Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Jung Chang, 1991
張 戎
538 pages
Read in 2008
Check the synopsis and details on amazon.com
🔽 Summary and quick note 🔽
✔ 3 generations of women under Mao's China
✔ Without dramatisation, it depicts their struggles and tortures they received
✔ Love and devotion for family, against the will of the society
★★★★☆ Mao's China and 3 generations of women - the reality of lives of people under Communism unveiled. Shocking, but what stayed with me was the love for family, which was obviously discouraged. Instead of nature and love, youths surrounded by ideology and violence. Brutal and honest non-fiction of the women.
🔽 Book review 🔽
In one word, shocking.
I only knew about China during this period from brief history lesson at school, so I didn't know much about how the people actually lived, and it was awful.
The author doesn't make anything dramatic, but the descriptions of struggles and tortures made me sick several times while reading this.
Her grandmother was a concubine to a warlord, her mother survived life under Japanese occupation and later became a Communist member, then the author's own life growing up in the modern China.
These 3 generations of women all suffered under Mao's Communism but we must not forget her father, who devoted himself to the Communist Party but later received physical and mental violence with horrible tortures - all the while he clung to justice and love for his family.
I know many people, especially Europeans, admire Communism but this is Communism in action, and you realise you cannot be that naive to admire this hell.
It's difficult to learn how people lived under in modern China, but this non-fiction book will be your reliable and honest guide (not surprisingly, it's not available in China, she wrote it in the UK)
The author had a comfortable childhood thanks to her parents, while many others in China struggled to eat - but not for long.
Her father became a target of Cultural Revolution.
As mentioned before, the book doesn't dramatise unnecessarily, because they are shocking enough without any melodramatisation, but what left a deep impression on me is the family's love for each other.
Under the Communism, they were made to vow to love and respect their Leader Mao Zedong, not their parents, but that didn't stop them, in the land surrounded by concrete buildings without a patch of grass, they chose love, chose to love each other and they eventually managed to send the author to the UK to tell their story.
Breathtaking book that tells us the secret and honest reality of the Communism in modern China.
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🔽 Where to buy / Summary and more info 🔽
●●● Amazon.com (US) ●●●
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
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