Her family suffered atrociously, her father and grandmother both dying painful deaths and both her mother and father were imprisoned and tortured. You may also wish to purchase from either Amazon or Blackwell’s.It’s taken me a couple of months to read Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (first published in 1991), Jung Chang’s book about her grandmother, her mother and herself, telling of their lives in China up to and during the years of the violent Cultural Revolution. Try checking the availability of this book at your school or local library or explore second hand bookshops and websites. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang The book is well worth a read if you have the time! It was also a great book for easing me into more academic literature on global history (I went on to read John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires) which I was able to discuss in my personal statement. Beyond opening up an understanding of the political regimes and social constraints operating in China, this memoir is also great for anyone interested in commentaries on human nature, as well as the female experience. Instead, it reads like fiction, since the experiences of the three women are both exhilarating and devastating. Whilst being highly historically credible, this memoir is by no means academically challenging. Through these three generations of female experience, Jung Chang gives a wonderfully vivid and real account of what life in China was like in the 20th century. In this memoir, Jung Chang walks us through the lives of three Chinese women – her grandmother, her mother, and herself – growing up in pre-communist, revolutionary and communist China. Chinese culture and history was something of a mystery to me, even by the time I was in Year 11, so when I saw a book called Wild Swans on my dad’s bookshelf I was pretty intrigued.
Whether it was the Second World War, Stalin’s regime, or the Norman conquest in the 11th century, I felt like the curriculum left out a huge chunk of the world.
History lessons at school were always very geared towards the British and European experience.
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