The reality of China for three generations of women

books:


	• Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China Jung Chang Touchstone, 2003 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 345 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

For Real, Chinese Desperate Housewives!

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.

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Excellent

Nice review of History of China since world War II. Intersting way of telling story.

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The reality of China for three generations of women

Some books are to be savored slowly and take me months to finish. Other books, like this one, are a delicious overindulgence of reading, the narrative sweep so compelling that I gobbled up all 505 in almost one fell swoop. Subtitled "Three Daughters of China", this 1991 autobiography is the story of 20th Century China itself. Here we meet three women, the grandmother and mother of the narrator, and the narrator Jung Chang herself, each experiencing the reality of China unique to her particular generation.

Born in 1909, the grandmother lived with the physical pain of her childhood footbinding, was forced to become a concubine to a warlord, and suffered all the indignities shared by women of her generation. The mother was born in 1931, lived through the Japanese occupation of her Manchurian town and the war between Nationalist and Communist China. She became a true believer in Communism, and she and her husband often put the needs of the Communist party above their own. She bore five children, one of whom is the author of this book, who grew up watching her parents become victims of the Cultural Revolution and undergoing torture and imprisonment as the politics of the nation changed. Through hard work and luck and more changes in China, Jung Chang was one of the lucky ones and was able to go to a University in England in 1978.

This book is more than the sum total of its parts however. It is the story of three women against the backdrop of history. I identified with each of them and was saddened and horrified at the details of their lives. In a funny way, while I was reading the book, I felt I was, myself, right there with them, going though the glories and misfortunes of China as it erupted in its dramatic changes. There was joy, there was pain, and there was avid patriotism. Especially though, there was a sense of family and honor that is very uniquely the Chinese. Sometimes I smiled but mostly I was saddened. And the fact that these stories were true made a tremendous impression upon me.

I've read other books about China. If they were fiction, I could get a sense of China, but I only have a limited emotional attachment for fictional characters. I've also read books about travel, mostly written by westerners, and these books were interesting inasmuch as I could see myself as the traveler, the observer. I've also read non-fiction about footbinding which made me grit my teeth a bit but the practices didn't relate to any specific person. All of these books were good, I reviewed them and gave them good ratings, but, frankly, Wild Swans was different. Here were real people against a backdrop of history. The writing was excellent and filled with facts which gave a context to their lives. I was sorry the book ended and I wanted to read more. I wanted to know what happened to Jung Chang after 1978. Of course I went to the internet where I discovered that she has stayed in England, is married to a Brit, and has recently wrote a book with him entitled "Mao.". This is a perfect topic for her. She and her family lived through Mao's greatest glory and his greatest excesses. I even found a webcast in which she talks about the book. She's middle aged now and she has a British accent and I am ordering "Mao" from Amazon today.

Read Wild Swans! You will come away with an understanding of China in a way not possible through the news stories. It's also impossible to put down. I give it one of my very highest recommendations

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The story of an unusal family

The story of this family is not usual. The grandmother was the mistress of a warlord, the mother was a communist revolutionist, and her daughter, the author of the book has escaped form China as a young girl. The thing I respect the most, that the author has only used personal experiences, and only written about things she has seen with her own eyes, or things which has happened with her family, and never used unchecked stories in her descriptions. She never tells a word in her story against the regime, even when she writes about the most shocking events in her family, but leave the reader to create his or her own opinion.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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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