Jung Chang has said that her intention in writing Wild Swans was to show how the Chinese people, and in particular the women in her family, "fought tenaciously and courageously against impossible odds. Chang herself marched, worked, and breathed for Mao until doubt crept in over the excesses of his policies and purges.īorn 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. 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's grandmother was a warlord's concubine. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China is a memoir of three generations of Chinese women from Imperial China through and beyond the Cultural Revolution.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |