Wild Swans by Jung Chang

Introduction

Through the lives of three different women - grandmother, mother and daughter - this book tells the story of 20th-century China. At times scarcely credible in the details it reveals of the suffering of millions of ordinary Chinese people, it is an unforgettable record of tyranny, hope and ultimate survival under conditions of extreme harshness. In 1924, at the age of 15, the author's grandmother became the concubine of a powerful warlord, whom she was seldom to see during the 10 years of their "marriage". Her daughter, born in 1931, experienced the horrors of Japanese occupation in Manchuria as a schoolgirl, and after their surrender joined the Communist-led underground fighting Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang. She rose to be a senior Communist official, but was imprisoned three times. Her husband, also a high official and one of the very first to join the Communists, was relentlessly persecuted, imprisoned and finally sent to a labour camp where, physically broken and disillusioned, he lost his sanity. The author herself grew up during the Cultural Revolution, at the time of the personality cult of Mao and the worst excesses of the Gang of Four. She joined the Red Guard but after Mao's death she was to become one of the first Chinese students to study abroad.

Extract

The economic situation deteriorated steadily through the winter or 1947 - 1948. Protests against food shortages and price gouging multiplied. Jonzhou was the key supply base for the large Kuomintang armies farther north, and in mid-December 1947 a crowd of 20,000 people raided two well-stocked grain stores.

One trade was prospering: trafficking in young girls for brothels and as slave-servants to rich men. The city was littered with beggars offering their children in exchange for food. For days outside her school my mother saw an emaciated, desperate-looking woman in rags slumped on the frozen ground. Next to her stood a girl of about ten with an expression of numb misery on her face. A stick was poking up out of the back of her collar and on it was a poorly written sign saying 'Daughter for sale for 10 kilos of rice.'

Among those who could not make ends meet were the teachers. They had been demanding a pay rise, to which the government responded by increasing tuition fees. This had little effect, because the parents could not afford to pay more. A teacher at my mother's school died of food poisoning after eating a piece of meat he had picked up off the street. He knew the meat was rotten, but he was so hungry he thought he would take a chance.

By now my mother had become the president of the students' union. Her Party controller, Liang, had given her instructions to try to win over the teachers as well as the students, and she set about organising a campaign to get people to donate money for the teaching staff. She and some other girls would go to cinemas and theatres and before the performances started they would appeal for donations. They also put on song-and-dance shows and ran rummage sales, but the returns were paltry - people were either too poor or too mean.

One day she bumped into a friend of hers who was the granddaughter of a brigade commander and was married to a Kuomintang officer. The friend told her there was going to be a banquet that evening for about fifty officers and their wives in a smart restaurant in town. In those days there was a lot of entertaining going on among Kuomintang officials. My mother raced off to her school and contacted as many people as she could. She told them to gather at 5.p.m. in front of the city's most prominent landmark, the sixty-foot-high eleventh-century stone drum tower. When she got there, at the head of a sizable contingent, there were over a hundred girls waiting for her orders. She told them her plan. At around six o'clock they saw large numbers of officers arriving in carriages and rickshaws. The women were dressed to the nines, wearing silk and satin and jingling with jewelry.

When my mother judged that the diners would be well into their food and drink, she and some of the girls filed into the restaurant. Kuomintang decadence was such that security was unbelievably lax. My mother climbed onto a chair, her simple dark-blue cotton gown making her the image of austerity among the brightly embroidered silks and jewels. She made a brief speech about how hard up the teachers were, and finished with the words: 'We all know you are generous people. You must be very pleased to have this opportunity to open your pockets and show your generosity.'

The officers were in a spot. None of them wanted to look mean. In fact, they more or less had to try to show off. And, of course, they wanted to get rid of the unwelcome intruders. The girls went round the heavily laden tables and made a note of each officer's contribution. Then, first thing next morning, they went round to the officers' homes and collected their pledges. The teachers were enormously grateful to the girls, who delivered the money to them right away, so it could be used before its value was wiped out, which would be within hours.

Reader's comments

Everyone should read this book

This book is huge in every sense of the word. Jung Chang's astonishing, moving and deeply personal account of China's recent past is a sweeping, epic story spanning three generations. It cannot fail to move you. The cruel, medieval regime that kept women as virtual slaves, the horrors of war, the wave of idealism and optimism that accompanied the communist revolution, the sheer terror of the Cultural Revolution - it's all here in this unputdownable account. Anyone who is interested in twentieth century history, or even anyone who isn't, should read this book.

A reader from Liphook, Hampshire , April 2000

Don't let the size put you off.

I am very busy and rarely get a chance to read, so Wild Swans stayed unread on a bookshelf for several years; a kind present from my brother, sadly neglected due to the sheer size of it. If I can persuade anyone to read it despite it's length, I shall have done them a great service. I think what surprised me most about the book was how recent the events in the latter part of the story were; now every time I see a Chinese person in their late 30s or early 40s, I want to go up to them and ask them if they have experienced the same things. Jung Chang's father's story was the saddest part. He was apparently a truly committed Communist of the purest kind, who was totally destroyed by scared and unscrupulous members of the Party. If every Communist had had his attitude, Communism might have worked extremely well. The part about the Great Leap Forward was particularly shocking, people starving so that Mao could look prosperous abroad; a philosophy almost too stupid and criminal to believe, but Jung Chang's view of it is very convincing. What also surprised me (obviously very ignorant of history) was that the Red Guard were school children and students, I had always assumed that they were a kind of elite police force. It may sound and feel a bit heavy, but pick it up and read it anyway, even if think you have no interest in history--by the end you definitely will have!

A reader from Essex, England , July 2000

An astonishing and emotionally powerful account.

Jung Chang is a masterly story teller, she fixes the human details into a grand sweep of an immense story of turbulent and often catastrophic social change, so that we are shown everything but never lose sight of the individual experiences that made this history.

Chris Jonas, England , February 2000