As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving-and ultimately uplifting-detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.

She joined the Red Guard but after Mao's death she was to become one of the first Chinese students to study abroad.The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history-a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author.Īn engrossing record of Mao's impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord's concubine her mother's struggles as a young idealistic Communist and her parents' experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution.Ĭhang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a 'barefoot doctor,' a steelworker, and an electrician. 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. 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 story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history. She rose to be a senior Communist official, but was imprisoned three times. I enjoyed reading this book and here are my thoughts on it for you on behalf of Team ThinkerViews. She is from this amazing intellectual family and its. First published in 1991, this book tells the story of three generations of women spanning through a big part of 20th century, and has been widely loved by international audiences selling millions of copies world wide. 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. To me Wild Swans is one of those iconic books for understanding the generations of Chinese women. 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 ten years of their 'marriage'. 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. Through the lives of three different women - grandmother, mother and daughter - this book tells the story of 20th-century China.

Three swans book