Wild Swans

Three Daughters of China

Jung Chang

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781439106495
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

An 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.

Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Introduction to the 2003 Edition
• Chapter 1: “Three-Inch Golden Lilies”
• Chapter 2: “Even Plain Cold Water Is Sweet”
• Chapter 3: “They All Say What a Happy Place Manchukuo Is”
• Chapter 4: “Slaves Who Have No Country of Your Own”
• Chapter 5: “Daughter for Sale for 10 Kilos of Rice”
• Chapter 6: “Talking about Love”
• Chapter 7: “Going through the Five Mountain Passes”
• Chapter 8: “Returning Home Robed in Embroidered Silk”
• Chapter 9: “When a Man Gets Power, Even His Chickens and Dogs Rise to Heaven”
• Chapter 10: “Suffering Will Make You a Better Communist”
• Chapter 11: “After the Anti-Rightist Campaign No One Opens Their Mouth”
• Chapter 12: “Capable Women Can Make a Meal without Food”
• Chapter 13: “Thousand-Gold Little Precious”
• Chapter 14: “Father Is Close, Mother Is Close, but Neither Is as Close as Chairman Mao”
• Chapter 15: “Destroy First, and Construction Will Look After Itself”
• Chapter 16: “Soar to Heaven, and Pierce the Earth”
• Chapter 17: “Do You Want Our Children to Become ‘Blacks’?”
• Chapter 18: “More Than Gigantic Wonderful News”
• Chapter 19: “Where There Is a Will to Condemn, There Is Evidence”
• Chapter 20: “I Will Not Sell My Soul”
• Chapter 21: “Giving Charcoal in Snow”
• Chapter 22: “Thought Reform through Labor”
• Chapter 23: “The More Books You Read, the More Stupid You Become”
• Chapter 24: “Please Accept My Apologies That Come a Lifetime Too Late”
• Chapter 25: “The Fragrance of Sweet Wind”
• Chapter 26: “Sniffing after Foreigners’ Farts and Calling Them Sweet”
• Chapter 27: “If This Is Paradise, What Then Is Hell”
• Chapter 28: Fighting to Take Wing (1976-1978)
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• Family Tree
• Chronology
• Map of China
• Acknowledgments
• Touchstone Reading Group Guide
• About the Author
• Photographs
• Index
• Copyright