Book: FLY, WILD SWANS: MY MOTHER, MYSELF AND CHINA
Author: Jung Chang
Published by: William Collins
Price: Rs 599
Nearly three and a half decades after her book, Wild Swan, became a global success, the British-Chinese author, Jung Chang, has come out with a sequel to continue the story of her family. The earlier book dealt with her grandmother, mother and herself, focusing on the tempestuous changes in China during the years, 1909-78. The family saga of suffering and endurance, especially during the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, was an eye-opener for most Westerners and appealed to the uninitiated readers of China as well. The book was banned in China but sold 15 million copies worldwide and was translated into 40 languages.
Here, she has picked up the thread to continue the story about her family and China over the last three decades. The perspective is from London where she has been staying since 1978. She was among the first batch of Chinese students to travel and study abroad after Deng Xiaoping replaced Mao and embarked on his reforms that opened China to the outside world. Her narration of China in the sequel is mostly from the memories of her first 26 years in China as well as from the impressions she gathered during short visits to the country in the past years to research for her books and meet her family. “The book is about my mother and myself — and inevitably about my grandmother and my father,” she says. They were all “extraordinary people” who swam against the tide and ran into bigger waves, she writes. China is now at another watershed moment as Xi Jinping, who worships Mao, wants to create a Maoist State with capitalist features, Jung Chang says. The book may find favour among loyalists and those who will go by her reputation from her earlier work. For others, it may fall way short of expectations.
Jung Chang faces two major challenges in this book. First, meeting the high expectations of readers from the impressive benchmark that Wild Swan had set. It’s difficult to recreate the impact she had with the narration of the atrocities millions of Chinese suffered at the hands of Mao’s Red Guards. Her grandmother and father died during the Cultural Revolution. She could not join the Red Guards as she had too much “warm feelingsism”. But she noted what she saw and heard was happening to people around her and narrated them in her new book too. Her second challenge comes from the fact that her books are under close scrutiny. The one on Mao, written jointly with husband, Jon Halliday, came under severe criticism for lack of historical rigour.
The sequel comes amidst a significant rise in Western scholarship on China: several writers have given positive assessments of the country and identified it as a partner for solving some of the pressing challenges in the world. When more people in the world are concerned about how America unravels under Donald Trump, the danger posed by Xi Jinping in China may be of lesser importance.