Wild Swans, this month's featured book, is by no means the first book to follow the torturous path China has traveled through the twentieth century. But as Harold Goldblatt mentions in his commentary, it is one of the more successful in this genre. The beauty of this memoir, which reads more like a novel, lies in Jung Chang's stirring account of three generations of courageous, articulate Chinese women: her grandmother, born at the turn of the century into a stifling feudal society; her mother, a communist official and later an "enemy of the people"; and herself. Raised during the Cultural Revolution, Chang, a former Red Guard, was sent abroad to study in England in 1978, at the age of twenty-six. With the depressing images of famines, natural disasters, torture, and revolution as a backdrop, Chang paints a vivid picture of how state Confucianism reinforced oppression of women in feudal China before the communist revolution, and how the status of women gradually improved, though only marginally, after the revolution. Chang shows how each generation of women challenged the ancient traditions and customs that practically enslaved them, gradually mustering the courage to speak their minds and make decisions concerning the direction of their lives.
The excerpts from Wild Swans highlight instances that shaped the three woman's lives and characters, enabling them to resist oppression and humiliation, and, eventually, to attain some dignity and respect. In the commentaries that follow, literary scholar Howard Goldblatt discusses the cultural obstacles each generation of women faced and how far they, as well as the Chinese people, have come. He also compares Wild Swans to some of the other works on China before and after the revolution. Historian Harold Hinton looks at the political situation each generation was born into and how
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