Book 16 - Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, or: Communism is not for lovers

Dunedin trip was pretty awesome - barely froze to death at all due to deliciously heated motel room - but the book I took down with me was decidedly not. I was hoping to finish it last week and write it up, but I'm halfway through and it is still unbelievably dull. So instead, here's a book I read a few months ago, only twenty years after everyone else read it. (In my defence, I was only 5 when it was published).



Title: Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991)

Author: Jung Chang

Why this book?
After Bomb, Book and Compass I was dying to learn more about China's history. I remember this book being pretty popular at school when I was 13 or 14, but Chinese Cinderella, which was published about then, put me off reading anything Chinese and autobiographical for a really long time (mostly because it was just so depressing.)

What's it all about anyway? Wild Swans tells the stories of three Chinese women whose lives span most of the Twentieth Century as huge social, political and economic changes come to China; three women the author knows intimately, as they are her maternal grandmother, her mother, and herself.

Chang's grandmother, Yu-fang, is born to a poor family, but her father schemes to have a high-ranking warlord take her on as his concubine in order to gain status. After a wedding ceremony, Yu-fang goes to live in a large household where all her material needs are left; however, she seldom sees her husband, as he has many other concubines as well as a wife. She's pretty miserable, as she distrusts the servants and convention dictates she does not return to her own family. Eventually she has a daughter and goes to live with in her husband's own household; however, after he dies, she realises her daughter is likely to be taken from her and raised by his wife as their own child. Yu-fang escapes back to her mother's house.

Yu-fan doesn't exactly have a lot of status as an ex-concubine living under her mother's roof, but nevertheless she falls in love with a kindly older man, Dr Xia, and he with her. They marry, but his family disapproves greatly of the match and his (adult) children go out of the way to destroy the relationship, even going so far as to hurt Yu-fan's daughter. Eventually, Yu-fan, her daughter and Dr Xia move away from his family home to an economically disadvantaged district; but despite her new poverty Yu-fan is very happy, and begins to learn the customs of Dr Xia's people (unlike her, he's Manchurian).

The story of Yu-fan's daughter is very different. De-hong (also known as Bao Qin) grows up seeing the Japanese and Chinese armies constantly battling for supremacy and is used to stories of their brutality and oppression; so she is surprised when she first meets members of the Communist army, impressed with their gentle manners and egalitarian ideals. She begins working for the Communist Party, and slowly works up the ranks, yet in the eyes of her superiors she is never fully committed to the Party - for one thing, she has friends among the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Party) that she refuses to see as enemies, and for another the fact that her own father was a high-ranking military officer makes her a possible enemy (despite the fact she never met her own father).

Still, when De-hong falls for a man who is a well-respected officer in the Communist Party, Shou-yu (also known as Wang Yu) she tries to become more dedicated to the Party, if only for his sake. The two marry, but Shou-yu's own conviction that he needs to put the needs of the Party before his own means that he often neglects his wife. De-hong, like her mother before her, is often lonely, and very unhappy, particularly since Party rules dictate that couples are seldom allowed to sleep together. These stiff rules do start to relax eventually - however, at the same time the ideal country that both Shou-yu and De-hong believe they are helping to build also starts to crumble away.

The couple have five children, including Jung Chang, the book's author. Chang's childhood is dominated by the growing cult of Mao; in contrast to Communists like Chang's parents, all Mao cared about was his own personal glory. After rising to power he began to stamp out past dissenters, present dissenters, possible future dissenters... And, of course, began brainwashing the children of China into believing the only way forward was his way. Chang herself willingly follows the other children, but thanks to her parents' influence finds herself starting to doubt Mao as she grew older. Still, she can't voice these doubts out loud, and like everyone else she is subject to the whims of the Communist Party's Leader - such as going to the country to work among peasants, despite constant illness and her lack of skills.

Mao's death leads to changes in China, although these changes are slow coming. Chang gets to go to university - something she's wanted to do for a very long time - and is able to study English, even meet foreigners. Finally, she is offered a scholarship to England, and the chance to leave China for good.

The Good and the Bad
The biggest problem I have with this book is the same problem I have with any autobiography, which is that it is impossible for the writer to describe her characters - her friends, family and enemies - without any bias, or to describe how an event transpired with a wholly impartial view. Chang does do a wonderful job with her grandmother and mother - although she clearly admires and loves them, she doesn't treat them softly, nor does she go the other way and treat them too harshly. When it comes to describing her own life, however, it really felt to me like she was talking herself up a little. Maybe I was just too cynical towards what I was reading, but whatever it was I didn't enjoy her story as much as I enjoyed the stories of her mother and grandmother.

Besides that, this was a wonderful book. It wasn't nearly as depressing as I thought it was going to be, and even when Chang is describing the most horrific of events she does so in such an even tone that it's surprisingly readable - she doesn't lay on the emotion, or revel in shocking her audience, she's simply telling what happened. That's really what makes Chang's story so believable, I think.

So should I read it or what?
This isn't a light read, but definitely worth putting in a few days of reading (even if I did start to skim a little towards the end...)

Unrelated link of the day: Superflat First Love, an animated music video created by Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton. Cute and cracktastic, this link was passed on to me from a friend who as big a dork about anime as I am.

Book 8 - Bomb, Book and Compass, or: Scientists get all the chicks

Completely unrelated link of the day: Orisinal: Morning Sunshine is where I spend my tea breaks at work. It has a few dozen beautifully designed games, most of which are horribly addictive. My all-time favourite has to be Winterbells, where you, as an adorably cute bunny rabbit, have to jump and hit as many falling bells as possible. But I also love Floats, and Bugs, and Cats, and OK I just love everything.

The People have spoken: Colonel Mustard is the favourite murder suspect of The People, no doubt because of his colonial attitudes and suspicious moustache, and the fact that mustard is probably the worst condiment ever invented (besides barbeque sauce, ugh.) Please answer this week's poll, which asks a question for the ages: which branch of science is the sexiest?

Obviously the most suspicious thing about him
is that he has a yellow cone instead of a body.

And now, to business: I seldom read nonfiction, which probably makes me a terrible person, but in my defence my history textbooks in high school were about as dry and boring as the surface of the moon, and they more or less scarred me for life. However, every now and then my interest in something will be piqued by a movie I watch, or a fictional story I read, and then I'm forced to turn to my old foe, Nonfiction, for answers (I like to imagine Nonfiction as an olde-time villain, twirling his moustache, hiding behind his cape, and tying young, virginal women to railway tracks).

Title: Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China (2008)
US Title: The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (2008)

Author: Simon Winchester

Why this book? What with the Olympics being held there last year and everything, it suddenly became trendy to actually have some sort of interest in China. Although, in my case, it was actually a review of this book in my local paper that made me interested to find out more about the life and times of Joseph Needham. I bought it and started reading it last year, but I never really had a chance to get stuck into it until this year.

What's it all about, anyway?
Joseph Needham (full name: Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, awesome) was a radical scientist working at Cambridge in the 1920's. Radical in the sense of his political and social views, which were definitely a little left of the spectrum, and by a little I mean a lot, although his ideals and sentiments were not entirely unusual for an academic of his day. He studied embryology and morphogenesis, and was married to a fellow biochemist Dorothy Moyle, who was lucky enough to also be offered research opportunities at Cambridge at a time when few women were.

Joseph and Dorothy had an open relationship, and in the 1930's Needham began an affair with a visiting Chinese scientist, Lu Gwei-djen, who began to teach to write and speak Classical Chinese, and who gave him the name Li Yuese. Thanks to Lu, Needham's interest in, and passion about, China began to grow, and when, in 1944, the Royal Society offered him a chance to actually travel to China, he took it.

Officially, Needham's role was a kind of goodwill ambassador to Chinese Universities - parts of China were being occupied by Japan at this time, and as a way of demoralising the Chinese people the Japanese were closing and ransacking her universities - in at least one case, university buildings were turned into brothels. Needham traveled the country - in itself a difficult feat, what with the war going on and all - visiting Chinese academics, showing that the international community had not forgotten about them (yet). He realised that many of the scientific discoveries that the West had claimed as its own had in fact first been discovered in China - a realisation that eventually lead to him writing his opus, Science and Civilisation in China.

The Good and the Bad:
OK, I realise this doesn't sound like the most scintillating read, but Winchester has an light, racy style of writing, always finding little bits of information, picking up on the oddities of Needham's life in Cambridge and China, and going off into tangents about the other famous figures that Needham meets, most of whom are just as eccentric as he was - people like Rewi Alley and Wang Ling - scientists, archaeologists, politicians. A lot of the information comes directly from Needham's diary, too, so it doesn't feel like Winchester is interpreting Needham's life, just describing it.

Winchester clearly admires Needham, but it's probably also fair to say he neither condones nor condemns his views and behaviour. That's one of the best things about this book, because while Needham's views disn't bother me especially (although his support of Communism did bother a lot of people) his behaviour frequently did. Needham was an unabashed womaniser, and although he and his wife did supposedly have an open relationship there is no mention of Dorothy having any extra-marital affairs. In fact, both Moyle and Lu completely fascinated me, yet the information about them compared to many of the other figures in Bomb, Book and Compass seemed rather sparse. It's a great pity - these were two women that not only influenced Needham's life and passions but who both defied the odds themselves, if in a much quieter way. I would have liked to get to know them a little better.


Womanising aside, by the time I had finished this book I was half in love with China myself, and very much ashamed that I know so little about a country that is so vast and which holds so much history and so much culture (and so much science, of course.) I guess this book made me realise that, while China can be a controversial subject, there's so much more to her than political manoevering - that beyond the politics, there's a China who's really worth discovering.

Lastly, I have to say that I have no idea why the Powers The Be decided that the good people of America needed a different title to the good people of everywhere else, especially since, in my opinion, Bomb, Book and Compass has a much nice ring to it than The Man Who Loved China, which sounds a little like a James Bond ripoff. Perhaps they were worried that the word 'bomb' had connotations of terrorism? Or maybe they worried that if people bought something with the word 'book' in the title they might realise they'd actually been tricked into reading one? Or perhaps it was a push from the Anti-Compass Lobby? We may never know.

So should I read it or what? This is definitely one of the best biographies I've ever read; possibly the best. Bomb, Book and Compass is not the book to read if you're looking for light entertainment - but if you're looking for entertainment with substance you should give it a chance.