Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Incredibly introduction to 20th century Chinese history though the quotidian

I read The True Believer by Eric Hoffer before this and it's like reading it all over again but this time, it's the perspective of the people who experienced the mass movement first-hand. It's also like reading 1984 by George Orwell but it's the reality. I'd really like to read Mao's works if I can get my hands on it just to dive on that mind of his and try to make sense of it.

I love how Jung Chang tells her story and her family's. She does not dwell too much, doesn't go over-critical, she's simply telling the story. Overall, it's a really great book and a must-read.

Wild Swans is a true story of three generations of Chinese women and that alone is enough for me to urge you to read this book. Jung Chang tells the tale of her grandmother, who was a concubine in old China, and the tale of her mother, a wholehearted Chinese Communist who worked for Mao, and her own tale, the tale of a child in Mao's China and a young woman who made her way to a new life in freedom.

I was saddened by the terrible consequences of power concentrated in the hands of a few in this story. Mao seemed to offer China so much hope after centuries of cruel treatment of the common man by the emperors. Yet, within a few years, Mao made decisions that resulted in the starvation and death of millions of people. In this story, Chang shares the stories of small people in the new China and the miseries they endured.

It took me some time to warm up to this story. It was not until Chang had shared her grandmother's tale and had begun to relate her mother's story that I began to love this book. Glad I didn't give up early.

My favorite little story from the book: When Chang was a little girl, she and her siblings were sent to a nursery during the day while both of her parents worked for the Communist Party. Chang and the other children often did not want to eat the food the nursery workers prepared. The nursery workers would taunt the children by saying, “Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!”