The Ultimate China Bookshelf #48: Jung Chang's Wild Swans

Three Daughters of China — Published: 1991

“Riveting; an extraordinary epic” — Mail on Sunday (UK)

“Everything about Wild Swans is extraordinary. It arouses all the emotions, such as pity and terror, that great tragedy is supposed to evoke, and also a complex mixture of admiration, despair and delight at seeing a luminous intelligence directed at the heart of darkness” — Minette Marrin, Sunday Telegraph (UK)

“Immensely moving and unsettling; an unforgettable portrait of the brain-death of a nation’” — J.G. Ballard, Sunday Times (UK)

“Wild Swans made me feel like a five-year-old. This is a family memoir that has the breadth of the most enduring social history” — Martin Amis, Independent on Sunday (UK)

“There has never been a book like this” — Edward Behr, Los Angeles Times

Author Bio:

Jung Chang ( 张戎 Zhāng Róng) was born in 1952 in Yibin, Sichuan Province to Communist Party official parents. She claims her parents came to oppose Mao’s policies during the Great Leap Forward. Chang chose to become a Red Guard at the age of 14. Her parents suffered at the hands of the Red Guards and were expelled from the Party and lost all their previous privileges. Chang, considering herself both a victim and beneficiary of the Cultural Revolution, attended Sichuan University in 1973 and became one of the so-called "Students of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers". When the universities closed she became a peasant, a barefoot doctor, and an unqualified steelworker and electrician.