The wispily decorative title of Jung Chang’s “Wild Swans” hardly does justice to this clear-eyed, harrowing account of life in China over the past three generations. (Jung Chang’s mother was called De-Hong, “Virtue Wild Swan”; she herself was born Er-hong, “Second Wild Swan.”) And while the subtitle, “Three Daughters of China,” may rope in Amy Tan readers, it downplays the book’s scope. This family chronicle-whose most memorable figure is a quixotic, incorruptible father-is also a history of China from the 1900 Boxer Rebellion to Tiananmen Square. The dual focus is no toggled-up, Michenerian tour de force: in China, even minute changes in the political weather had direct, devastating impact on private citizens. Indeed, the great vision of Mao Zedong was that the distinction between private and public be obliterated.
If indoctrination alone could extirpate the sin of “individualism,” Jung Chang, who now teaches at London University, would be faceless and voiceless. In her teens she was a slogan-chanting Red Guard, gyrating in “loyalty dances.” Her parents had become provincial communist officials out of deep conviction. In 1952, the year she was born, her father was made governor of Yibin, and his ideological purity was absolute. When her mother was pregnant and had TB, he vetoed a plan to move her to a better hospital: good communists played no favorites. (Her mother understood, admired-but didn’t forgive.) But while self-abnegation was revolutionary for the men of the family, for the women it was business as usual. Jung Chang’s grandmother, Yu Fang, was a warlord’s concubine with bound feet; her mother had no name but “Number Two Girl.”
Black-market rabbit: But neither feudalism nor Japanese occupation (1937-1945) nor the corruption and chaos under Chiang Kai-shek were as dehumanizing as the Orwellian lunacy of Maoism. In the late ’50s, an estimated 30 million people died during the Great Leap Forward, when peasants were too busy making steel to harvest crops; one couple was caught killing babies and selling the flesh as black-market rabbit. The Cultural Revolution of the ’60s made witch-hunting the only leisure activity: no books, no films, no music, no sports. Even stoplights were deemed counterrevolutionary: red had to mean “go.” Jung Chang recalls being upset when she and fellow students were ordered to uproot the “bourgeois” grass and flowers around their school, but she “had grown into the habit of ‘self-criticism’ and … blamed myself for any instincts that went against Mao’s instructions.” How wacky did it get? When her parents fell from grace, they were kicked out of their impeccably proletarian concrete-block flat and banished to a house with garden, mulberry trees and parquet floors.
Yet Jung Chang came to her senses–perhaps because of her parents’ unwavering integrity. Even her father’s dogmatic loyalty to “the people” at the expense of his wife and children was a conscious moral choice. He never sold out or backed down; predictably, he landed in a labor camp. But for his daughter, “the people” are first of all people; her book teems with individuals, each sharply outlined. Some develop like characters in a novel; others live in a single anecdote. The schoolgirl tortured to death after a forbidden leaflet fell from her purse. The ousted party hack denied his last request, to see the trees outside his newspaper-covered hospital window. On every page-in fact, by its very existence-“Wild Swans” affirms what warlords and Red Guards alike denied: that private thoughts, private judgments, are sacrosanct and that the individual is supreme.
