Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991)

You'd *think* that this would be great: three generations of Chinese women, the oldest the concubine of a warlord, the middle an avid communist, the third disillusioned by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. I learned and relearned (Mrs. Goodman in seventh grade went into only slightly less depth) a lot but this could have been a lot more engaging if Chang had composed her history around a narrative thread, if it had been balanced. She didn't know as much about her grandmother's life as about her own, okay, but 50 pages of overview for Granny vs. 400 for every skinned knee of her own under Mao did not work for me.

Interesting. I will admit a got a little bored in certain sections of this read - not because the subject matter is boring but because the style of the prose was bland. There seemed to be a disconnect of emotion between the living and the telling. ( )

This book will go on a journey to Sweden. I will read and review the Dutch edition of this book.

Chang writes about her family's 20th-century Chinese history with a narration that is largely devoid of drama—the only way that a writer can give this horrifying historical period the respect and literary justice it deserves. I appreciated this style for this tale: there is no need to play up the actual events of the Cultural Revolution with forced or extravantly elaborated prose. The result is that there is no writerly manipulation of emotions, instead just the clean human reaction to scenes of inhumane horror, and a strengthening of the bond of humanity between all sorts of readers.

Wild Swans is the story of the author's family, the "three daughters" of the subtitle representing three generations. The first, Chang's grandmother, Yu-fang, was born in 1909 into a traditional Imperial China on the brink of great changes. Two years after her birth the centuries old Manchu dynasty came to an end and China became a republic. As a toddler, she was among the last women to endure the practice of crippling footbinding and as a young teen was virtually sold by her father to become a warlord's concubine. Her daughter, De-hong, in her teens worked for the Red Army resisting the Japanese occupation. She married an idealistic, uncorruptible communist who'd become a high-ranking official in Mao's People's Republic. That was the world Jung Chang was born into in 1951. One where a privileged life would largely isolate her from the effects of the man-made famine caused by the "Great Leap Forward" that took tens of millions of lives--but then came the Cultural Revolution. Her account is both farcical and heart-breaking. Mao, as she put it, was a man with a "metaphysical disregard for reality" and a "deep-seated contempt for human life." The consequences for the country, that was taught to regard him as an Emperor-God, was catastrophic.

I think, when it's done well--and this is done very well--that there's probably no better way to really absorb and become engrossed in history than through biography. It's one thing to be told the bare facts and statistics--or even told isolated stories about people. It's another to learn enough about a family that they become real people in your mind, then learn the details about how such events as the Japanese Occupation, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Great Famine and Cultural Revolution affected them. What happened to her father was particularly heart-breaking. But when I was moved to tears, it wasn't the suffering that undid me--but the later happiness given all that had come before. Through the story of Chang's family she's able to tell, vividly, movingly, engrossingly, the story of China in the 20th century. ( )