If your idea of “party” conjures joy, merriment and camaraderie, be prepared to change that when you read Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. The 20th century saga of the 900 million Chinese in Sichuan, Peking and Chengdu that was portrayed through the biographies of three generations of the Chang women in the book was non-stop suffering. Their travails during the time of the Kuomintang party, the Communist Party of China, the Great Leap Forward, the Red Guards and the Rebels as well as the Cultural Revolution makes the word “party” a pooped out expression of being outcast, detained, forced to submission, made to do hard labor, become hungry due to famine, become ostracized, have your whole family and friends ruined for life, become a peasant, become exiled in the name of being a server of the people, and traitor to one’s allegiances including one’s family. 
Jung Chang’s first person account of the history of her concubine grandmother, her communist party revolutionary mother and her Rebel Party self set in the cultural and geographic vastness of China is marked by suffering of epic proportions. Under the Japanese conquerors of Manchukuo, resistance leader Chang Kai Sek, Communist Party leader Mao Zedong, Deng Shao Ping and Zhou En Lai and finally the Gang of Four led by Mdm. Mao, these women’s stories will make you squirm in your seat as you turn page after page of oppression, personal degredation, rehabilitation, self recrimination and criticism, denial of pleasures and freedoms, sexual repression, abuse of filial piety that ends in extreme subjugation of one’s creativity and spirit. I have a feeling most Chinese people of this generation are still reeling from these collective experiences and memories that marked their history under Chairman Mao from 1949-1978. Our heroine weathers all of these to flee unscathed to England and be the first Chinese citizen to finish a PhD in a foreign land since 1948. Her account of her parent’s loyalty to the Communist Party of the early 1940’s as they were high ranking officials in the Departments of Public Affairs leaves no relative of theirs enjoying any “bourgeoise”privileges or even just personal comfort. Their own allegiance to the Maoist/communist philosophy led them to despair and brokeness, but they remained loyal subjects to a demigod that took over all their beliefs and traditions. The very principles that they committed to in the hope of alleviating poverty and class iniquity betrayed them and caused many deaths in the proportions of genocide. The irony of these untold stories and hushed secrets is that they became the source of strength and cohesiveness that propelled China into economic power and visible world dominance today.
