A Reflection on Remembering

In this memoir, a daughter untangles her bond with her mother, life in exile, and the aftermath of China’s cultural revolution

- By ANJALI CHAUHAN

Jung Chang’s Fly; Wild Swans is an intimate excavation of the mother-daughter bond, tender yet turbulent, marked by the twin inheritances of trauma and resilience. Chang sets this precedent right in the opening lines of the Prologue: “This book is about my mother and myself—and inevitably about my grandmother and my father.”

With that confession, she signals that personal history cannot be disentangled from collective memory, nor can love be separated from loss. At its heart, the book revolves around Chang’s relationship with her mother, a bond stretched across continents and decades, yet bound by the invisible threads of affection, silence, and survival. Their relationship, as Chang portrays it, is one of love tempered by emotional restraint, shaped by the political and personal devastations of authoritarian China.