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Jung Chang QUOTES

Jung Chang QUOTES

81 " inner courtyard. Dr. Xia tolerated Yu-wu’s rowdy parties without demur, even though his sect, the Society of Reason, forbade gambling and drinking. My mother was puzzled, but put it down to her stepfather’s tolerant nature. It was only years later when she thought back that she felt certain that Dr. Xia had known, or guessed, Yu-wu’s real identity. When my mother heard that her cousin Hu had been killed by the Kuomintang she approached Yu-wu about working for the Communists. He turned "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

82 " The Japanese are a disease of the skin...the Communists are a disease of the heart. Everything personal was political... Two reds sandwiching a black... "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

83 " The whole nation slid into doublespeak. Works became divorced from reality, responsibility, and people’s real thoughts. Lies were told with ease because words had lost their meanings-and had ceased to be taken seriously by others. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

84 " I was not forced to join the Red Guards. I was keen to do so. In spite of what was happening around me, my aversion and fear had no clear object, and it never occurred to me to question the Cultural Revolution or the Red Guards explicitly. They were Mao’s creations, and Mao was beyond contemplation.

Like many Chinese, I was incapable of rational thinking in those days. We were so cowed and contorted by fear and indoctrination that to deviate from the path laid down by Mao would have been inconceivable. Besides, we had been overwhelmed by deceptive rhetoric, disinformation, and hypocrisy, which made it virtually impossible to see through the situation and to form an intelligent judgment. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

85 " In league with a general called Feng Yuxiang, a Christian warlord, who entered legend by baptizing his troops en masse with a firehose, "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

86 " Poverty drove their parents to have them castrated as young children, hoping they would earn a better living at court. Usually the father would take the boy to a specialist castrator, who operated by the appointment of the court. After a contract was signed, absolving the castrator from any responsibility in case of death or failure (both highly likely outcomes), the unimaginably painful operation was performed. The castrator’s fee was huge and had to be paid from future earnings. "

― Jung Chang , Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

87 " The old man, who shuffled along with great difficulty, bent double, was blind. To attract the attention of passersby,he sang a heart wrenching tune. Every time my father heard the song, he said to himself that society must change. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

88 " Fallowing the custom, my great-grandfather was married young, at fourteen, to a woman six years his senior. It was considered one of the duties of a wife to help bring up her husband. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

89 " Na verdade, a mesquinhez era uma característica fundamental de uma revolução em que se celebravam a intrusão e a ignorância, e incorporava-se a inveja no sistema de controle. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

90 " Nana and I had to take off our shoes, roll up our trouser legs, and wade into the cottage. Fortunately the double bed we shared had tall legs, so we slept about two feet above the muddy water. . . . But the cottage was also fun. When the flood receded, mushrooms would spring up under the bed and in the corners of the room. With a little imagination, the floor looked like something out of a fairy tale. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

91 " On 20 July an article appeared in the People's Daily about a 'blank exam paper." Unable to answer the questions in his university entrance papers, an applicant had handed in a blank sheet, along with a letter complaining that the exams were tantamount to a 'capitalist restoration."  His letter was seized on by Mao's nephew and personal aide.  Mme Mao and her cohorts condemned the emphasis on academic standards as 'bourgeois dictatorship."
"What does it matter even if the whole country becomes illiterate?" they declared. "What matters is that the Cultural Revolution achieves the greatest triumph!"
The exams I had taken were declared void.  Entrance to universities was now to be decided solely by 'political behavior. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

92 " Making a lot of noise was considered essential for a good wedding, as keeping quiet would have been seen as suggesting that there was something shameful about the event. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

93 " So the story of Wild Fox Kang’s attempted coup and murder of Cixi lay in darkness and obscurity for nearly a century, until the 1980s, when Chinese scholars discovered in Japanese archives the testimony of the designated killer, Bi, which established beyond doubt the existence of the plot. "

― Jung Chang , Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

94 " Yaban Kuğuları - Çin'de Üç Kızkardeş "

― Jung Chang

95 " Long-lasting peace … is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace … When we look at history, we adore the times of war when dramas happened one after another … which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace and prosperity, we are bored … human nature loves sudden swift changes. "

― Jung Chang , Mao: The Unknown Story

96 " Mao was duly fired from this position. Criticized as “opportunistic” and “right-wing,” he found himself kicked out of the Central Committee, and was not even invited to attend the next CCP congress scheduled for January 1925.* His health now took a downturn, and he grew thin and ill. A then house-mate and colleague told us that Mao had “problems in his head … he was preoccupied with his affairs.” His nervous condition was reflected in his bowels, which sometimes moved only once a week. He was to be plagued by constipation—and obsessed by defecation—all his life. Mao was "

― Jung Chang , Mao: The Unknown Story

97 " Muitas camponesas que vinham para a cidade mudavam de trajes para não parecer caipiras. Mas ela era inteiramente descontraída com suas roupas, o que mostrava a força de seu caráter. "

― Jung Chang

98 " I had experienced privilege as well as denunciation, courage as well as fear, seen kindness and loyalty as well as depths of human ugliness. Amid suffering, ruin and death, I had above all known love and the indestructible human capacity to survive and to pursue happiness. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

99 " Mao’s instruction to exterminate grass had led to a constant demand for manpower bc of the grass’s obstinate nature. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

100 " They had been able to criticise the Beijing government publicly without fear of retribution. In 1929, a number of prominent liberals spoke out in a collection of essays called On Human Rights. Hu Shih, the leading liberal of the day, wrote that his fellow countrymen had already been through a ‘liberation of the mind’, but now ‘the collaboration of the Communists and the Nationalists has created a situation of absolute dictatorship and our freedoms of thought and speech are being lost. Today we may disparage God, but may not criticise Sun Yat-sen. We don’t have to go to Sunday church services, but we have to attend the weekly [Sun] Commemorative Service and read the Sun Yat-sen Testament.’ ‘The freedom we want to establish is the freedom to criticise the Nationalist party and to criticise Sun Yat-sen. Even the Almighty can be criticised, why can’t the Nationalists and Sun Yat-sen?’ And, ‘The Nationalist government is deeply unpopular, partly because its political system fell far short of people’s expectations, and partly because its corpse-like ideology failed to "

― Jung Chang , Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China