Wild Swans: Three Daughters Of China By Published by Flamingo (£6.99)
Reviewed by JODLEY GREEN THIS STORY of three generations of Chinese women starts in 1909 at the time of the Manchu Empire with Jung Chang's grandmother's feet being crushed by binding.
Chang goes on to tell the story of her grandmother (Yufang), mother (De-hong) and Chinese republic through to Mao's death and the fall of the Gang of Four.
The personalities and policies of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution escebed bue cermain d tant.
Similarly the peasant communities in which Jung Chang did her "Thought reform through Labour' remain anonymous.
These fuzzy images on the edge of the family world enhance Chang's portrayal of ner solaca uponnging is the daughter of two Communist Party officials.
Two chapters cover the period 1958-62. One documents the famine which accompanied back-yard steel production during the Great Leap Forward. The other, titled, 'In a privileged cocoon' records Chang's own experiences in those years.
Bureaucrat
Throughout Wild Swans the experiences of women are at the forefront. Yu-fang's lack of nower as a concubine and then a wife contrasts sharply with De-hone's rise as an offi• cial in the Communist Party.
However, the family reIl's too polite to equate survival with heroism mained the organising princi. change for the position of women within it.
This book highlights the failure of the Chinese revoluBo o Coe ne enc" pation of women, especially in Told in atmost detached tones, the majority of the book is a tale of great hardship. terror and violence. hong's work for the communist underground during Japanese and then Kuomintang rule, of the short period after the revolution and before the Anti-Rightist campaign. prevent Jung Chang's painful rendition becoming intolerable.
Weaving together the disintegration of normal life during the Cultural Revolution and the disintegration of her father's sanity, Jung Chang describes her gradual gime.
Heroism
It is only when both her parents are detained in camps that she dares to blame Mao for their suffering. Having suffered sreatly and survived without losing their humanity. wi cal ceny ne neost or Chang's parents?
This book is beautifully written, moving, evocative and serves as a crash course in (wentieth century Chinese history and geography to the uninitiated, but I am left uneasy Boout us tragic-herossm ar the references to Chinese tradition as an explanation.
All great tragedies demand herocs, but was the heroism of sistance for the most part (for example turing in fewer names than the quota during the Anti-Rightist Campaign) -SO SinT autSce amid other more enthusiastic purges and denunciations?
It is far too poetic, not to mention simplistic, to equate survival with heroism, Mao with past emperors and to exphun the crociy or cromesy people as a particularly Chinese charciensic acycioncd under centuries of arbitrary rule.