China, up close and personal

Best known for her 1991 family autobiography, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, Chinese-born British writer Jung Chang is back with a followup to that popular book.

- NEHA KIRPAL

Wild Swans, an epic personal history of the author, her mother and grandmother, was a book that defined a generation and offered a firsthand view of the depredations of Mao Zedong's era. Fly, Wild Swans brings the story of her family as well as that of China's over the years up to date. In many ways, the book is Ms Jung's tribute and love letter to her mother, her "guardian angel".

In Wild Swans, Ms Jung wrote, among other things, about her grandmother's excruciating foot-binding as an infant, Mao Zedong's rule, especially its last decade, the horrific Cultural Revolution during which her Communist parents were subjected to painful humiliation, and how Deng Xiaoping finally brought the Mao era to an end. Around this time, a 26-year-old Jung became one of the first Chinese to leave Communist China for the West in 1978 — which she describes as being "out of the cage".

Though she lives in London, Ms Jung's life was still deeply entwined with her birthplace. She visited her mother who continued to live there, and travelled around the country to research her books. "The country has been turned upside down many times by tempestuous changes," writes Ms Jung in the book's Prologue. Her books talk primarily about her and her family's experiences dealing with the regime during those tumultuous years. Over the last 120 years or so, present-day China has grown from a crumbling state to a strong global power.