaking.
Summary of Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China
Blending the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history, Wild Swans has become a bestselling classic in thirty languages, with more than ten million copies sold. The story of three generations in twentieth-century China, it is an engrossing record of Mao's impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love.Jung Chang describes the life of her grandmother, a warlord's concubine; her mother's struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents' experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a "barefoot doctor," a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving -- and ultimately uplifting -- detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.
In Wild Swans Jung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century. Chang's grandmother was a warlord's concubine. Her gently raised mother struggled with hardships in the early days of Mao's revolution and rose, like her husband, to a prominent position in the Communist Party before being denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself marched, worked, and breathed for Mao until doubt crept in over the excesses of his policies and purges. Born just a few decades apart, their lives overlap with the end of the warlords' regime and overthrow of the Japanese occupation, violent struggles between the Kuomintang and the Communists to carve up China, and, most poignant for the author, the vicious cycle of purges orchestrated by Chairman Mao that discredited and crushed millions of people, including her parents.
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