Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China

THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO WILD SWANS, THE MULTI-MILLION COPY INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING SENSATION

Jung Chang’s Wild Swans was a book that defined a generation, an epic personal history of Jung, her mother and grandmother – ‘three daughters of China’. The book opens with her grandmother’s birth – and foot binding – in 1909, when China was under the last emperor, through Mao Zedong’s rule and the Cultural Revolution during which Jung’s parents were subject to unbelievable ordeals. It finishes in 1978 when the Mao era officially ended, and Deng Xiaoping started the post-Mao ‘Reforms’. Jung, at that propitious juncture, became one of the first Chinese to leave Communist China for the West.

Nearly half a century on, China has risen from a decrepit and isolated state to a world power, the challenger to the United States’ dominant position in the world. Through those decades, Jung’s life has been intimately entwined with her native land. Her experiences in those years were rich and complex – especially so because all her books were (and are) banned.

Fly, Wild Swans is the follow-up to Wild Swans and brings the story of Jung’s family – along with that of China – up to date. The book is in many ways Jung’s love letter to her mother. It is inevitably also about her grandmother and father both of whom died tragically in the Cultural Revolution, but they are often recalled in this book. In fact, the past is never far away in Jung’s subsequent life. It has shaped her, and moulded the present China, and what’s more, it promises to herald the future.

China is now at another watershed moment: Chairman Xi Jinping is seeking to turn the country back towards the old Maoist days and build a Communist state with capitalist features. This new Xi era is greatly affecting the lives of Jung and her mother. Through the arc of their respective lives, she gives an immersive, deeply moving and unforgettable account of what it is like to live in a communist dictatorship and the threats modern China poses to the international world order. It is family history at its best.