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Jung Chang

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China Paperback – August 12, 2003

by Jung Chang (Author)

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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.

Print length

538 pages
Language

English
Publication date

August 12, 2003
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.5 x 8.44 inches
ISBN-10

0743246985
ISBN-13

978-0743246989
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Editorial Reviews

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"Wild Swans is riveting. It's blindingly good: a mad adventure story, a fairy tale of courage, and a tale of atrocities. You can't, as they say, put it down." ― Newsday

"Her family chronicle resembles a popular novel that stars strong, beautiful women and provides cameo roles for famous men....But Wild Swans is no romance. It's a story...about the survival of a Chinese family through a century of disaster." ― The New Yorker

"A mesmerizing memoir." ― Time

"An inspiring tale of women who survived every kind of hardship, deprivation and political upheaval with their humanity intact." --Hillary Clinton, O, The Oprah Magazine

"An inspiring tale of women who survived every kind of hardship, deprivation and political upheaval with their humanity intact." ― Hillary Clinton, O, The Oprah Magazine

About the Author

Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She left China for Britain in 1978 and obtained a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of York in 1982, the first person from the People’s Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university. She lives in London with her husband, Jon Halliday, with whom she wrote Mao: The Unknown Story.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (August 12, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 538 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743246985
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743246989
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.08 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.5 x 8.44 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #29,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #21 in Chinese History (Books)
- #27 in Asian & Asian Americans Biographies
- #1,021 in Memoirs (Books)

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Jung Chang

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Jung Chang (simplified Chinese: 张戎; traditional Chinese: 張戎; pinyin: Zhāng Róng; Wade–Giles: Chang Jung, Mandarin pronunciation: [tʂɑ́ŋ ɻʊ̌ŋ], born 25 March 1952) is a Chinese-born British writer now living in London, best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, selling over 10 million copies worldwide but banned in the People's Republic of China.

Her 832-page biography of Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, written with her husband, the Irish historian Jon Halliday, was published in June 2005.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Guy Aitchison from London, UK (Names not numbers Uploaded by Snowmanradio) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Bob B.

Compelling story with lots of history

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 4, 2023

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I absolutely loved this book. I had already read quite a few history books on Mao and the Cultural Revolution. This autobiographical story brought the history to life. I now have a better understanding of the people endured this period of time.

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Litr8r

For Real, Chinese Desperate Housewives!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 29, 2008

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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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A View into China's Fascinating, but Tumultuous History.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 11, 2011

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"Wild Swans", by Jung Chang, is a sophisticated and substantive biographical-historical novel about life and events in China during 1909-1978. The story centers on Chang's parents' lives, her own life, and those of her siblings; and it is told against the backdrop of significant historical events: the Sino-Japanese war, the Russian occupation of China, Koumintang rule (under Chiang Kai-shek), the civil war between the Koumintang and the Communists, The Long March, and Communist rule (under Mao Tse-tung). Chang indicates that the names of the public figures as well as the members of her family are real; but the names of other figures have been changed. [Note: Speaking of names, Chang's older sister's name is Xiao-hong---`hong' means `Wild Swan'. Also, Chang's birth name is Er-hong which means `2nd Wild Swan'. They also have three younger brothers named, Jin-ming, Xiao-hei, and Xiao-fang].

According the Chang, during each of aforementioned periods the `rulers' committed numerous atrocities against the Chinese people. The Japanese were extremely cruel, particularly, to the Manchurians, relegated them to second class status, and committed numerous acts of torture. When the Japanese were eventually ousted, the Russians came in and committed many inhumane acts against the Chinese people. Under Koumintang rule, many Chinese were punished and executed. However, according to Chang, none of the aforementioned cruelties compared to the disaster created by Mao Tse-tung and his reckless policies---Chang describes Mao Tse-tung as a tyrant and a cult leader who suffered from delusions of grandeur, had no regard for human life, and was totally ignorant regarding economic policy.

More specifically, according to Chang, Mao's "Great Leap Forward" (which required the entire population, including farmers, to devote their efforts to making steel) led to a great famine which resulted in the deaths of some 30 million people. As a result of the disastrous famine Mao relinquished his position as President of China to Liu Shaoqi, and assumed a lower profile. However, Mao retained the more powerful position of Chairman of China's Communist Party and was still China's supreme leader. Once the famine was over, and under the more pragmatic leadership of Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping (general secretary), both the economy and the society became more liberal. According to Chang, Mao was unhappy with this approach---he wanted the Chinese to live a life based on conflict, struggle and violence, not harmony.

Mao began a comeback by promoting his own deification (e.g., issuing propaganda and slogans that glorified himself, further regimenting the population, encouraging people to spy on one another, mandating public self-criticism and denunciation of others, etc.). Then Mao launched the disastrous Cultural Revolution. According to Chang, the Cultural Revolution was essentially a `witch-hunt' and a `reign of terror' carried out (against teachers, intellectuals, `rightists', the `bourgeoisie', Kuomintang sympathizers, and ultimately Communist Party officials) by millions of Red Guards. The Red Guards were essentially teenagers (who typically were children of officials) and kids in their early twenties (who generally were not children of officials). All member of the Red Guard routinely carried copies of Mao's "Little Red Book' which contained slogans that deified Mao. The Red Guards were directed by the Cultural Revolution Authority led by Mao's wife, Chiang Ching. The Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards wreaked havoc on the Chinese society---they persecuted numerous people, conducting `home raids' at will. Mao's reason for launching the Cultural Revolution was to ultimately remove President Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and to completely revamp China's Communist Party. The Cultural Revolution went on from 1966 to 1976, when Mao died. According to Chang, Mao was a cult leader who desired absolute power and control, "both on earth and in heaven."

I was extremely impressed with this work. The book provides deep insight into China's fascinating, but tumultuous history. Chang's presentation is sophisticated, and the material is substantive. She adeptly uses words to `paint a picture' in order to familiarize the reader with the intimate thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the individual characters, and skillfully interweaves the characters' lives with important historical events, thereby bringing these events to life. I was most surprised to learn the extent of Mao's disastrous policies, and the extent of control that he exercised over the Chinese people, including their innermost thoughts. Although I had previously read about the Red Guards in the newspapers, I hadn't previously understood Mao's motives for unleashing such devastation against his own people, or why they would have continued to support him.

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SANDRINE

If you want to know more about China, you must read this book!

Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on January 5, 2021

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I enjoyed this book so much that I have given it to a number of friends and went on reading more books from the same author. It is a great historical saga that covers three generations of the author’s family. You learn so much about China, a good base for a better understanding of what is happening today.

Denise

Do read it

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on February 27, 2017

Verified Purchase

Classical great book unraveling a family saga against the backdrop of 1930s-1970s China, featuring beautiful family relations between the author and her mother and grandmother

GASTAO BRUN

vontade

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on September 1, 2014

Verified Purchase

Interessante poder conhecer a unificacao da China e a evolucao das geracoes.
Muito bom para quem quizer conhecer um pouco da cultura chinesa

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John Hopper

magnificent family memoir cum history

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 15, 2019

Verified Purchase

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.

11 people found this helpful

James McGrory

Everyone should read this!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 9, 2016

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Marvellous book; excellent value; first-class service!

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