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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Up to that moment the policemen had had no idea about the family's intelligence connections. Nor had they any idea who had confiscated the textiles. The administration of Jinzhou was in utter confusion because of the enormous number of different Kuomintang units stationed in the city and because anyone with a gun and some sort of protection enjoyed arbitrary power. When "Loyalty' and his men had appropriated this load the driver did not ask them who they were working for.

The moment my mother mentioned Zhu-ge's name, there was a change in the attitude of the officer. Zhu-ge was a friend of his boss. At a signal, his subordinates lowered their guns and dropped their insolently challenging manner. The officer bowed stiffly and muttered profuse apologies for disturbing such an august family. The rank and-file police looked even more disappointed than their commander no booty meant no money, and no money meant no food. They shambled off sullenly, dragging their feet as they went.

At the time there was a new university, the Northeast Exile University, in Jinzhou, formed around students and teachers who had fled Communist-occupied northern Manchuria. Communist policies there had often been harsh: many landowners had been killed. In the towns, even small factory owners and shopkeepers were denounced and their property was confiscated. Most intellectuals came from relatively well-to-do families, and many had seen their families suffer under Communist rule or been denounced themselves.

There was a medical college in the Exile University, and my mother wanted to get into it. It had always been her ambition to be a doctor. This was partly Dr. Xia's influence and partly because the medical profession offered a woman the best chance of independence. Liang endorsed the idea enthusiastically. The Party had plans for her. She enrolled in the medical college on a part-time basis in February 1948.

The Exile University was a battleground where the Kuomintang and the Communists competed fiercely for influence. The Kuomintang could see how badly it was doing in Manchufig and was actively encouraging students and intellectuals to flee farther south. The Communists did not want to lose these educated people. They modified their land reform program, and issued an order that urban capitalists were to be well treated and intellectuals from well to-do families protected. Armed with these more moderate policies, the Jinzhou underground set out to persuade the students and teachers to stay on. This became my mother's main activity.

In spite of the Communists' policy switch, some students and teachers decided it was safer to flee. One shipload of students sailed to the city of Tianjin, about 250 miles to the southwest, at the end of June. When they arrived there they found that there was no food and nowhere for them to stay. The local Kuomintang urged them to join the army.

"Fight back to your homeland!" they were told.

This was not what they had fled Manchuria for. Some Communist underground workers who had sailed with them encouraged them to take a stand, and on 5 July the students demonstrated in the center of Tianjin for food and accommodations. Troops opened fire and scores of students were injured, some seriously, and a number were killed.

When the news reached Jinzhou, my mother immediately decided to organize support for the students who had gone to Tianjin. She called a meeting of the heads of the student unions of all the seven high and technical schools, which voted to set up the Jinzhou Federation of Student Unions. My mother was elected to the chair. They decided to send a telegram of solidarity to the students in Tianjin and to stage a march to the headquarters of General Chill, the martial law commander, to present a petition.

My mother's friends were waiting anxiously at school for instructions. It was a gray, rainy day and the ground had turned to sticky mud. Darkness fell and there was still no sign of my mother and the other six student leaders. Then the news came that the police had raided the meeting and taken them away. They had been informed on by Yao-han, the political supervisor at my mother's school.

They were marched to the martial law headquarters.

After a while, General Chill strode into the room. He faced them across a table and started to talk to them in a patient, paternalistic tone of voice, apparently more in sorrow than in anger. They were young and liable to do rash things, he said. But what did they know about politics? Did they realize they were being used by the Communists? They should stick to their books. He said he would release them if they would sign a confession admitting their mistakes and identifying the Communists behind them. Then he paused to watch the effect of his words.

My mother found his lecturing and his whole attitude insufferable. She stepped forward and said in a loud voice: "Tell us, Commander, what mistake have we made?" The general became irritated: "You were used by the Communist bandits to stir up trouble. Isn't that mistake enough?"

My mother shouted back: "What Communist bandits? Our friends died in Tianjin because they had run away from the Communists, on your advice. Do they deserve to be shot by you? Have we done anything unreasonable?" After some fierce exchanges the general banged his fist on the table and bellowed for his guards.

"Show her around," he said, and then, turning to my mother, "You need to realize where you are!" Before the soldiers could seize her, my mother leaped forward and banged her fist on the table: "Wherever I may be, I have not done anything wrong!"

The next thing my mother knew she was held tight by both arms and dragged away from the table. She was pulled along a corridor and down some stairs into a dark room.

On the far side she could see a man dressed in rags. He seemed to be sitting on a bench and leaning against a pillar.

His head was lolling to one side. Then my mother realized that he was tied to the pillar and his thighs were tied to the bench. Two men were pushing bricks under his heels.

Each additional brick brought forth a deep, stifled groan.

My mother felt her head was filled with blood, and she thought she heard the cracking of bones. The next thing she knew she was looking into another room. Her guide, an officer, drew her attention to a man almost next to where they were standing. He was hanging from a wooden beam by his wrists and was naked from the waist upward.

His hair hung down in a tangled mess, so that my mother could not see his face. On the floor was a brazier, with a man sit ling beside it casually smoking a cigarette. As my mother watched, he lifted an iron bar out of the fire; the tip was the size of a man's fist and was glowing red-hot With a grin, he plunged it into the chest of the man hanging from the beam. My mother heard a sharp scream of pain and a horrible sizzling sound, saw smoke coming from the wound, and could smell the heavy odor of burned flesh.

But she did not scream or faint. The horror had aroused in her a powerful, passionate rage which gave her enormous strength and overrode any fear.

The officer asked her if she would now write a confession. She refused, repeating that she knew of no Communists behind her. She was bundled into a small room which contained a bed and some sheets. There she spent several long days, listening to the screams of people being tortured in rooms nearby, and refusing repeated demands to name names.

Then one day she was taken to a yard at the back of the building, covered with weeds and rubble, and ordered to stand against a high wall. Next to her a man who had obviously been tortured and could barely stand was propped up. Several soldiers lazily took their positions. A man blindfolded her. Even though she could not see, she closed her eyes. She was ready to die, proud that she was giving her life for a great cause.

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