Wild Swans

I just finished reading Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang.

It is quite simply, the best book I have ever read on modern Chinese history.

When I sat down with Wild Swans, I had no expectations but to be informed and entertained by what I hoped would be a good book. I read to gain a personal understanding of the world in which we live through accounts and examples given by others of things of past events. Never have I read a book that drew me in so powerfully and personally as Chang's Wild Swans. Wild Swans is epic in its historical backdrop moving untirelessly through the last century of China, roughly between the years 1911 and 1976, but this is no textbook. It's the story of the author Jung Chang, her mother, and her grandmother. It is through their lives that history unfolds and is exposed. From the end of Imperial China, through Japanese occupation, the Nationalist movement, the Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communists, Communist takeover, Mao's Great Leap Forward starving tens of millions to death, the Cultural Revolution turning a national identity upon its head and breaking its collective spirit in the process, to Mao Zedong's death,I was constantly amazed at what I learned in this book about the capacity of the heart to perservere and triumph. I couldn't help but to feel ashamed at the provincial life we are handed in our land of freedom, and at once be thankful that we are so endowed. Jung Chang explores her family so deeply that her subjects, such as her stoic father, a true beliver in the Communist cause, and her grandmother, a veritable symbol through her bound feet of a time and place long gone, become indelibly etched upon the mind of the reader.

I would highly recommend this book to you. By the end of Wild Swans, you will feel you know China and Ms. Chang and her family intimately. If you have never been afraid to crack a book, let this fall into your hands, enter your heart, and enrich your life and in the end, thank Jung Chang for sharing her history (and the collective history of hundreds of millions just like her) with you.