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Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China Paperback – 5 April 2004
A new edition of one of the bestselling and best-loved books of recent years, with a new introduction by the author.
The publication of ‘Wild Swans’ in 1991 was a worldwide phenomenon. Not only did it become the bestselling non-fiction book in British publishing history, with sales of well over two million, it was received with unanimous critical acclaim, and was named the winner of the 1992 NCR Book Award and the 1993 British Book of the Year Award.
Few books have ever had such an impact on their readers. Through the story of three generations of women – grandmother, mother and daughter – ‘Wild Swans’ tells nothing less than the whole tumultuous history of China’s tragic 20th-century, from sword-bearing warlords to Chairman Mao, from the Manchu Empire to the Cultural Revolution. At times terrifying, at times astonishing, always deeply moving, ‘Wild Swans’ is a book in a million, a true story with all the passion and grandeur of a great novel.
For this new edition, Jung Chang has written a new introduction, bringing her own story up to date, and describing the effect the success of ‘Wild Swans’ has had on her life.
- Print length720 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication date5 April 2004
- Dimensions12.9 x 3.9 x 19.8 cm
- ISBN-100007176155
- ISBN-13978-0007176151
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From the Publisher
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Review
‘It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this book.’ Mary Wesley
‘Mesmerising.’ Antonia Fraser, The Times
‘Everything about “Wild Swans” is extraordinary. It arouses all the emotions, such as pity and terror, that great tragedy is supposed to evoke, and also a complex mixture of admiration, despair and delight at seeing a luminous intelligence directed at the heart of darkness.’ Minette Marrin, Sunday Telegraph
‘Immensely moving and unsettling; an unforgettable portrait of the brain-death of a nation.’ J. G. Ballard, Sunday Times
‘“Wild Swans” made me feel like a five-year-old. This is a family memoir that has the breadth of the most enduring social history.’ Martin Amis, Independent on Sunday
'Riveting…an extraordinary epic.' Mail on Sunday
‘Of all the personal histories to have emerged out of China’s twentieth-century nightmare, “Wild Swans” is the most deeply thoughtful and the most heart-rending I’ve read.’ Spectator
‘There has never been a book like this.’ Edward Behr, Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was briefly a Red Guard at the age of fourteen, and then a peasant, a ‘barefoot doctor’, a steelworker and an electrician. She came to Britain in 1978, and in 1982 became the first person from the People’s Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university. She lives in London.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; New edition (5 April 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 720 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0007176155
- ISBN-13 : 978-0007176151
- Dimensions : 12.9 x 3.9 x 19.8 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 945,127 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 1,587 in Biographies about Essays, Journals & Letters
- 4,046 in Biographical Fiction (Books)
- 17,781 in Women's Biographies
- Customer reviews:
About the author
Jung Chang (simplified Chinese: 张戎; traditional Chinese: 張戎; pinyin: Zhāng Róng; Wade–Giles: Chang Jung, Mandarin pronunciation: [tʂɑ́ŋ ɻʊ̌ŋ], born 25 March 1952) is a Chinese-born British writer now living in London, best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, selling over 10 million copies worldwide but banned in the People's Republic of China.
Her 832-page biography of Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, written with her husband, the Irish historian Jon Halliday, was published in June 2005.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Guy Aitchison from London, UK (Names not numbers Uploaded by Snowmanradio) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Despite this litany of catastrophe, there is hope in the love and closeness of the family, centred here around the three eponymous amazing and strong-minded women. After the death of her warlord "husband", who treated her fairly decently by the standards of the time, the grandmother found happiness married to a much older man; the mother found love with a fellow communist and, despite strains caused by her husband's principled but rigid puritanism, their marriage survived their vicious denunciations by Red Guards and others at the appalling mass meetings, and their imprisonment in labour camps until the early 1970s. The physical and mental strains of years of humiliation and subjection to forced labour and psychological pressures, killed the author's father at the age of only 54 in 1975. In the relatively more relaxed atmosphere of the later 1970s, especially after the restoration to power of Deng Xiaoping, the future paramount leader in the 80s and 90s, the author was able to study abroad and the lives of her mother and other family members, as well as that of hundreds of millions of other Chinese, improved dramatically, albeit within the framework of what remains of course a one party communist state. The afterword recounts in brief the author's life in Britain and the original publication of this book in 1991 (what I have read is the 25th anniversary edition). One thing I would like to have heard a bit more about, though, was how she was able to defect to Britain after gaining her doctorate in 1982. This is a magnificent and absorbing book, with much to say about human nature at its best and worse, and the horrors that blind adherence to an ideology can bring about.
This book depicts a journey in several different ways ; a journey through the generations of three women in China and how the political atmosphere of each period influenced the lives they lived and the journeys they took. It's a journey through the political landscape of China across through a tumultuous period of history and it's an individuals journey of being born into a world where Mao is revered as a God and any criticism is to put yourself in danger of being known as a class enemy. Finally, it's a journey of womanhood through the ages in such a vastly different culture, that changes and evolves, yet still manages to find ways to make individuals lives a misery. The deification of Mao is frightening to behold, not least because it is a true story and the depictions of what is undoubtedly a reign of terror are horrifyingly eye-opening.
The bravery of so many individuals within the period rings through the book, as indeed does the eventual disillusionment with Communism and Maoism. The depictions of how family life was warped and twisted in so many ways through propaganda and an insistence that the Party must come first are vivid and yet Jung Chung never allows herself to wallow in pity. Whilst the story closely follows the lives of the three main women across three generations, it is the tale of Jung Chung's father that perhaps hits the hardest and shows the cruelty and random persecution of the Chinese period. Whilst the systematic degradation of women is clear across these three generations, it is in the tale of a moral man living in a land devoid of morality that really strikes hard.
Because Jung Chang's father is an infuriating figure at the beginning of the book; when he first marries her mother, he is so indoctrinated and obsessed with the Communist cause that he will cause his family active grief in trying to avoid a charge of nepotism. I winced at how Jung Chang's mother was treated during pregnancy and childbirth and wanted to hit the man for his insensitivity and lack of care. As the tale progresses however, it is his very inflexibility and refusal to bend the rules for anyone that gets him into so much trouble with the Communist rule. He won't stand for corruption and he won't sit silent in fear of the consequences. My heart bled for him and for his family who were taking so much grief because their husband and father was a moral man, trying to live by his own moral code in a world where this was untenable.
I found the early book rather dry and almost stilting, but this may be because Jung Chang was talking of events long before her birth. The binding of her grandmother's feet for instance, whilst horrific, didn't have the same emotional impact on me as the later book where she is depicting events that are in her own memory or at least of her parents. I think this is purely due to how close to events Jung Chang was and their emotional relevance to her. If you are struggling with the first few chapters I would definitely recommend sticking with it, because this is a book that is both depressing and inspirational by turns and becomes easier to read, if not to bear, in the sections related to Jung Chang's parents.
I have purchased this again for a friend’s birthday as she likes well written factual accounts