Book Reviews: Book Review of Wild Swans, by Jung Chang -- Blue Rectangle

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Wild Swans

Jung Chang

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Wild Swans Jung Chang "I chose Wild Swans I guess because I know so little of the history of modern China. Most Americans know very little. And I really hate reading history textbooks, so I always find historical novels a little more exciting way of learning about a time period and a place. I teach English to college students, but they happen to be foreign college students, and I'm married to a foreigner, so that might be why I sometimes choose history novels about foreign countries. It traces three women through their really strange, hard lives, and I think I just imagine myself in that situation and go, "Oh, my God, I would have given up." I guess I liked it; it was a very moving story told in a really unsentimental way. It's just sort of the facts, and these people just deal with each insane situation as it comes and like never kill themselves or never give up the will to live. It's a really long book, so I don't think I would ever use it with my foreign students, but I might use a few pages, an excerpt of it. The strange thing is right now, I'm teaching students from mainland China who are much younger than the Cultural Revolution; and I don't think they know some of these stories. I would give this book probably a four out of five just because it's longer than it needed to be. The same enlightenment could have been accomplished through a slightly longer than 500-page book, but it's done in an incredibly in-depth way, and you really feel like you've lived through like 80 years."