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Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bursting with drama, heartbreak and horror, this extraordinary family portrait mirrors China's century of turbulence. Chang's grandmother, Yu-fang, had her feet bound at age two and in 1924 was sold as a concubine to Beijing's police chief. Yu-fang escaped slavery in a brothel by fleeing her ``husband'' with her infant daughter, Bao Qin, Chang's mother-to-be. Growing up during Japan's brutal occupation, free-spirited Bao Qin chose the man she would marry, a Communist Party official slavishly devoted to the revolution. In 1949, while he drove 1000 miles in a jeep to the southwestern province where they would do Mao's spadework, Bao Qin walked alongside the vehicle, sick and pregnant (she lost the child). Chang, born in 1952, saw her mother put into a detention camp in the Cultural Revolution and later ``rehabilitated.'' Her father was denounced and publicly humiliated; his mind snapped, and he died a broken man in 1975. Working as a ``barefoot doctor'' with no training, Chang saw the oppressive, inhuman side of communism. She left China in 1978 and is now director of Chinese studies at London University. Her meticulous, transparent prose radiates an inner strength. Photos. BOMC alternate. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
During Jung Chang's childhood in Maoist China, lawns and flower gardens were des-troyed as symptoms of bourgeois decadence, while Red Guards made bonfires of books. Moving to Britain as a student in 1978, Chang - briefly a Red Guard in her teens - greeted London's parks with "indescribable joy", while Nineteen-Eighty-Four made her wonder, "in a naive way, if Orwell had ever been in China. I was reading about the society I'd been living in. How did he know?" Her experience of the cultural revolution of 1966-76, when her privileges as the daughter of a high-ranking communist were curtailed after her parents' denunciation as class traitors, fuelled her memoir, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991). The family saga, encompassing the history of 20th-century China through her life and those of her mother and grandmother, drew comparisons with Dickens and Balzac, and plaudits from Martin Amis and Penelope Fitzgerald. It sold more than 10 million copies and was translated into 30 languages. Yet relatively few have read Wild Swans in mainland China, where the translation has been banned since 1994, and even pirated editions omit references to Mao. Although Chang has been free to come and go (" Wild Swans was a threat, but I was not"), mention of her is prohibited in the Chinese media, she says. The experience of her first book makes her ambitions to extend the readership of her second all the more remarkable. Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), the 800-page biography co- authored with her husband, historian Jon Halliday, is out in UK paperback this week (Vintage), and Chang has just completed a Chinese translation for publication in Hong Kong. She has no doubt it will be banned on the mainland, but is confident copies will find their way in, as with the English version on sale in Hong Kong ("they can't check every suitcase"). The biography, which, unexpectedly, took 12 years to complete, sought to "unravel the labyrinth of myths" surrounding the Mao who haunts Wild Swans . "It's certainly not a bland history; our research uncovered things far worse than anything I could imagine," Chang says in the stuccoed house in London's Notting Hill she shares with her husband. "The book reflected my shock and outrage at what Mao did to the Chinese." Among its findings is his "love for bloodthirsty thuggery [bordering] on sadism", and that his rule saw the deaths of 70 million people in peacetime. Worst for Chang was the famine of 1958-61, when "38 million people died of starvation and overwork. I had thought it was a result of economic mismanagement. But he knew many people would die because he was exporting the food they were dependent on for their survival to Russia, to buy nuclear technology to further his ambition to build China into a military superpower." The couple, who work at home on different floors, divided the research by language, with Chang tackling Chinese archives, and Halliday Russian, Albanian and others. New sources included interviews with Mao's girlfriends, doctors and bodyguards, Soviet archives opened up since 1991, and letters from Mao's second wife, Yang Kaihui, found hidden behind a roof beam ("every historian's dream"). Though Mao's inner circle had been warned off talking to the couple, the warning became an "advertisement for the prestige of the biography", says Chang. "Because the regime repressed memories, people immediately opened up." World figures were as forthcoming, from Henry Kissinger and Imelda Marcos to the former Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, whom Chang collared at a Hong Kong hotel hairdresser's. Despite reforms since Mao's death in 1976, says Chang, Deng Xiaoping ensured the communist party still derives its legitimacy from Mao. "The young are not allowed to know what life under Mao was like," she says. Last month's 30th anniversary of the end of the cultural revolution was a "non-event; the media were under strict orders not to mention it. Brainwashing still goes on, and Mao's portrait hangs in classrooms as the guiding force of the nation." That, she said at English PEN's international writers day last month, is "why the book is so dangerous, because the facts will change people's lingering ideas about Mao". The biography, Michael Yahuda wrote in these pages, exposed Mao as "one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century alongside Hitler and Stalin". Yet Chang admits it has drawn both "wonderful reviews and furious attacks". The latter range from self-proclaimed Maoists leafleting outside her talks, to Andrew Nathan, professor of political science at Columbia university, criticising the authors as "magpies - every bright piece of evidence goes in, no matter where it comes from or how reliable it is", sparking a heated exchange with them in the London Review of Books. "We never twisted the evidence; it's our accuser who was misrepresenting our sources," says Chang. She denies a charge that the book over-emphasised Mao's personality. "As a writer, I'm interested in character and Mao changed the course of history. But we show he couldn't have taken power without Stalin or the Japanese invasion." As for a desire for vengeance clouding her vision, "there's nothing wrong with Mao's victims wanting to get even, but that's not my motive", she says. "Revenge consumes a person, whereas I've wanted to enjoy life." Her mother still lives in Chengdu, in Sichuan province, but of Chang's four siblings, only her sister is in China. Her brothers - a physicist, journalist and businessman - live in Canada, London and France. She was born in 1952 in Sichuan. As a child, she has written, she would have died for Chairman Mao: "He was the idol, the God, the inspiration." But her doubts began when she was 14. "The violence and atrocities went against my nature." Her father, who refused to "sell his soul" by backing the cultural revolution, was forced from his teaching job, tortured and sent to a labour camp, where he had a mental breakdown that hastened his death in 1975. Her mother, under pressure to renounce him, was paraded in a dunce's cap, beaten and made to kneel on broken glass. Before the family was scattered to labour camps, Chang would accompany her ailing mother to "horrible denunciation meetings when she was haemorrhaging from her womb. I'd sit in a hysterical crowd that was yelling and screaming." Her grandmother died in 1969, killed, Chang believes, by the "accumulation of anguish". Yet Chang blamed only those around Mao until 1974, when she read a smuggled copy of Newsweek that described Madame Mao as her husband's "eyes and ears". She says, "it spelled out Mao's responsibility. A window opened in my mind, and light came in. I can see how powerful the brainwashing and indoctrination were; I was reasonably intelligent, but it took me eight years." It was the burning of her father's library, she thinks, that unhinged his mind. She found him weeping over a kitchen fire, stoking it with the last of his precious volumes. Yet her "entrepreneurial" 13-year-old brother salvaged for the black market thousands of Chinese and western classics that had escaped the Red Guards. Chang was able to devour Shakespeare, Shaw, RL Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle in Chinese translation, along with Turgenev and the Russian novelists who spurred the "romantic side of my nat- ure". Among Chinese writers, she felt liberated by Lu Xun, for his "enlightened humanism" in the 1920s. "He said penetrating things about the repressive nationalists, but his attacks could as well apply to the regime I was living in." Exiled to the Hima-layan foothills, she worked as a barefoot doctor, steel worker and electrician, bef-ore her "rehabilitation" allowed her to study English at Sich-uan university in the early 70s. Two years after Mao's death, she studied linguistics at York and was the first person from China to earn a doctorate in Britain. She taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies and wrote Wild Swans after a visit from her mother in 1988. "She talked every day for six months; I had 60 hours of tapes." Chang learned that her grandmother had been a Man-churian warlord's concubine, and her mother had joined the communist underground at 15. After her doctorate in 1982, she married a Singaporean Chinese pianist and professor at London's Royal College of Music. They split up in 1986; Halliday, whom she married in 1991, also plays the piano: "Both Jon and my previous husband introduced me to music. When I was growing up, there wasn't much, except nice tunes singing the praises of Mao." While Chang has seen a diminution of fear in China, she says, "because of its dramatic changes, it's a place full of contradictions", and publications are "under tighter control than for a century". She and Halliday were deterred from giving Mao to Wild Swans publisher HarperCollins by reports that its owner had blocked a book by Chris Patten, former governor of Hong Kong. "We knew Rupert Murdoch had a friendly relationship with Beijing, and we didn't trust him to publish Mao ," she says. She is torn on the subject of western software companies colluding with China to restrict internet freedom. "If I were these companies, I'd go on doing business with China - it helps us all. But I'd try to push the line, and not do any self-censorship - or risk lives." In her introduction to a 2003 edition of Wild Swans , Chang wrote: "We were not treated by our own government as proper human beings, and consequently some outsiders did not regard us as the same kind of humans as themselves." She still feels "people don't always regard Chinese lives as being as valuable as European lives", citing a "preposterous remark" by Ken Livingstone. The mayor of London said last month: "One thing that Chairman Mao did was to end the appalling foot binding of women. That alone justifies the Mao Zedong era." Foot binding, Chang points out, as suffered by her grandmother, was outlawed in the early 20th century. "And nothing justifies 70 million deaths in peacetime." Once the Chinese translation of Mao is out, says Chang, "I'm putting my feet up and drawing a long breath and no doubt some inspiration." As for her next project, "I hope it won't take 12 years." Caption: article-jung10.1 Yet relatively few have read Wild Swans in mainland China, where the translation has been banned since 1994, and even pirated editions omit references to Mao. Although [Jung Chang] has been free to come and go (" Wild Swans was a threat, but I was not"), mention of her is prohibited in the Chinese media, she says. The experience of her first book makes her ambitions to extend the readership of her second all the more remarkable. Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), the 800-page biography co- authored with her husband, historian Jon Halliday, is out in UK paperback this week (Vintage), and Chang has just completed a Chinese translation for publication in Hong Kong. She has no doubt it will be banned on the mainland, but is confident copies will find their way in, as with the English version on sale in Hong Kong ("they can't check every suitcase"). The couple, who work at home on different floors, divided the research by language, with Chang tackling Chinese archives, and Halliday Russian, Albanian and others. New sources included interviews with Mao's girlfriends, doctors and bodyguards, Soviet archives opened up since 1991, and letters from Mao's second wife, Yang Kaihui, found hidden behind a roof beam ("every historian's dream"). Though Mao's inner circle had been warned off talking to the couple, the warning became an "advertisement for the prestige of the biography", says Chang. "Because the regime repressed memories, people immediately opened up." World figures were as forthcoming, from Henry Kissinger and Imelda Marcos to the former Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, whom Chang collared at a Hong Kong hotel hairdresser's. Despite reforms since Mao's death in 1976, says Chang, Deng Xiaoping ensured the communist party still derives its legitimacy from Mao. "The young are not allowed to know what life under Mao was like," she says. Last month's 30th anniversary of the end of the cultural revolution was a "non-event; the media were under strict orders not to mention it. Brainwashing still goes on, and Mao's portrait hangs in classrooms as the guiding force of the nation." That, she said at English PEN's international writers day last month, is "why the book is so dangerous, because the facts will change people's lingering ideas about Mao". - Maya Jaggi.
Kirkus Review
An exceptional tribute to three generations of courageous and articulate Chinese women: the grandmother, born in 1909 into a still feudal society; the mother, a Communist official and then ``enemy of the people''; and the daughter, the author, raised during the reactionary Cultural Revolution, then sent abroad in 1978, when the story ends, to study in England, where she now, at age 39, serves as Director of Chinese Studies for External Services, Univ. of London. In recounting her grandmother's early life--the binding of her feet, her time as the concubine of a warlord, her escape with her infant daughter after his death, and her marriage to a respectable middle-class doctor--Chang provides a vivid picture of traditional China and the place of women before the Communist Revolution. After the Revolution, the position of women rose: Chang's mother, who grew up during the Japanese occupation and married a Maoist guerrilla soldier, bore five children while enduring the discipline and hardship of those early revolutionary years, and later, as a civil servant and wife of an official, acquired in the new government status and advantages, especially education for her children. Raised in this ``Privileged Cocoon'' between 1958-65, Chang was protected from the injustices that led to the Cultural Revolution--the purges, repression, public denunciations and humiliations, the confusing and arbitrary shifts in ideology that led ultimately to the conviction of her parents, idealistic but old-time Communists, as ``enemies of the people.'' As part of her ``re-education,'' Chang was sent to the countryside to live as a peasant, serving without any training as a doctor and then as an electrician before being sent abroad. A valuable historical perspective on the impact of Mao on traditional Chinese culture and character--as well as an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world. Mostly, however, Chang offers an inspiring story of courage, sensitivity, intelligence, loyalty, and love, told objectively, without guilt or recrimination, in an unassuming and credible documentary style. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs--not seen.)
Library Journal Review
An excellent work about China as seen through the eyes of women of three different generations: the author, who left China in 1978; her mother, a revolutionary who married one of Mao's soldiers; and her grandmother, concubine to a warlord. Although aimed at the general reader, parts of this will be rewarding for specialists, especially those interested in Chinese social history during the decades leading up to the Communist revolution. For example, during the war period, the author's family was usually ``behind the lines'' (of the Japanese, then of the Communists), about which little has been written in English. Later parts of the book would be valuable to anyone especially interested in Sichuan province. Less ``new'' are the general events of 1949-78, including the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. Particularly well portrayed are the efforts of the Communists to change the Chinese social system. An often fascinating narrative, though one often yearns for a map and family tree. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/91.-- James D. Seymour, Columbia Univ. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.