Wild Swans

This weekend I read Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang. It's her story, as well as that of her mother and grandmother. It's also the story of China in the 1900s.

Opening Lines:

"At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general, the police chief of a tenuous national government of China. The year was 1924 and China was in chaos."

About foot binding:

"My grandmother was a beauty.... But her greatest assets were her bound feet"

"Sometimes a mother would take pity on her daughter and remove the binding cloth; but when the child grew up and had to endure the contempt of her husband's family and the disapproval of society, she would blame her mother for having been too weak."

"In fact, my grandmother's feet were bound just at the moment when foot-binding was disappearing for good. By the time her sister was born in 1917, the practice had virtually been abandoned, so she escaped the torment."

About families:

"In China, to have several generations of a family living under one roof was considered a great honor. Streets even had names like "Five Generations Under One Roof" to commemorate such families. Breaking up the extended family was viewed as a tragedy to be avoided at all costs"

"In Chinese tradition the person with the most power over a married woman was always her mother-in-law, to whom she had to be completely obedient and who would tyrannize her. When she in turn became a mother-in-law, she would bully her own daughter-in-law in the same way. Liberating daughters-in-law was an important Communist policy, and rumors abounded that Communist daughters-in-law were arrogant dragons, ready to boss their mothers-in-law around."

About The Great Leap Forward & Famine (1958 - 1962):

"Mao gave full vent to his half-baked dream of turning China into a first-class modern power. He called steel the "marshal" of industry, and ordered steel output to be doubled in one year - from 5.35 million tons in 1957 to 10.7 million in 1958. But instead of trying to expand the proper steel industry with skilled workers, he decided to get the whole population to take part. There was a steel quota for every unit, and for months people stopped their normal work in order to meet it. ... It was officially estimated that nearly 100 million peasants were pulled out of agricultural work and into steel production. They had been the labor force producing much of the country's food."

"This absurd situation reflected not only Mao's ignorance of how an economy worked, but also an almost metaphysical disregard for reality."

"In Chengdu, the monthly food ration for each adult was reduced to 19 pounds of rice, 3.5 ounces of cooking oil, and 3.5 ounces of meat, when there was any. Scarcely anything else was available, not even cabbage."

"Starvation was much worse in the countryside because there were no guaranteed rations. Government policy was to provide food for the cities first, and commune officials were having to seize grain from the peasants by force. In many areas, peasants who tried to hide food were arrested, or beaten and tortured.... As a result, the peasants who had actually grown the food died in the millions all over China."

About what the children were told:

"As a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery....When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say: "Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!" In school, when they were trying to make us work harder, the teachers often said: "You are lucky to have a school to go to and books to read. In the capitalist countries children have to work to support their hungry families." Often when adults wanted us to accept something they would say that people in the West wanted it, but could not get it, and therefore we should appreciate our good fortune."

(Which exactly mirrors what we were told about children in China.)

About Mao:

"For two thousand years China had an emperor figure who was the state power and spiritual authority rolled into one.... Mao made himself more godlike by shrouding himself in mystery."

"All the credit was given to Mao. Although the very top leaders knew what Mao's real contribution was, the people were kept completely in the dark."