It’s taken me a couple of months to read Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (first published in 1991), Jung Chang’s book about her grandmother, her mother and herself, telling of their lives in China up to and during the years of the violent Cultural Revolution. Her family suffered atrociously, her father and grandmother both dying painful deaths and both her mother and father were imprisoned and tortured.
Needless to say that this is a harrowing book to read, but it’s also an eye-opener (for me at any rate) about what happened in China under Mao.
Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was briefly a Red Guard at the age of fourteen, and then a peasant, a ‘barefoot doctor’, a steelworker and an electrician. She came to Britain in 1978, and in 1982 became the first person from the People’s Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university. Wild Swans won the 1992 NCR Book Award and the 1993 British Book of the Year. She lives in London.
In Wild Swans she casts light on why and how Mao was able to exercise such paralysing control over the Chinese people. His magnetism and power was so strong and coupled with his immense skill at manipulation and his ability to inspire fear, it proved enough to subdue the spirit of most of the population; not to mention the absolute cruelty, torture and hardships they had to endure.
I wondered how she knew so much about what happened to her mother and grandmother (I don’t know nearly as much about mine) but in the Introduction she explains that when her mother came to visit her in London they talked every day for months. She talked about their eventful lives – her grandmother had been a concubine of a warlord general and her mother had joined the Communist underground at the age of 15. She also recorded sixty hours of her memories.
I wrote a bit about the book in a Book Beginnings post at the end of last November, when I’d just started to read it. It’s a personal story, reflecting the twentieth century history of China. A remarkable book, full of courage and spirit.
- Paperback: 720 pages
- Publisher: HarperPress; New edition edition (1 Mar 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0007463405
- ISBN-13: 978-0007463404
- Source: borrowed from a friend
BooksPlease 
I wonder if this was originally published some time ago as it sounds like something I have read, but wasn’t able to finish. It stirs the emotions.
Ann
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I read this book a couple of years ago when we came back from China and loved it.
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I read this when it first came out and thought it quite remarkable. Then, last year a friend of mine was invited to have dinner with Jung Chang and so the book came out again so that she would be prepared to talk with her. I was so envious and indeed she turned out to be the most remarkable lady.
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Margaret – I can see why it took you a little time to read this. Such a gut-wrenching story! And yet what insights into what was happening in China at the time of the Cultural Revolution. I’ll have to look out for that one.
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I’d love to get to know this period of history better (I’ve read very little about China in any period) – and this seems like a wonderful introduction. Thanks for the recommendation!
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I don’t think I’m up for reading anything harrowing at the moment. I did here the author speaking about the book on the radio a while ago, though, it was very interesting.
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