Wild Swans

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:11 -0500

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.

Chinese_history on George's Blog

Wild Swans