![]() ![]() One of the most horrible things in the book occurs within the first chapter when Chang describes her grandmother’s footbinding. Wild Swans presents almost the entire 20th century history of China in a highly personal way that makes it so much more memorable than just reading the same information in a text book would have been. Reading Wild Swans made me realize how important books like this one are. It also explained why many people eventually became disillusioned and why the system started to break down. ![]() This book helped me understand why the Chinese people initally welcomed communism and how millions of children grew up viewing Mao as their hero and never dreaming of questioning his regime. As Jung Chang says in her introduction to the 2003 edition, ‘the world knows astonishingly little about him’. The third is Jung Chang herself and the longest and most compelling section of the book is devoted to her own experiences during Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s.īefore beginning this book I didn’t know very much at all about Chairman Mao, but I’m obviously not alone in that. The second is Chang’s mother, De-hong, who became a senior official in the Communist party following their victory over the Kuomintang. The first is her grandmother Yu-fang, who grew up in pre-communist China, a time when women had their feet bound as children and could be given to warlords as concubines. ![]() Wild Swans is the story of three generations of women in Jung Chang’s family. ![]()
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