Wild Swans

Wild Swans

by JungChang (Author)

Synopsis

Through the lives of three different women - grandmother, mother and daughter - this book tells the story of 20th-century China. At times scarcely credible in the details it reveals of the suffering of millions of ordinary Chinese people, it is an unforgettable record of tyranny, hope and ultimate survival under conditions of extreme harshness. In 1924, at the age of 15, the author's grandmother became the concubine of a powerful warlord, whom she was seldom to see during the 10 years of their "marriage". Her daughter, born in 1931, experienced the horrors of Japanese occupation in Manchuria as a schoolgirl, and after their surrender joined the Communist-led underground fighting Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang. She rose to be a senior Communist official, but was imprisoned three times. Her husband, also a high official and one of the very first to join the Communists, was relentlessly persecuted, imprisoned and finally sent to a labour camp where, physically broken and disillusioned, he lost his sanity. The author herself grew up during the Cultural Revolution, at the time of the personality cult of Mao and the worst excesses of the Gang of Four. She joined the Red Guard but after Mao's death she was to become one of the first Chinese students to study abroad.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 704
Edition: Open Market Ed
Publisher: Flamingo
Published: 25 Mar 1992

ISBN 10: 0006545998
ISBN 13: 9780006545996
Prizes: Winner of Writer's Guild / Macallan Award Non-Fiction Category 1992.

Author Bio
Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was briefly a Red Guard, and then a peasant, a `barefoot doctor', a steelworker and an electrician. She came to Britain in 1978, and became the first person from the People's Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university. Her books include `Wild Swans', which won the 1992 NCR Book Award and the 1993 British Book of the Year, and sold over 10 million copies. She lives in London.