You could fill a post-it note with what I don’t know about Chinese history. Wild Swans follows 3 generations of Chinese women in the 1900s-1990. The grandmother is part of the last generation of Chinese to endure the foot-binding craze. She had her feet bound starting ate age 2. As a brief reminder, bound feet were supposed to be less than 4 inches and would require the toes to be curled in under the feet until they broke. The foot would then stretched straight down until the arch broke. The foot would then be tightly bandaged to keep the bones from ever healing correctly. On top of this, the process was usually done by the girl’s mom. The grandmother was born into a poor family and ends up becoming a general’s concubine. She has a daughter (author’s mother) this daughter joins the Communist party shortly after WW2 and marries a high ranking communist party member. They have several children one named Jung Chang(the author) who outlines the experience of going through Mao’s famine and his cultural revolution. It’s a very interesting story and I don’t want to give away too many details, but the parallels to 1984 were striking.

  • Mao used citizens to report on each other
  • Mao turned children into informers on their parents
  • Forced recitation of Mao sayings in schools.
  • Speak Bitterness sessions where citizens would air grievances and remember how bad the past was
  • History rewritten
  • The heavy use of Mao’s face
  • The psychological attachment the citizens had to Mao, especially the younger children All the above being said the big surprise for me (and probably not the goal of the author) was that life actually did get better for a while after the communist took over. The Communist were actually an improvement over the previous regime. At the beginning their leaders were honest and corruption was unheard of. This is crazy seeing as China had issues with corrupt officials for centuries prior to Communism. Women were also treated better (a la no more concubines). The author’s mom and dad were true believers in Communism and they were both good people. Its very interesting to think what would have happened had the author’s dad replaced Mao. Maybe the same thing? Who knows, but it made me realize that I don’t think Marx really lays out a governmental structure. I think he was more interested in critiquing capitalism per se and trying to make the case we could do a little better. I also found out this weekend that the Cincinnati Reds got their name because the players originally wore red stockings. They were originally named the Red Stockings, but that got shortened to Reds. Then during the cold war, they lengthened it to Redlegs to distance themselves from Communism. In the West Islam is to Christianity what Communism is to Capitalism. Don’t expect to hear a “fair and balanced” take on either of them. Overall, the writing was not the best, but the story was so interesting it didn’t matter.