Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

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The forces of history and the exceptional talents of this young writer combine to produce a work of nonfiction with the breadth and drama of the richest, most memorable fiction classics. Wild Swans is a landmark book, with the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic vision of a monumental human saga, which tells of the lives of Jung Chang, her mother, her grandmother, and of 20th-century China. 16-page photo insert.
***
"Bursting with drama, heartbreak and horror, this extraordinary family portrait mirrors China 's century of turbulence…[Chang's] meticulous, transparent prose radiates an inner strength." Publisher's Weekly
"The story reads like the sweeping family sagas of genre fiction but rises far above the norm. The characters are well drawn, the events are riveting, and the story teaches lessons of history as well as lessons of the heart. It also allows listeners to visit a world unfamiliar to most Westerners. The author brings memories of a foreign life and illuminates them with graceful prose." Jacqueline Smith, Library Journal
"[This] is one of the most intimate studies of persecution, suffering, and fear in Mao's time, before and after his triumph in 1949, and one of the finest…It is the most harrowing and extended account I have read of the years between 1966 and 1976, and the most analytical." The New York Review of Books
"By keeping her focus on three generations of female kin and their practical adaptations to the shifting winds of political power, Ms. Chang gives us a rare opportunity to follow the evolution of some remarkable women who not only reflected their times, but who also acted upon them in order to change their individual destiny." Susan Brownmiller, The New York Times Book Review
"Despite its interesting details, Wild Swans does not tell us much that other memoirs, similarly written from a position of privilege, have not already revealed. One looks forward to an account of China 's recent past which will not merely focus on the experience of the privileged urban elite." The Times Literary Supplement
"[The author] tells stories and anecdotes, in straight chronological order, with little contrivance, providing real-life fables as open-ended answers to the puzzles of 20th-century China…Taken in pieces, Chang's narrative can be prosaic. But in its entirety, the author achieves a Dickensian tone with detailed portraits and intimate remembrances, with colorful minor characters and intricate yet fascinating side plots." Time
"An evocative, often astonishing view of life in a changing China." The New York Times
***
Amazon.com Review
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.
From Publishers Weekly
Bursting with drama, heartbreak and horror, this extraordinary family portrait mirrors China 's century of turbulence. Chang's grandmother, Yu-fang, had her feet bound at age two and in 1924 was sold as a concubine to Beijing 's police chief. Yu-fang escaped slavery in a brothel by fleeing her "husband" with her infant daughter, Bao Qin, Chang's mother-to-be. Growing up during Japan 's brutal occupation, free-spirited Bao Qin chose the man she would marry, a Communist Party official slavishly devoted to the revolution. In 1949, while he drove 1000 miles in a jeep to the southwestern province where they would do Mao's spadework, Bao Qin walked alongside the vehicle, sick and pregnant (she lost the child). Chang, born in 1952, saw her mother put into a detention camp in the Cultural Revolution and later "rehabilitated." Her father was denounced and publicly humiliated; his mind snapped, and he died a broken man in 1975. Working as a "barefoot doctor" with no training, Chang saw the oppressive, inhuman side of communism. She left China in 1978 and is now director of Chinese studies at London University. Her meticulous, transparent prose radiates an inner strength.

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Yu-wu was tortured ferociously as well. In order to avoid incriminating other people, he killed himself by slashing his wrists. He did not mention my mother. But the investigation team found out about their connection and claimed that she was a member of the 'spy ring."

Her teenage contact with the Kuomintang was dragged up. All the questions that had come up in 1955 were gone over again. This time they were not asked in order to get an answer. My mother was simply ordered to admit that she was a Kuomintang spy. She argued that the investigation in 1955 had cleared her, but she was told that the chief investigator then, Mr. Kuang, was a 'traitor and Kuomintang spy' himself.

Mr. Kuang had been imprisoned by the Kuomintang in his youth. The Kuomintang had promised to release underground Communists if they signed a recantation for publication in the local newspaper. At first he and his comrades had refused, but the Party instructed them to accept. They were told the Party needed them, and did not mind 'anti-Communist statements' which were not sincere. Mr. Kuang followed orders and was duly released.

Many others had done the same thing. In one famous case in 1936, sixty-one imprisoned Communists were released this way. The order to 'recant' was given by the Party Central Committee and delivered by Liu Shaoqi.

Some of these sixty-one subsequently became top officials in the Communist government, including vice-premiers, ministers, and first secretaries of provinces. During the Cultural Revolution, Mme Mao and Kang Sheng announced that they were 'sixty-one big traitors and spies."

The verdict was endorsed by Mao personally, and these people were subjected to the cruelest tortures. Even people remotely connected with them got into deadly trouble.

Following this precedent, hundreds of thousands of former underground workers and their contacts, some of the bravest men and women who had fought for a Communist China, were charged with being 'traitors and spies' and suffered detention, brutal denunciation meetings, and torture. According to a later official account, in the province next to Sichuan, Yunnan, over 14,000 people died.

In Hebei province, which surrounds Peking, 84,000 were detained and tortured; thousands died. My mother learned years later that her first boyfriend, Cousin Hu, was among them. She had thought he had been executed by the Kuomintang, but his father had in fact bought him out of prison with gold bars. No one would ever tell my mother how he died.

Mr. Kuang fell under the same accusation. Under torture, he attempted suicide, unsuccessfully. The fact that he had cleared my mother in 1956 was alleged to prove her 'guilt." She was kept in various forms of detention on and off for nearly two years from late 1967 to October 1969. Her conditions depended largely on her guards.

Some were kind to her when they were alone. One of them, the wife of an army officer, got medicine for her hemorrhage. She also asked her husband, who had access to privileged food supplies, to bring my mother milk, eggs, and chicken every week.

Thanks to kindhearted guards like her, my mother was allowed home several times for a few days. The Tings learned of this, and the kind guards were replaced by a sourfaced woman whom my mother did not know, who tormented and tortured her for pleasure. When the fancy took her, she would make my mother stand bent over in the courtyard for hours. In the winter, she would make her kneel in cold water until she passed out. Twice she put my mother on what was called a 'tiger bench." My mother had to sit on a narrow bench with her legs stretched out in front of her. Her torso was tied to a pillar and her thighs to the bench so she could not move or bend her legs. Then bricks were forced under her heels. The intention was to break the knees or the hipbones. Twenty years before, in Jinzhou, she had been threatened with this in the Kuomintang torture chamber. The 'tiger bench' had to stop because the guard needed men to help her push in the bricks; they helped reluctantly a couple of times, but then refused to have any more to do with it. Years later the woman was diagnosed as a psychopath, and today is in a psychiatric hospital.

My mother signed many 'confessions," admitting that she had sympathized with a 'capitalist road." But she refused to denounce my father, and she denied all 'spy' charges, which she knew would inevitably lead to the incrimination of others.

During her detention we were often not allowed to see her, and even had no idea where she was. I would wander the streets outside the possible place in the hope of catching sight of her.

There was a period when she was detained in a deserted cinema on the main shopping street. There we were occasionally permitted to deliver a parcel for her to a warden, or to see her for a few minutes, although never on her own. When a fierce guard was on duty, we had to sit under freezing eyes. One day in autumn 1968 I went there to deliver a food parcel and was told it could not be accepted. No reason was given, and I was told not to send things anymore. When my grandmother heard the news she passed out. She thought my mother must be dead.

It was unbearable not knowing what had happened to my mother. I took my six-year-old brother Xiao-fang by the hand and went to the cinema. We walked up and down the street in front of the gate. We searched the rows of windows on the second floor. In desperation we screamed "Mother! Mother!" at the top of our voices again and again.

Passersby stared at us, but I took no notice. I just wanted to see her. My brother cried. But my mother did not appear.

Years later, she told me that she had heard us. In fact, her psychopath guard had opened the window slightly so our voices would be louder. My mother was told that if she agreed to denounce my father, and to confess to being a Kuomintang spy, she could see us immediately.

"Otherwise," said the guard, 'you may never get out of this building alive." My mother said no. All the time, she dug her nails into her palms to stop her tears from falling.

21. "Giving Charcoal in Snow"

My Siblings and My Friends (1967-1968)

Throughout 1967 and 1968, while Mao struggled to set up his personal power system, he kept his victims, like my parents, in a state of uncertainty and suffering.

Human anguish did not concern Mao. People existed only to help him realize his strategic plans. But his purpose was not genocide, and my family, like many other victims, were not deliberately starved. My parents still received their salaries every month in spite of the fact that not only were they doing no work, they were also being denounced and tormented. The main compound canteen was working normally to enable the Rebels to carry on with their 'revolution," and we, like the families of other capitalist-roaders, were fed. We also got the same rations from the state as everyone else in the cities.

Much of the urban population was kept 'on hold' for the revolution. Mao wanted the population to fight, but to live.

He protected the extremely capable premier, Zhou Enlai, so that he could keep the economy going. He knew he needed another first-class administrator in reserve in case anything happened to Zhou, so he kept Deng Xiaoping in relative security. The country was not allowed to collapse totally.

But, as the revolution dragged on, large parts of the economy slipped into paralysis. The urban population increased by several tens of millions, but virtually no new housing or other service facilities were built in the towns.

Nearly everything, from salt, toothpaste, and toilet paper to every kind of food and clothing, either was rationed or disappeared completely. In Chengdu there was no sugar for a year, and six months passed without a single bar of soap.

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