Country 38 China. Blurb from goodreads.com, please scroll down for my review.
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 Review
Quote “I grew up taking hierarchy and privilege for granted”
Murder, torture, famine, violence, imprisionment, disappearances…. is this communism? Reading this book, which is a memoir rather than a novel, certainly makes you wonder what communism is.
Let me define communism according to britannica.com “Communism, political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society. Communism is thus a form of socialism-a higher and more advanced form, according to its advocates.”
Definition of communism according to the RAE: Movement and political system, developed since the nineteenth century, based on the class struggle and the suppression of private property of the means of production. Or Oxford: a political movement that believes in an economic system in which the state controls the means of producing everything for the people. It aims to create a society in which everyone is treated equally.
There is nothing about torture, famine, violence, imprisionent or disappearances in this definition.
OK, so I know I am reviewing the book, not communism, but communism is a huge part of this book. Actually, most of the book is about politics of the 20th century. I don’t doubt many of these things happened, but there are some quotes that seem difficult to remember after so many years but I am sure many things did actually happen, like the famine, just look it up on wikipedia for more information.
There is so much going on over the numerous years the book covers and it is written in fact style, lots and lots of paragraphs which are often individual facts. The writing is not good, lots of rambing, but it was written in english and as it is her second language so this can be understood, but a good editor should be able to correct this.
There are sooo many facts from the author’s point of view, of course, that it got a little tedious. This is of course a personal view, that of the author Jung Chang, many of the facts might be a little biased, and well, this is a very anti Mao book, hardly surprising it is banned in China because it talks about brutal political upheavals in China and purges of the Cultural Revolution.
After all the negative stuff that the author portrays, how can China, in so few years, reach the super nation it is now? (2021),
The beginning of the book, the parts with her grandmother and her mother seemed much more real than the part with the author herself as the main character.
So many characters, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, other family members, people from the party that occasionally pop up 20 years later. …….. This book could be so much more interesting.
Favourite part was when Jung Chang went to visit Peking as a teenager and I enjoyed the descriptions of the journey and the hardship during the journey.
I got to about ⅔ of the way in and decided not to waste any more of my time with the tedious descriptions.
Originally published at http://readinginecuador.wordpress.com on August 23, 2021.
