Wild Swans
First published in 1991 and banned in mainland China, Jung Chang's Wild Swans tells twentieth-century Chinese history through the lives of her grandmother, her mother, and herself. The grandmother is given as a concubine to a warlord. The mother becomes a committed Communist Party official, then a target of the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself comes of age in Mao's China, sent to the countryside, eventually making her way to England as one of the first Chinese students permitted to study abroad. The personal detail is extraordinary, and the political sweep matches it. Famine, denunciation campaigns, Red Guards, rehabilitation, and quiet domestic survival all sit on the same pages. The book has sold over thirteen million copies worldwide and remains the most widely read English-language account of life under Mao. A foundational work of modern Chinese memoir.
What you might want to know about Wild Swans
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Three generations of Chinese women, from warlord concubinage to Communist rule to escape, in Jung Chang's family memoir.
Wild Swans was written by Jung Chang, published in 1989 by HarperCollins Publishers Limited.
Wild Swans is 704 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Wild Swans takes most readers 11 to 15 hours to finish.
Wild Swans is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
