Wild Swans
Three Daughters of China
by Jung Chang · first published 1989
9mentions
4recommended by
8HN commenters
2009–2026first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
"Jung Chang vividly evokes China's sights, sounds, and smells to create what must be one of the grimmest, yet most perceptive accounts of growing up middle-class in the maelstrom that has swept China since the 1920s." - Back cover.
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> The Cultural Revolution: A people's history Never read it, have you read "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" or "Mao?" by Jung Chang? Great books on the subject as well, I'll check yours out. Not sure what this has to do with my post though. Maybe the term 'anti-intellectual' was…
on “What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft” ↗…nightmares. For those interested, I recommend the bestselling book _Mao: The Unknown Story_ by Jung Chang and historian Jon Halliday, a result of a decade of intense research. Chang's earlier bestseller _Wild Swans_ is also a great read. Based on many discussions with my wife and her friends (all about Chang's age and social class), I can vouch for its general validity. My apologies (except to kragen) for the long…
on “I was driven mad by the Chinese education system” ↗The book "Wild Swans" (written a good while ago) gives a very good insight into what it was like for a young person to grow up in this madhouse.
on “Looking back on the Great Leap Forward” ↗…temples. In a few years, countless ancient buildings, artifacts, antiques, books, and paintings were destroyed by Red Guards. Doesn't sound so great. A book I can recommend is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Swans > it might take materialist brainwashing ('re-education') to reverse religious brainwashing. They're not even getting "materialist" brainwashing, whatever that would even be, they're getting totalitarian…
on “China is detaining a million Uighur muslims in a secret camp” ↗Thank you for sharing these memories. I'd be very interested to hear any thoughts you might have about Jung Chang's book "Wild Swans". I read this book a year or two ago and learned a lot from it, but I also learned that many people who grew up in China take issue with the author's account. I'd be grateful for any remarks you may…
on “Growing up in "404 Not Found": China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert” ↗…population dynamics of China took decades to get into a good shape, you simply can't hide the size of the cohort going to school and university when the due dates roll around. Some estimates (Jung Chang, "wild swans") were over the top. The government definitely minimised them. I will be very interested in the US, and Russian effective back-calculations because I think surplus deaths will turn out to be far larger…
on “Ask HN: Will there be another lockdown for Covid soon?” ↗Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang. It's an autobiographical history which recounts the lives of the author, her mother, and her grandmother throughout an extremely transformational century in Chinese…
on “Ask HN: What are you reading?” ↗Many years ago I read Animal Farm (1945) and Wild Swans (1991) almost back to back. It was startling how much of China's post-WW2 history was already written before it happened.
on “A Spark Extinguished” ↗Wild Swans has received criticism for ignoring statistics and human demographic evidence on the scale of the famine, and therefore lacks an element of verifiability and number inflation. However the author wrote…
on “Growing up in "404 Not Found": China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert” ↗