Book 7 (April, China)Wild Swans, by Jung Chang (read by Pik-sen Lim)
Reason for Reading: China found its way onto my theme list thanks in large part to The Three-Body Problem, which features some early scenes from the Cultural Revolution, a period of which I know very little. Wild Swans was pretty much a shoe in.
Wild Swans is - as you are probably aware even if you haven't actually read it - the semi-autobiography of author Jung Chang, her mother and her grandmother. It begins with her grandmother Yu Fang's excruciating foot binding, and her marriage to a Warlord General in pursuance of her father's career. As the Second Sino-Japanese and Second World Wars give way to continuing civil war between the Communists and the Kuomintang, Jung Chang's mother Bao Qin (alternatively De-hong) becomes a Communist spy, and later marries Communist official Wang Yu (or Shou-yu) and becomes an official herself, working in education. The family then live through the Cultural Revolution, where Jung's parents find themselves at odds with the collapse of the old party system into the cult of Mao, and Jung herself grows up a natural academic in a country that despises education.
Reading Wild Swans is an eye-opener. We tend to assume we have a good working knowledge of 20th century history, but the fact is that there is a huge amount of the world that we learn fuck all about in school. The Japanese occupation of northern China and the Cultural Revolution are things that I know happened, but most of the details were new to me. Wild Swans is a fascinating and disturbing look into a historical period that has a worrying number of parallels with a modern world where political and economic realities take second place to cults of personality, and political opponents are dogged and harassed by allies in the press or vilified for daring to question a great leader.
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