It oughta be a movie: Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, by Jung Chang
Despite the name of this post category, it would probably take several movies or a TV series to really do justice to this amazing family history/memoir. Sadly, given the expense of period pieces and the importance of the Chinese market to film companies, that’s not likely to happen any time soon; this book is still banned in China1, so far as I am aware. In the meantime, don’t be daunted by the thickness of the 500-page book. It is an extremely engaging read that sheds light on the nuances and complexities of women’s lives over three tumultuous generations. Note: Some spoilers ahead, but only for the general timeline and key events – there are WAY more interesting details than anyone could ever give away in a review of this length!
1. Sort of. It isn’t sold in-country, and the author isn’t supposed to give public talks when she visits, but no one gets in trouble for reading it if they manage to get a copy.
Generation 1: The warlord’s runaway concubine
The author’s grandmother was born in 1909 in Yixian, at the end of the Manchu empire. Many things were changing as the empire became, briefly, a republic, but Yu-fang’s upbringing was quite traditional2, including having her feet bound to turn them into “three-inch golden lilies”. Her ambitious father sought to introduce his lovely and outwardly demure fifteen-year-old daughter, to the warlord Xue Zhi-heng. Xue was handsome and powerful, having become inspector general of the Metropolitan Police in Peking and thereby having manipulated the election of the president. The introduction had to look accidental, and the story of their not-courtship is interesting. Xue was seemingly enchanted; he even gave their daughter the birth name Bao Qin, “precious zither” after the performance by Yu-fang that captured his heart. She, however, didn’t like the idea of being a concubine rather than a proper wife, as her position would be very insecure. Though it would be unthinkably unfilial to refuse, her mother noticed how unhappy she looked and tried to talk up Xue, telling Yu-fang that she would be able to stay in Yixian and have a house of her own.
That was true, but Yu-fang was intensely bored and lonely. Xue left her alone for years at a time due to his various political roles, she couldn’t properly leave the house often, and had little to do inside it other than throw mah-jongg parties, read, and play with her cat3. After their daughter was born, Xue wanted her to come to Lulong. A 200-mile journey was difficult for a woman with bound feet and an infant to carry, so she brought her sister Yu-lan to assist. An uncomfortable situation was waiting for her: Xue was dying, and she would soon be at the mercy of his wife and other concubines. She hatched a plan to escape with her daughter.
This was all rather scandalous, of course! But as her adventure demonstrates, Yu-fang was a lot tougher than she looked. She found love with a local doctor, and even managed to get her mother and sister out of the poisonous atmosphere her father’s concubines had created back home. Things still didn’t go easily, however. Her new husband’s grown children were not happy with him marrying a young former concubine, and much tragedy and drama ensued that ultimately leads to them moving to Jinzhou in 1936. But Dr. Xia was devoted to Yu-fang and gave her daughter his family name and a new given name: De-hong, meaning “virtue-wild swan”.
2. The mother of Yu-Fang (“Jade-Fragrant Flowers”) was never given a name as a child, just being called “number two girl”. So, progress, I guess!
3. Or smoke opium, but Yu-fang refused to take up the habit even though Xue suggested it.
Generation 2: A revolution betrayed
In the introduction, the author
mentioned feeling when she arrived in the UK that it was an extremely
egalitarian place. If your country had a socialist revolution and yet you feel
like Great Britain – land of judging people’s origin and worth by accent – is a
classless society, someone REALLY messed up! I was curious to see exactly where
things went wrong. The next two generations illustrate just that.
Jinzhou, where Xia De-hong grew up, was nominally in the kingdom of Manchukuo, but really under control of the Japanese. Despite propaganda - “Red boys and green girls walk on the streets/They all say what a happy place Manchukuo is” – the Chinese were clearly second-class citizens. Even though all the teachers were Japanese, De-hong and her classmates studied in dilapidated temples and crumbling houses with no heat, while Japanese students had clean, modern classrooms. Even rice was reserved for the occupiers: Dr. Xia was haunted by the memory of a worker to whom he had prescribed rice for digestive issues, who was caught with it, sent to a work camp, and died. That sort of thing turned even the cautious doctor into a quiet rebel, and it certainly had an influence on De-hong!
The Communist army briefly took over the area in 1945 and was regarded as scruffy but honest and unpretentious, restoring order and dealing efficiently with food scarcity. The Kuomintang rule that followed was unpopular, being marked with extortion, corruption, and torture. De-hong formed a friendship with a reluctant Kuomintang colonel named Hui-ge and together they helped to smuggle explosives into a weapons depot and scouted the location of defenses around the city, information that she passed to her Communist contacts. Eighty thousand Kuomintang soldiers were captured when Jinzhou was taken, but they were treated well at that time, and many switched sides. The residents were once again impressed by how quickly the Communists reduced food prices and the disciplined and ethical behavior of the soldiers. It was in this hopeful period that De-hong met Comrade Wang Yu (the author’s father, AKA Chang Shou-Yu). He had been born 1,200 miles away in Sichuan, an area known as “Heaven’s Granary” that nonetheless suffered from terrible inequalities. He was more bookish and refined than many of the rebels, which rather caught De-hong’s eye, and they soon married.
While Yu-fang was wary of her daughter marrying an official, since officials had a reputation for corruption, Yu’s very incorruptibility turned out to be a major strain on their relationship. He would not make exceptions for his family members like letting De-hong ride in an official vehicle instead of walking. When her first pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage and heavy bleeding she demanded a divorce, but Yu apologized profusely, and also pointed out that whatever happened with them she must not be seen as a deserter…an early sign that there would be no “opting out” of the revolution. Their relationship improved after they moved to his hometown of Yibin and reunited with his welcoming family. De-hong was assigned a job in the Public Affairs Department, though she spent much of her time in the countryside trying to purchase food for the city while being harassed by remnant Kuomintang forces. Yu was also wrapped up in his work, which included overseeing land reform. Though they had four children together, conflicts cropped up repeatedly. The old saying was “when a man gets power, even his chickens and dogs rise to heaven”, but Yu was insistent that it should not be this way:
“You are good Communist, but a rotten husband!” My father nodded. He said he knew.
But there soon began to be signs that not all officials were so devoted to fairness.
As the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, there began to be harsher treatment of those associated with the old regime. De-hong was devastated to learn that Hui-ge had been executed. This gradually shaded into vaguer accusations; De-hong experienced an intense six month investigation that kept her away from her infant children due to her past links to Kuomintang people like Hui-ge. She was cleared, but then came the period of “let a hundred flowers bloom”…which turned out to be a trap. By the time of the Great Leap Forward, even Yu knew something was seriously wrong. He became clinically depressed and spent much time fishing, a traditional pastime of scholars disillusioned with the emperor. Things seemed to be improving in the early 1960s, but then came the Cultural Revolution that turned society upside down with endless denunciations, often motivated by personal grievances. Yu decided it was his duty to try to write directly to Mao, who was the only one who could stop the madness. He was detained before he could send it, but despite her serious misgivings De-hong set out for Peking to try and deliver it.
If even half of what the author says about her father is true, you have to respect the guy. Through years of persecution, he never capitulated:
“A standard opening was to chant: ‘Ten thousand years, another ten thousand years, and yet another ten thousand years to our Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Commander, and Great Helmsman Chairman Mao!’…My father would not do this. He said that the ‘ten thousand years’ was how emperors used to be addressed, and it was unfitting for Chairman Mao, a Communist. This brought down a torrent of hysterical yells and slaps…He said that kneeling and kowtowing were undignified feudal practices…The Rebels screamed, kicked his knees, and struck him on the head, but he still struggled to stand upright.”
For her part, while she had once threatened to divorce Yu for his stubbornness, De-hong now refused to “draw a line” between them. Both paid the price, from physical torment like being made to kneel on broken glass, to mental breakdowns, to a scattering of their family across different remote rural areas.
A reluctant red guard flies the coop
The author was born in 1952, and was named Er-hong, “second wild swan4”. She was a child during the Great Leap Forward, when no one dared point out how trying to produce steel in backyard furnaces or pulling millions of peasants out of agriculture to produce steel in this inefficient way and encouraging others to plant crops so densely they died was stupid. The resulting mismanagement led to a huge famine and a shocking number of deaths5. Years later the author heard the peasants she had been sent to live amongst “speaking bitterness” of a famine, and realized that it was only a decade or so past, not something due to the prior rulers.
4. Her elder sister’s name is Xiao-hong.
5. The last major famine in a country that had frequently suffered them in the past, it would be fair to note – but also one that didn’t have to happen!
But that doubt came later. She grew up on tales of how perfect life in China was – “As a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery, like that of the homeless ‘Little Match Girl’ in the Hans Christian Andersen story” – and her relatively comfortable life as an official’s daughter would give her no reason to doubt that. The schools she attended were good, with libraries and biology labs and well-trained teachers. But there was a growing strain of Mao worship, as well as unhelpfully vague instructions for how to be a good Communist: “Our teacher said we had to be careful whom we helped on our do-good errands. We must not help ‘class enemies’. I did not understand who they were…One common answer was ‘like the baddies in the movies’. But I could not see anyone around me who looked like the highly stylized enemy characters in the movies.”
Presaging the Cultural Revolution, in 1963 she asked to change her name because Er-hong sounds like “faded red” – too ominous! The author and her father settled on Jung, an archaic word meaning “martial affairs” that conjured chivalric images. Three years later, a Red Guard organization was founded at Jung’s school, and it went without saying that it was an honor to be accepted. But she was a shy child who had never much cared for group activities and liked them even less now that they involved bullying people. While shutting down a teahouse, an establishment labeled as “bourgeois”:
In a far corner one old man was still sitting at his table, calmly sipping his tea…He had a deeply lined face that was almost stereotypical ‘working class’…I summoned up my courage and pleaded in a low voice, ‘Please, could you leave?’ Without looking at me said ‘Where to?’ ‘Home, of course,’ I replied… ‘Home?...I share a tiny room with my two grandsons…When the kids are home I come here for some peace and quiet. Why do you have to take this away from me?’
I think this story struck me because it is in some ways more telling of how the goals had shifted than the brutality that was argued to be “necessary”. Like money and education, opportunities for relaxation and beauty are unequally distributed6, and public gardens, teahouses, and sporting facilities are an efficient way of righting that – but they had to go, because “struggle” had become a goal in itself.
6. See the
classic protest song ‘Bread and Roses’: “Hearts starve as well as
bodies; Give us bread, but give us roses.” In Jung's school, grass and flowers were removed, but no vegetables were grown!
The Cultural Revolution utterly trashed China’s education system – again, completely backwards if the goal were actually to build up a more equal and prosperous country! The education of the author was put entirely on hold for five years. Her brother, Jin-Ming, became involved in the black market book trade – partly just to get something to read! - while her other brother, Xiao-hei, who was twelve, had nothing to do other than join a street gang. The economy, too, slipped into paralysis, as efforts were directed toward denunciations and rallies rather than maintaining factory production or building new housing and services. While she wasn’t ready yet to blame Mao, Jung had had enough of the Red Guards and their brutality, and when her mother asked what they would do now that their father was condemned, she and her siblings decided to stand by him, despite the risk of being branded “blacks”.
They were sent to the countryside, supposedly to learn from the peasants, but as they could barely speak the local dialect and the peasants found these soft city kids to be rather worthless farmhands, no one got much out of the arrangement! For a while Jung was a “barefoot doctor”. This was a program that sounds good in principle – getting more medical care to rural areas – but since schools weren’t functioning all she got was a diagnostic handbook. The peasants, quite reasonably, mostly looked at this teenager with a not-even-impressively-thick book and went: “Yeah…no offense, but I’m gonna wait for the guy with an actual medical degree!” For a while she became an electrician, and then studied up to try and get a spot in the universities that were just re-opening. Then the exam results got cancelled, Madame Mao and her cohorts having declared that they represented “bourgeois dictatorship”. While exams can certainly be unfair, ironically the only thing left to ensure university entry was the “back door” – connections to the admissions committee – which only children of officials were likely to have! Jung was assigned to study English, and that eventually became a path out.
One thing I really like about this book is the way it immerses you in the life of this family and a period of history that many of us in the US don’t really know that much about. Many of the things you do hear about the Chinese Revolution are extremely biased, either being apologetics for Mao or some variant on “see, that’s why socialism will never work”. This book, on the other hand, is much more nuanced. While Jung Chang is unflinching in pointing out what went wrong, by putting the revolution in a broader historical context she is also able to show why people were initially quite happy to have the Communists in power. You can also see how some issues came from the reassertion of old patterns, such as the tendency to condemn a whole family together, or Mao taking on the role of a deified emperor – and how, despite its claims to the contrary – the Cultural Revolution reinforced these problematic patterns.
Adaptation issues
There is a LOT of story here, with many characters over 3 generations, so a TV series would probably be a better bet than a movie. The screenwriter would have to make up much of the dialogue, but the descriptions of setting, clothing, and general vibe of different places and times are vivid and could give a lot of guidance to those parts of the production.
