#BookReview of #WildSwans: Three Daughter of China by Jung Chang

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– WILD SWANS: THREE DAUGHTERS OF CHINA

[ About Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China ]

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.

[ My Review ]

Wild Swans: Three Daughter of China by Jung Chang was first published in 1991 and is described as ‘a tragic tale of nightmarish cruelty and an uplifting story of bravery and survival‘. Having recently received a copy of Fly, Wild Swans by Jung Chang, the sequel to Wild Swans, I made a decision to read Jung Chang’s bestselling original book first. What I was totally unprepared for was the epic nature of her writing and the level of extraordinary detail that is recounted.

A sweeping story of three generations of women from the one family, Wild Swans immediately sets the scene when Jung Chang’s grandmother, Yu-fang, steps into her role as one of the many concubines of a warlord general, General Xue Zhi-heng. It is 1924 and she is fifteen years of age. There are multiple scenes and descriptions throughout this vast memoir that made me stop and absorb the scale of what I had a read but there is one standout incident that will remain with me. At the age of two, Yu-fang’s feet were cruelly bound in an extremely painful process that lasted several years, in order to appease men. ‘Not only was the sight of women hobbling on tiny feet considered erotic, men would also get excited playing with bound feet, which were always hidden in embroidered silk shoes.’ This shocking practice, one that was officially banned early in the 1900s, was continued in rural areas for many years, leaving many women with terrible disabilities and deformities for life, including Yu-fang.

China, as a nation, has been through some extraordinary times. This encyclopaedic memoir captures a people who have suffered greatly under different leaderships but it is the regime under Mao Zedung that completely undermined the family structure and a way of life. Jung Chang, with great risk to her own safety, provides a detailed and enthralling account of her own family’s personal experiences, as China went through many dramatic and barbaric years. This historical document of China through the decades, and the formation of the Communist Party, is shocking. Its people suffered tremendous pain and loss. The warped ideology of certain individuals wound its way into the minds of millions, leaving carnage in its wake.

Jung Chang, in a recent BBC Radio 4 interview, mentioned that her mother, now ninety-four years of age, is unwell but Jung Chang has paid the ultimate price for documenting her memories and can never return to China. The scale of what she, and many other Chinese people, suffered is unimaginable yet she continues to inform us, encouraging us to educate ourselves and witness what has happened, and still is happening, across the globe. Like many of you, I have read dystopian novels, watched dystopian movies, but Jung Chang has actually lived a dystopian life. Her writing is vital. Her history is important.

Wild Swans is a distressing read but yet, through Jung Chang’s words, we also get little glimmers of hope and joy, even in the midst of such nightmarish environs. Jung Chang is a tenacious individual, one unwilling to forget her past, no matter the trauma of her youth. Through this compelling memoir, she remembers her mother, her grandmother and many more brave individuals who didn’t escape a regime that was built to destroy its people. Extraordinary, essential reading, Wild Swans is a powerful and extremely profound book, a unique reading experience.

[ Read my review of Jung Chang’s sequel Fly, Wild Swans ]

[ Bio ]

Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was briefly a Red Guard, and then a peasant, a ‘barefoot doctor’, a steelworker and an electrician.

She came to Britain in 1978, and became the first person from the People’s Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university.

Her books include ‘Wild Swans’, which won the 1992 NCR Book Award and the 1993 British Book of the Year, and which has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide, except in China where it is banned, as are all of her other books. She lives in London.

Her latest book is, Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China (2025).

Read more: https://www.jungchang.net/biography