When history abroad hits close to home

A review of "Wild Swans" by Jung Chang, plus implications for Trumpian politics

I have been on a mission to uncover the stories and personal histories of my grandparents and great-grandparents. From a young age, I have known bits and pieces: in the early 1900s, my grandfather’s father smuggled away on a ship to find new opportunity in America; my grandmother fled China to Hong Kong as a young teen, alone, after her own father was castigated as a landowner in Communist China. I heard tidbits about running from the Japanese, and of fighting for a few spilled grains of rice on the ground. But these facts alone are not a story.

I began reading Wild Swans by Jung Chang after realizing that I cannot truly understand the lives of my grandparents and great grandparents without understanding the tumultuous backdrop in which they grew up, without knowing the history of the rise of Communist China. Wild Swans tells the story of three generations of women, including Chang herself, living through this very history.

The Forbidden City, adorned with Chairman Mao’s portrait. Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

I had known in rough terms about the warlord period, the last emperor of China, the spheres of influence carved up by foreigners, the Japanese invasion, and the civil war between the Guomindang and the Communist Party — “known” in the sense that I am aware that they happened. But reading Wild Swans impressed upon me for the first time what these events really entailed and how rapidly these changes all came about - well within the span of a single lifetime. Much of this history is so outlandishly gory, so full of unimaginable suffering, that I could scarcely believe that it was not actually fantastical.

My grandfather had spoken of a time in his childhood when hunger was rampant. If a even few grains of rice spilled on the ground, he said, people would fight for them. I think of his words from time to time while washing rice for cooking; a few grains inevitably spill out each time. I could not imagine them being worth fighting for. But Wild Swans told of hunger beyond anything I have ever imagined. A man, sobbing on the ground begging to be punished for an unforgiveable crime — in an uncontrollable fit of hunger, he had killed and eaten his own child. A black market sprung up for butchered children, passed off as meat from other animals. Even Communist officials, relatively well-to-do, were rationed only five eggs a month¹. People grew algae in spittoons of urine in order to supplement their diets. Tens of millions were starved to death by Mao and his ill-conceived Great Leap Forward. The estimated death toll falls approximately between wiping out the entire populations of modern-day Canada and modern-day Spain.

Here are a few other things that astounded me as I read this book:

1. Mao’s cult of personality was so strong, even as Chang herself grew disenchanted with the Communist regime, for many years, it simply did not occur to her to question Mao. It is remarkable to me that Mao’s deification was so encompassing that he could retain favor despite abominable gaffes — and further remarkable that he somehow compelled his political enemies to help deify him. How did he do this?
   

2. China’s global leadership in industrial productivity today stands in stark contrast to its primitive false starts under Mao. One of the reasons people starved during the Great Leap Forward was that the entire populace was enlisted to tend steel furnaces, nominally to advance China’s industrialization. This included everyone, most egregiously China’s food-producing workforce, but also doctors, teachers, and 6-year-old children — aka, people who did not know how to make steel. Mao’s government directed the people to feed the furnaces finished metal tools, like farming implements and woks, melting them down into useless pig iron. Education was also hopelessly interrupted during the two decades that Mao’s campaigns (Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution) took hold. Yet, within two decades following Mao’s death in 1976, China emerged as the world’s largest steel producer. How did this happen?

3. I have long wondered why Chinese traditions do not appear to be very strong, and I finally have my answer: the Communists eliminated much of it. When I got married, I remember being at a loss for how to make my heritage shine through in my ceremony. I had a hard time finding Chinese clothing of a quality befitting a wedding (most of what we could find was costume attire), and the Chinese tea ceremony is meant to be a small, intimate affair without a lot of celebratory fanfare. Imagine my surprise upon learning that 100 years ago, Chinese weddings were as (or more!) loud, large, and flamboyant as I perceive Indian weddings to be today. On her wedding day, Chang’s grandmother, lavishly adorned, was carried in a brightly-embroidered sedan chair in her own personal parade, a giant procession of banners, plaques, lanterns, carts of wedding gifts, and an orchestra playing loud, joyful music. The whole town gathered to watch. A generation later, Chang’s mother was excused briefly from a work meeting to be married whilst still wearing her baggy uniform; there was only a small gathering with no ceremony, and she and her husband returned to work the same day. How can culture change so quickly?
   

I’ll leave you with this closing thought: understanding the history of how Mao gained and wielded power feels particularly important in the era of Trumpian politics. Mao Zedong, like Donald Trump, nursed an ego that made it impossible for him to admit when he was wrong, and he cultivated a cult of personality that enabled him to maintain popularity in spite of clear and severe wrongdoing.

But this should leave us somewhat optimistic, for two reasons. Firstly, I don’t believe that Trump could ever be as bad as Mao; I don’t think that he could or would enact policy that would starve to death a tenth of the US population, or create a political environment that would leave the entire country without any form of education for six straight years. Secondly, even as bad as Mao was, the country recovered within the next couple of decades and ultimately emerged as a global superpower. We have strong institutions in the US, and we should trust them — and we should educate ourselves about history to prevent the worst of it from recurring.

1. If you were very senior, like the author’s father, you would get a luxurious double-ration: 10 eggs per month.