Catherine Raynes: Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China and Circle of Days

Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China by Jung Chang  

Jung Chang’s Wild Swans was a book that defined a generation – the story of ‘three daughters of China’: Jung, her mother and her grandmother and their lives during a century of revolution. Fly, Wild Swans is, quite simply, what happened next. 

Jung Chang arrived in the UK in 1978 aged 26, part of a Chinese scholarship programme for study abroad. Finding herself in the London of punk, political protests and Ziggy Stardust, she felt as if she’d landed on the moon. She and her fellow students had all grown up in complete isolation from the west, living in fear as to what might happen if they broke any of the strict rules imposed upon them by their government. It was an invaluable opportunity but came at a cost of long-term separation from her mother and family in China. As Jung began to adjust to life in the West, she warmed to the fashion scene, rebelled and thrived. Her studies took off and she became the first person from the People’s Republic of China to be awarded a doctorate from a British university. Fly, Wild Swans is, in many ways, Jung’s love letter to her mother set against China’s development from the relative freedoms of the late-1970s and untrammelled capitalism of the 1990s to the current authoritarian repressive rule of Xi-Jinping. With vivid flashbacks to her family’s experience in communist China, the book offers an extraordinary account of Jung’s research into the genocidal regime of Mao Tse-Tung, the many fictions she uncovered and the political consequences of publishing her subsequent biography.  

As Jung becomes a successful academic and writer in the West, Fly, Wild Swans demonstrates how much she relies on her mother still living in China and the painful years in which politics has prevented them meeting.  Through the arc of their respective lives, she gives an immersive, deeply moving and unforgettable account of what it is like to live in a communist dictatorship and the threats modern China poses to the international world order. It is family history at its best. 

 

Circle of Days by Ken Follett  

A FLINT MINER WITH A GIFT 

Seft, a talented flint miner, walks the Great Plain in the high summer heat, to witness the rituals that signal the start of a new year. He is there to trade his stone at the Midsummer Rite, and to find Neen, the girl he loves. Her family lives in prosperity and offers Seft an escape from his brutish father and brothers, within their herder community. 

A PRIESTESS WHO BELIEVES THE IMPOSSIBLE 

Joia, Neen's sister, is a priestess with a vision and an unmatched ability to lead. As a child, she watches the Midsummer ceremony, enthralled, and dreams of a miraculous new monument, raised from the biggest stones in the world. But trouble is brewing among the hills and woodlands of the Great Plain. 

A MONUMENT THAT WILL DEFINE A CIVILISATION 

Joia's vision of a great stone circle, assembled by the divided tribes of the Plain, will inspire Seft and become their life's work. But as drought ravages the earth, mistrust grows between the herders, farmers and woodlanders - and an act of savage violence leads to open warfare . . . 

Truly ambitious in scope, Circle of Days invites you to join master storyteller Ken Follett in exploring one of the greatest mysteries of our age: Stonehenge. 

 

LISTEN ABOVE 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack team podcast
from news Talks at be.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Catherine Rains, our book reviewer, chooses two fantastic new reads
for us every week. She's here with their picks for
the weekend. Get a Catherine Morning Jack. Let us begin
with Fly Wild Swans by Jung Chang So.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Wild Swans, which was one of her first books, was
published back in nineteen ninety one, and it had a
real global impact and sold over thirty five million copies.
And it so told the story of three generations of
women in the twentieth century of twentieth century China. It
was her grandmother, her mother, and herself and then since on.
Since then she's gone on to write some more books,
particularly a Biographer of Mile the Untold Story. But in

(00:50):
Fly Wild Swan, she actually returns to her grandmother's birth
in nineteen hundred and the binding of her feet and
her marriage at seventeen to a warlord whose household she
escaped with her daughter and her arms, and that child
grew up to join the communist struggle against the ruling
Kom Tongue Party and married a fellow revolutionary who became

(01:11):
a senior official in the Communist victory at the end
of the Civil War. But then Chang's parents both lost
their faith in communism during the starvation in the early
nineteen sixties as a result of Males's earlier policies, and
they began this retreat from political life, and it didn't
really save them from persecution during the Cultural Revolution. And
it's just this, you know, she covers that ground, and

(01:33):
Chang's kind of fourteen at that time, and then weirdly,
when the book ended in nineteen ninety one, China's gone
from poverty to prosperity in the world's second largest economy,
and Chang herself sort of talks about that and Wild
Swan's being banned in China, and she still went there
and conducted research for a long time, actually for several

(01:55):
years because that's where she was started to talk about
her mild biography as well in the publication of that
in two thousand and five, and then eventually she's sort
of placed under the surveillance and these has become more difficult,
and you know, she's usually accompanied by minders, and in
this book she really talks about China is that global powerhouse,
and the impact of their lives on her and her mother,

(02:17):
and Wild Swans is really about that experience, and you know,
it's a really intriguing memoir, and you know, she has
this ability to bring together the Chinese history and politics
and really bring that to life in a very personal way.
And it's a really interesting story and a really interesting
you know what happened after the end of Wild Swans?

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Okay, So fly Wild Swans by Yung Chang is that book.
Next up, Circle of Days by Ken Folletts.

Speaker 3 (02:42):
So one of my favorite books is actually a much
older book of Ken Follet's called The Pillars of the Earth,
which is he just writes historical fiction so well, and
he's such a great story teller, and he has this
ability to make something very old and ancient come to
life and these very relatable characters. So in this he
imagines how Stonehenge might have come to be, and it's

(03:02):
told through the intertwining stories of herders and farmers and woodlanders,
and it paints this really interesting picture of prehistoric life
and the effort that it would have taken to unite
these divided tribes and the pewture something actually to build
something that was greater than themselves, and so you introduce
to these characters from each tribe and you follow them
throughout the story, and seef It and joe are central

(03:26):
to the story. And see if it's a flint miner
and he lives in this brutal home, but he's blessed
with this really great talent for what he does and
a very quiet resolve and personality. And then he meets
this woman Nine who's a herder, and she opens his
eyes to this really different kind of life, you know,
one built on love rather than dominance. And then there's Joa,

(03:46):
whose Nien's younger sister, and she has this fascination with
priestesses and ancient knowledge. And so the whole herder community
meets together on a quarterly basis where they gather to
trade and feast and participate. And then the drought ravages
the land and the tensions build and conflict swimmers, and
then you know, Joea has this dream of building this
sacred circle to bring unity. And Follett's managed to fill

(04:09):
the story with these great characters, as I said before,
and some you like and some you despise, and is
really interesting in explanations of how the stones perhaps came
to be and the world and society here imagines and
I really like it as great ancient history and that
mystery of Stonehenge, and it's, you know, this simple but
powerful towel. It's a bit slow in places, but actually

(04:30):
it's slow on a reason and it kind of builds
the story and it really makes it work. And it's
seven hundred pages. It's not a small book. But I
found myself flicking through it quite quickly, to be honest,
because it's such a great story.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
Great. Okay, cool. So that's Circle of Days by Ken Follett,
Catherin's first book again fly Wild Swans by Yung Chang.
We'll have all the details for both of those on
the news Talk ZEDB website.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, Listen live
to Newstalk ZEDB from nine am Saturday, or follow the
podcast on iHeartRadio.