New Left Review I/194, July-August 1992

Lin Chun

The Elegy of Wild Swans

The significance and integrity of this first-hand account of the lives of three women in twentieth-century China—the author, her mother and grandmother—so vividly written and ambitious in scope, are beyond question. [*] Jung Chang, Wild Swans. Three Daughters of China, HarperCollins, London 1992, £17.95 hbk. The author, someone of my own age and background, was born in 1952 to a Communist family, and like myself became a Red Guard and was sent to the countryside for some years to work. I confess that I was on occasions moved to tears by the book—either out of feelings of empathy or as a result of unspeakably sad thoughts and emotions. And yet at times the author’s attitude jars, in a sense that strongly brought home to me the way in which each of us produces a determinate social meaning out of our own experience.

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