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CHANG,
JUNG
'Wild Swans' rating:  
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It's very rare for a book to bring tears to my eyes. 'Wild Swans' did. It's one of the most brilliant and affecting books I've ever read. In it, Jung Chang describes the lives of three generations of women in her family, and the hidebound social environment in which they found themselves. Shame, ostracization, and punishment often ruined (or ended) the lives of whole families:
Executions could extend to cousins nine times removed. Her grandmother had to endure the shocking pain of having her feet bound; from when their daughters reached the age of two, mothers were expected to continually break their feet so that they could develop the twisted, ruined 'Three-Inch Golden Lilies' (bound feet) which were so sought after in women at that time. The child would of course beg the mother to stop doing this to her; but if the distressed mother did succumb to her daughter's entreaties, the daughter would never find a proper husband, and would end up blaming her. During the 20s, China was not a feminist haven; the attitude expected of women was expressed in the following saying: "if you are married to a chicken, obey the chicken; if you are married to a dog, obey the dog". Super! When her mother was a child in Japanese-occupied Manchuria (northeastern China), girls of around 12 were forced by the Japanese to watch films of soldiers cutting people in half, and of people tied to stakes, being torn apart by dogs. If they saw the girls flinch, they would beat them savagely. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the Communists subjected her mother and father to terrible, chronic beatings and abuse; they were condemned as 'rightists' and blacklisted. The father in particular had incredible integrity; he received brutal treatment for decades because of his refusal (possibly misguided, but admirable in the extreme) to 'sell his soul' by taking part in the witchhunts. The part of the book that shocked me most was when some prison guards realised that the father was developing schizophrenia, and deliberately encouraged him to hear voices by telling him his wife was complaining about him in the next room. Her father was "a dog that has fallen into the water, and must be flogged and beaten with absolutely no charity". This, however, was only one among many sickening deeds which Mao and his cohorts encouraged in Communist China; beatings, intimidation and torture were rife. One of the scariest aspects was that the repression was not just carried out by the security forces - everyone was encouraged to take part: "in almost every school in China, teachers were abused and beaten [by the students], sometimes fatally". Torture chambers were home to 'singing fountains' (split skulls) and 'landscape paintings' (slashed faces). It is in some ways a very depressing book; the more 'revolutionary' the Communist revolution became, the more it resembled the narrow, backbiting ways of the past: "the real impetus came from personal animosity". There were some peculiar inversions, however: among Communist guerrillas, men and women used to compete to see who had the most 'revolutionary insects' (lice)! It is also ironic that it took Communism to bring religion (Mao worship) to a largely secular (though superstitious) China. Wild Swans is worth reading just for the insane songs and slogans which proliferated during the 'Cultural Revolution'. Here are just a few:
The 'great helmsman', Chairman Mao, mounted massive campaigns of destruction against sparrows, grass, flowers and pets - bourgeouis habits all. For a couple of days, traffic was in chaos because zealous students decided that red - the colour of the glorious revolution - should mean 'go' rather than 'stop'. His personality cult reached outrageous proportions: No newspapers could be thrown away because they all had Mao's face on them; it was a crime to allow mice to gnaw them. 'Loyalty dances' were compulsory.
Stefan Landsberger has an interesting page on the Mao Cult, as part of his extensive "Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages", which are an excellent resource. Click
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