Austin Chapter
Reader's Guide
September 2007
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Jung Chang
Jung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century. Chang's grandmother was a warlord's concubine. Her gently raised mother struggled with hardships in the early days of Mao's revolution and rose, like her husband, to a prominent position in the Communist Party before being denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself marched, worked, and breathed for Mao until doubt crept in over the excesses of his policies and purges...
- What new information did you learn about China from this memoir?
- What were the particular strengths of the three women in this story: Chang's grandmother, Chang's Mother and Jung Chang herself?
- What is the role of comrade Wang, Chang's father, in this memior?
- What were the main components of the Cultural Revolution?
- How did this memior affect your own thinking about your own future?
- What is happening in China today?
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