Looking Back - Wild Swans

Looking Back... In an effort to transfer my book journal entries over to this blog, I'm going to attempt to post (in chronological order) an entry every Friday. I may or may not add extra commentary to what I jotted down in these journals.

Wild Swans by Jung Chang
Nonfiction - Memoir
2003 Simon Schuster (first published in 1991)
Read in November 1998
Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author.

An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.

My Original Notes (1998):

Starts off slow, then the pace picks up, but almost drags toward the end. I learned a lot about Communism in China, but what a depressing book. Such brutality!

My Current Thoughts:

I think I might have read this with an online book group. I remember how it got bogged down toward the end and I almost didn't bother finishing. It's not a book I remember too well.