Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang (PDF)

Description

The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author.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 extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: 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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Great read for guys and girls. Good story and wonderful about explaining some of the history in not a dry fashion. Educational.I read it years ago, loved it. Ordered it recently for my fiancee (american) who is enchanted with China) and has spent time working there

⭐“Wild Swans” is one of the most memorable and significant books that I have read in my life. I first read the book just after it was published in 1991 and was amazed. Having just finished re-reading it after an absence of some thirty years, I am no less amazed. This is an extraordinary book.The author, Jung Chang, tells the story of three generations of women in her family. It begins with her grandmother who was born in 1909 in the last days of the Manchu dynasty. She was forced to have her feet bound as a child and as a young adult was a concubine to a warlord. She subsequently escaped to marry a doctor. Her mother was a Communist who, after marrying another Communist official, subsequently fell from grace and was a tragic victim of the Cultural Revolution and the madness that it generated. Jung Chang herself eventually left China and became a linguist in London. These three women were incredible in their own right. Together, the story becomes even more powerful.Beyond the power of the narrative, several other events are worthy of mention:1. “The Great Leap Forward”. This is covered in some detail. What a piece of economic insanity! Famine ensued and millions died.2. “The Cultural Revolution”. Tens of millions of lives were ruined as Mao strived to maintain power whilst destroying the Chinese economy.3. The Myth of Mao. By any reasonable account, Mao was one of the most destructive forces of the 20th century. He may have been responsible for the loss of more lives than any other human ever born.Jung Chang has written one of the great memoirs. She covers all of the history of modern China. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

⭐Irony, hypocrisy, suffering, famine, a multitude of tragedy, and a touch of insanity. No, it’s not Desperate Housewives re-runs–it’s Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. The only thing missing is sex, and the reason why is of course a story in itself. If you’re looking to kick-off your China reading experience with an essential novel, Wild Swans is for you. First published in Britain in 1991, the novel provides an eye-opening look at China’s cultural history between 1900 and 1990 so truthful and thorough that censors have not yet approved it for publication in its original form in mainland China. That alone should make you want to pick up a copy.In seeking to ameliorate the past and to make sense of her life, Chang delves into her family history, providing a brutally honest portrait of three generations of women. What is truly amazing about Chang’s family chronicles are the wealth of hardships Chinese women have had to endure.The book begins in the early 1900s, with her grandmother’s (Yu Fang’s) marriage at age 15 to a warlord general. She battled bound feet, loneliness, and the challenges of managing her reputation against conniving servants while isolated in a gilded prison awaiting a husband who might show up for only a few days or a week, once in six years. Once she was required to reside with the general’s wife and other concubines, her and her daughter’s–Bao Qin’s–fates were in the hands of the first wife. Yu Fang had to struggle through the pecking order of the household’s women. The details of the customs and rituals of well-to-do lives are quite interesting. Her second marriage was as the second wife of a well-regarded Manchu doctor. He re-names Bao Qin as De Hong, meaning wild swan of virtue.De Hong, Chang’s mother, grew up during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, during the 1930s and 1940s. She refused to marry a man she did not love and could not respect, so she left home to study at a teacher’s college, where she developed communist sympathies. In stark contrast to the pomp and circumstance of her mother’s arranged marriage, De Hong had to apply to the party for approval to marry a fellow communist in a binding that didn’t even include a real ceremony and had minimal refreshments. They had no honeymoon, but returned to work. De Hong endured terrible emotional and sometimes cruel physical hardship as a result of her husband’s party ideals and ambitions. Though she eventually had four children, she was tragically required to give all her time and attention to the party, which persecuted her despite her loyalty. Becoming a communist, she noted, was an “agonizing process.” De Hong had little choice but to suffer in silence, as leaving the party would cause her family terrible problems and complaining would bring its own share of woe. Eventually her husband was unfairly and illogically destroyed and betrayed by the system he worked so hard to help create.Jung, born in 1952, grew up with the privileges of party officers’ children. But these privileges brought with them contradictions, confusion, and emotional challenges. Jung attempts to survive, fulfill her dreams, and make sense of the destruction of the topsy-turvy world of the Cultural Revolution and still emerge with something to live for.When the schools are closed in 1966, Jung is sent into the countryside to learn how to be a peasant. While there, she is assigned work as a doctor and later an electrician–without any training, she was expected to learn by doing. Her first love is destroyed by revolutionary ideals. Despite her lack of formal education, Jung is accepted into university in 1973 to study the English language. Oddly, after university, students were not given degrees and were supposed to return to whatever jobs they had previously held! Her mother’s guanxi helps Jung to secure a job for which she was far better suited–a teacher. As time goes on, she grows more disillusioned with the government and its leader and begins to question all that she has been taught to think all her life. After Mao’s death, she enters an academic competition for which the prize is funding to study in the West. In 1978, she goes to London to get a Ph.D., where she remains teaching and writing to this day. A “wild” life, indeed.Having completed making peace with family history by writing Wild Swans, Chang’s next project was of course her myth-busting biography of Mao, published in 2005.

⭐This has to be the most moving piece of literature I’ve read, and will stay with me for life. I came to Wild Swans having very little knowledge of China’s real political history, and having only really encountered references to foot-binding, the cult of Mao, etc., through fiction. Jung Chang’s family history, centring on three generations of women (her grandmother, her mother, and herself) is profoundly shocking in its brutal account of 20th century China and everyday life in the Communist Party. But what is perhaps even more shocking is her capacity to love and to forgive, in spite of the atrocities and all that is taken from her and her for family. Her dignity and her empathy remain in tact throughout, a truly remarkable achievement. I shed many tears whilst reading this book, and was incredibly moved when I heard Jung Chang speak on these subjects as part of the 2017 Beverley literature festival – I can only encourage people to read this courageous and powerful memoir, and pass on its ultimate message of hope and enduring love.

⭐I didn’t really know much about this book before I ventured in but I had it on my Kindle for a while and the reviews looked great. As it was a Kindle book, I didn’t have much of an idea on the size and it took me a lot longer to read than I thought.Wild Swans is the true history of three generations of women living through the nightmare that is modern Chinese history. One is the author herself, the second is her mother, an earnest Communist and the third is her grandmother, who was married off as a concubine to a warlord as a girl and lived to see her family suffer for this unfortunate connection again and again.I knew nothing about Chinese history before venturing into this book and the truth of what happened shocked me. This whole book is hard to review, it’s depressing, uplifting, gruesome, horrific and loving. It’s a story of strength and endurance. The writing flows well and the characters are well defined. There are a few things that are repeated and I felt like it was a bit longer than it needed to be.I think that if you have an interest in China, Chinese people, Chinese history, or Chinese politics then this book will be a must-read for you but if you just have a passing interest, then this book might be more than you need.

⭐This is an epic personal story of life in China over much of the 20th century, told through the stories of three generations of women in one family. The author has lived in Britain since becoming one of the first Chinese students to get a doctorate at a British university since before the communist takeover in 1949. Her grandmother’s family came from Manchuria in the extreme north of China, and at the age of 15 in 1924 she was given away as a concubine to one of the warlords vying for control in this part of China in the vacuum created by the overthrow of the last Chinese emperor in 1912. Her mother, the daughter of this union, was one of the early idealistic communists in the years leading up to the 1949 revolution and for the first few heady years of the new regime when there seemed to be a genuine attempt to create a better society and reduce the oppressive and miserable life of the majority of the population, especially in rural areas. The book covers in depth the dramatic and horrific events that followed: the initially promising but quickly aborted attempt at liberalisation that was the Hundred Flowers campaign; the “Great Leap Forward”, where much of the country was forced to produce steel to boost industry, to such an extent that agriculture collapsed and famine ensued, in which some 30 million people died, including the author’s uncle and great-aunt; then, after a brief period of reform, the appalling “Cultural Revolution”, Mao’s attempt to create a personal rule, overthrowing much of his own communist apparatus, which dislocated society and economy, destroying much of the country’s cultural and historical infrastructure, effectively abolishing education, burning nearly all books, banning films, theatre and sport, seriously blighting the author’s teenage years and adult adulthood; and which, despite some relaxation after 1972, didn’t fully end until after Mao’s death and the overthrow of the Gang of Four, led by his wife, in autumn 1976.Despite this litany of catastrophe, there is hope in the love and closeness of the family, centred here around the three eponymous amazing and strong-minded women. After the death of her warlord “husband”, who treated her fairly decently by the standards of the time, the grandmother found happiness married to a much older man; the mother found love with a fellow communist and, despite strains caused by her husband’s principled but rigid puritanism, their marriage survived their vicious denunciations by Red Guards and others at the appalling mass meetings, and their imprisonment in labour camps until the early 1970s. The physical and mental strains of years of humiliation and subjection to forced labour and psychological pressures, killed the author’s father at the age of only 54 in 1975. In the relatively more relaxed atmosphere of the later 1970s, especially after the restoration to power of Deng Xiaoping, the future paramount leader in the 80s and 90s, the author was able to study abroad and the lives of her mother and other family members, as well as that of hundreds of millions of other Chinese, improved dramatically, albeit within the framework of what remains of course a one party communist state. The afterword recounts in brief the author’s life in Britain and the original publication of this book in 1991 (what I have read is the 25th anniversary edition). One thing I would like to have heard a bit more about, though, was how she was able to defect to Britain after gaining her doctorate in 1982. This is a magnificent and absorbing book, with much to say about human nature at its best and worse, and the horrors that blind adherence to an ideology can bring about.

⭐This certainly can’t be classed as a light read by any stretch of the imagination and yet it is both hugely interesting and incredibly educational. China is a culture that I have little knowledge of the history and this book is written in such a way to both educate and draw you into the times and cultures depicted. It’s a startlingly dark and depressing read at times and yet the writing style never allows you to become bogged down in the undeniably horrific events that have happened to Jung Chang’s family – and so many others in China – over the years. Parts of the book almost left me gasping at the sheer inhumanity of humanity and the ways in which neighbour can be set against neighbour and a culture of fear and paranoia permeate every aspect of life.This book depicts a journey in several different ways ; a journey through the generations of three women in China and how the political atmosphere of each period influenced the lives they lived and the journeys they took. It’s a journey through the political landscape of China across through a tumultuous period of history and it’s an individuals journey of being born into a world where Mao is revered as a God and any criticism is to put yourself in danger of being known as a class enemy. Finally, it’s a journey of womanhood through the ages in such a vastly different culture, that changes and evolves, yet still manages to find ways to make individuals lives a misery. The deification of Mao is frightening to behold, not least because it is a true story and the depictions of what is undoubtedly a reign of terror are horrifyingly eye-opening.The bravery of so many individuals within the period rings through the book, as indeed does the eventual disillusionment with Communism and Maoism. The depictions of how family life was warped and twisted in so many ways through propaganda and an insistence that the Party must come first are vivid and yet Jung Chung never allows herself to wallow in pity. Whilst the story closely follows the lives of the three main women across three generations, it is the tale of Jung Chung’s father that perhaps hits the hardest and shows the cruelty and random persecution of the Chinese period. Whilst the systematic degradation of women is clear across these three generations, it is in the tale of a moral man living in a land devoid of morality that really strikes hard.Because Jung Chang’s father is an infuriating figure at the beginning of the book; when he first marries her mother, he is so indoctrinated and obsessed with the Communist cause that he will cause his family active grief in trying to avoid a charge of nepotism. I winced at how Jung Chang’s mother was treated during pregnancy and childbirth and wanted to hit the man for his insensitivity and lack of care. As the tale progresses however, it is his very inflexibility and refusal to bend the rules for anyone that gets him into so much trouble with the Communist rule. He won’t stand for corruption and he won’t sit silent in fear of the consequences. My heart bled for him and for his family who were taking so much grief because their husband and father was a moral man, trying to live by his own moral code in a world where this was untenable.I found the early book rather dry and almost stilting, but this may be because Jung Chang was talking of events long before her birth. The binding of her grandmother’s feet for instance, whilst horrific, didn’t have the same emotional impact on me as the later book where she is depicting events that are in her own memory or at least of her parents. I think this is purely due to how close to events Jung Chang was and their emotional relevance to her. If you are struggling with the first few chapters I would definitely recommend sticking with it, because this is a book that is both depressing and inspirational by turns and becomes easier to read, if not to bear, in the sections related to Jung Chang’s parents.

⭐After reading the stories of these 3 women, grandmother, mother and daughter – what struck me was that the daughter was of a similar age to me.But while I grew up in relative comfort in a stable environment in western Europe, with knowing parents and grandparents who were by no means considered well off. Yet comparing my self to how Jung Chang, the daughter lived it was really eye opening. Would I have not only survived what she went through? But also have come out there other side with the compassion and humility she so obviously has.A highly recommended book

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