Fly, Wild Swans
My Mother, Myself and China
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO WILD SWANS, THE MULTI-MILLION COPY INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING SENSATION
A Book of the Year in The Times; Daily Telegraph; Financial Times and Waterstones
'A must-read … magnificent’ DAILY TELEGRAPH *****
'Beautiful and moving' ELIF SHAFAK, OBSERVER
Jung Chang’s Wild Swans was a book that defined a generation, an epic personal history of Jung, her mother and grandmother – ‘three daughters of China’. The book opens in 1909 with her grandmother’s birth – and foot-binding – when China was under the last emperor, moving through Mao Zedong’s rule, especially the Cultural Revolution during which Jung’s parents were subjected to horrendous ordeals because of their courage. It finishes in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping officially ended the Mao era and started the ‘reforms’. Jung, at that propitious juncture, became one of the first Chinese to leave Communist China for the West.
Nearly half a century on, China has risen from a decrepit and isolated state to a global power, the challenger to the United States’ dominant position in the world. Through those decades, Jung’s life has been intimately entwined with her native land. Her experiences dealing with the regime in those years were rich and revealing – especially so because all her books were (and are) banned.
Fly, Wild Swans is the follow-up to Wild Swans and brings the story of Jung’s family – along with that of China – up to date. The book is in many ways Jung’s love letter to her mother. It is inevitably also about her grandmother and father, both of whom died tragically in the Cultural Revolution but are often recalled in this book. In fact, the past is never far away in Jung’s subsequent life. It has shaped her, and moulded the present China, and what’s more, it promises to herald the future.
China is now at another watershed moment with the era of Chairman Xi Jinping greatly affecting the lives of Jung and her mother. Fly, Wild Swans is Jung’s heartfelt response to that experience, and a book filled with drama, love, curiosity and incredible history – both personal and global. Ultimately uplifting, told in Jung’s clear, honest and compelling voice, it is memoir writing at its best.
'Profoundly revealing as a portrait both of a family and of the deeper traumas that lie at the heart of modern China' RORY STEWART
'Another wonder book from Jung Chang…I am quite blown away by it' LADY ANTONIA FRASER
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Chang (Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister) parallels China's political upheavals with the evolution of her and her mother's relationship in this powerful memoir. Born in 1952 Yibin to an influential Communist couple who were frequently imprisoned for speaking out against Mao Zedong, Chang won a scholarship to London in 1978 to study Western culture as party leader Deng Xiaoping opened borders and attempted economic reforms. Inspired by her mother's tenacity and willingness to confront CCP officials over her father's 1967 imprisonment, Chang reveled in her newfound freedom, earning a doctorate in linguistics and writing extensively on China's history. Much of the account examines how her work brought Chang closer to, then further away from, her mother: after the success of Chang's 1991 memoir Wild Swans, the two bonded over their shared understanding of China's past and their vision for its future, and as Chang made bombshell discoveries about Mao while writing a 2006 biography of the former chairman, her mother shielded her from blowback. After current president Xi Jinping ramped up censorship, however, in the late 2010s Chang's mother stopped allowing family visits to China to protect Chang from imprisonment. Edifying, heartbreaking, and infuriating, this is tough to shake.
