Wild Swans Group Read - detail discussion

For general discussion on progress and initial thoughts, please see this thread: Here

This thread is for detail discussion and may well include spoilers. I will kick off with some questions, you may wish to answers them or pose others of your own.

This is presented as a family memoir and tells the story of a country through the impact on one family. How much do you feel the politics and beliefs of the author show through in the earlier chapters? Is that important, did it intrude on the story? Does it work as a personal history?

What did you find most or least surprising about the events of the book?

How did you feel about the different generations presented, were some easier to understand or empathise with than others? Which spoke to you particularly?

This book is restricted in China. What especially would you think has lead to that status? What do you think they would find the most shocking/unbelievable?

Did you enjoy this book? Any elements of it - be that the story, the people, the uncovering new knowledge? Was there anything that detracted from your enjoyment?

This isn;t supposed to be an essay, but the aim of the quarterly non-fiction reads has been to try and engender some more in depth discussion, rather than the progress updates or reviews that are often posted on group read threads. I would hope that the questions might start a discussion, and they are just prompts to start the conversation. Enough form me - over to you.

The first part of the book about the author's grandmother and mother had a different feel than the part of the book discussing events that the author remembered. I had a hard time engaging with the first part of the book. The author spent a lot of time away from her parents during her childhood and youth, and when they were together there were topics that the parents didn't discuss with the children. I kept wondering how the author could have known so many details about things that happened before she was born. The afterward in the edition I read answered those questions. The author's mother spent several months with her in England and they spent much of that time talking. Her mother also left her about 60 hours of recordings. I would have liked to have known that up front.

That's interesting, that it was provided in the afterward. I read a later edition with an introductory chapter about the book, how it came to be written, its popularity and so on. So I knew how she'd got the early years information up front.

I thought the parents had a very odd relationship with each other. The father principled to the point of making things difficult for his family struck me as an inexplicable stance to take. And the way that he seemed to put the party of his wife's health with the pregnancies was something I struggled to comprehend. That can;t have been a very easy discussion to be having. I know from my family that what you see as a child isn't always the adult reality, so it makes me wonder how her feelings for her father might have been affected by that kind of revelation about his treatment of her mother.

#2
I also had a hard time with the beginning of the book. Everything seemed so perfect and yet apologetic. For instance, even though things were perfect in China they were good. It was clear that the Grandmother's family was wealthy and that she married into wealth, or at least upper middle class. All of this the author tired to temper with the constant referrals to the fact that a woman had no status and that her family was so traditional as to bind the feet of the girls, so that the Grandmother appeared to be spoiled but shrewd and financially insecure while being able to snag a rich old man, with whom she happened to be in love, etc. etc. It left me feeling ambivalent and not engaged with these women and I would have liked to have been as it is clear that all the women in this book are strong capable people with talent, intelligence, and perseverance. I was so not "feeling it" at the beginning of this book that I thought about dropping it and reading something else.

>3 Helenliz: I did admire Jung's father's integrity while deploring the effects of his rigidity on his wife. It did appear that his strict adherence to his principles resulted in a bit of good much later in the family's life, if only by mitigating some of the hardships they would have otherwise endured. It seems that others remembered that he had not been cruel or vindictive when he had been in a position of power.

The rationale for what Jung's mother had to endure during her pregnancies seemed to be that she couldn't be treated any better than a peasant. Instead of making all women live like peasants, why couldn't they work to improve the living conditions of peasant women? (And men and children, for that matter.) That doesn't seem to have occurred to them.

I've finished reading Wild Swans. I also had difficulty reading through the early part of the book; Jung Chang's autobiography was much more engaging. What really struck me was what the author experienced and endured at such a young age. Much of the story takes place during her childhood and teenage years; she was a teenager when she exiled to Ningnan and later when she became a "barefoot doctor." She had to assume a lot of responsibility as an adolescent. The main story ends when she leaves for college in Great Britain in her mid-twenties.

Although a family member such as a father could have an impact on the family for years, the state made it difficult for families to function as a family. Jung Chang's parents were often physically absent during her childhood -- either working or in detention -- and the children were separated. After Jung's sister got married, she was physically separated from her husband; at that point some couples could legally live together something like twelve days a year.

Although this book was published in 1991 with an afterword in 2003, I'm glad that Jung Chang brought us more up-to-date with what happened to her siblings as adults. It is interesting to learn that only her sister stayed in China.

I just started and have only hit page 150 so I am still reading about her parents at this point. What strikes me is how quickly things change. One minute the family is together and somewhat happy and then, as the politics change, the family is pulled in multiple directions. But then, a few pages later, things settle down and the cycle starts again. What a horrible why to live!

2 - kept wondering how the author could have known so many details about things that happened before she was born.

Me too! The culture at the time was so secretive about family things and custom dictated that some things were just never spoken about. I guess it's relaxed enough now that her older relatives have been filling in blanks? She does write as if she was there herself.

I think that Jung does a really good job of letting the reader know what it felt like to be a teenager during those years. Teenager's are all over the place emotionally and swing widely in their impressions and as a author she does a good job of telling us how bewildered, frustrated, puzzled, and then stunned she is during the years that she is growing up. She is also very idealistic and she lets us know this without apologizing for it.

It has been very interesting to read how she is so in thrall to Mao and sees no danger in being so without skepticism and yet when her favorite teachers are arrested and deported she is stunned and bewildered. I can just see her trying to make sense out of this in some sort of rational way - asking questions - and refusing to believe that Mao might be the one at fault. I think it is typical of teenager reactions to life and as a reader I appreciate her efforts to get me to understand what she was thinking and feeling at that age. At the same time I want to scream at her to wake up and smell the coffee. I certainly can understand her emotional and intellectual confusion.

I had some mixed feelings about the book. I agree with others who found the first half of the book more of struggle. Once she was writing about her own life, she was much more assertive and the story seemed to flow more easily. Even with recordings from her Mother I am sure there was still a certain amount of guesswork and filling in of the blanks. Overall though I thought the author did a very good job of painting a picture of what China was like over these years of drastic change and I feel that I learned a lot.

I read this book for the first time several years ago, maybe in 2006? I remember finding it compulsively readable and being fascinated with what I learned about China and the political transitions it has been through. I also like the format of using the women in the family as I like reading about women's experiences in different cultures.

I liked the book so much that I snapped up the author's biography of Mao when it came out. Unfortunately, she seemed unable to keep her own negative life experiences out of the biography and her biases really clouded the book for me. What I found added to the autobiographical Wild Swans really detracted from the biography which I expect to be more neutral and factual (understanding every author has some bias!).

Anyway, my experience with the Mao biography led me to reread the book Wild Swans about 2 years after the first read. That time around I still appreciated it, but wondered more and more how universal her story is vs. just being one person's experience. It's so hard to tell something like that, especially for someone like me who has very little understanding of Chinese history.

I never came to any conclusions, but it's something I still think about when I contemplate this book.

>10 japaul22: The author's parents, and particularly her father, were at one point fairly high officials in their province. There wouldn't have been many people in similar circumstances in China. I don't think her experiences would have been representative of the whole population of China. I think it is more representative of segments of the population - her peer group (teens & young adults during the Cultural Revolution), urban residents of southwestern China, and to an extent the educated/intellectuals.

I finished reading this book last night and since it was Independence Day here in the U. S. couldn't help but think of the ironies in reading this book.

The book left me with mixed feelings. I found it to be incredibly biased towards the authors point-of-view. However, I am conflicted about this as isn't that what all memoirs are at heart? An author can only tell the story from their own point-of-view and that is exactly what this author did. The question becomes "Did I learn anything from this? Was it a diatribe?" I did learn from it and it was a diatribe. Because I learned so much from it about modern China I was willing to put up with the didactic tone of the book.

Where this book excels is in describing the lives of people in the last half of the 20th century in China. I think I came away with a sense of how the Communist party worked and why it was successful in taking over China. I also think that I have a better understanding of the Great Famine, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution and how all of those things were linked, as well as how those were linked to the events in Tienanmen Square in 1989. In short, this memoir gave me a better understanding of China and so I have to consider this to have been a book worth reading. I might wish that the author had approached it with a little more authentication, but as a memoir I think it is excellent. As an autobiography? No. What it does do is give the reader a very good sense of how people lived in the first three quarters of the years of the 20th century. There is a dearth of material about that time in Chinese history, so this does fill the gap and provide the reader with a good sense of what it was like to live through those events.

I also realize that I might be picky about this - but this book is NOT an autobiography. There is no listing of sources to lend any level of authentication to the book, so I put this title squarely in the memoir camp.

#11

I think you are right that she and her family are not representative of how all people lived in China from 1950 to 1980, but I do think she is a keen observer and as such is well qualified to tell us about what was going on at the University level and among Communist party officials during the Cultural Revolution. There are not many who will speak of those events openly, and so, for the time-being, we must rely on what information we have. In that sense Chang has given us some insight. I appreciate that, but also realize that you are correct - there are big gaps in her story.