Home > Work > Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China QUOTES

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China QUOTES

1 " They were endowed with the qualities of youth- they were rebellious, fearless, eager to fight for a 'just cause', thirsty for adventure and action. They were also irresponsible, ignorant, and easy to manipulate- and prone to violence. Only they could give Mao the immense force that he needed to terrorize the society. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

2 " Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere. The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying into personal details was a way of ensuring thorough soul-cleansing. In fact, pettiness was a fundamental characteristic of a revolution in which intrusiveness and ignorance were celebrated, and envy was incorporated into the system of control. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

3 " At night I locked my bedroom door, because [my father] could not sleep and would insist on talking to me, endlessly, without making sense. But there was a small window over the door which could not be locked. One night I woke up to see him slithering through the tiny aperture and jumping nimbly to the floor. But he paid no attention to me. He aimlessly picked up various pieces of heavy mahogany furniture and let them drop with seemingly little effort. In his insanity he had become superhumanly agile and powerful. Staying with him was a nightmare. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

4 " There were no state regulations about hairstyles or clothes. It was what everyone else was wearing that determined the rules of the day. And because the range was so narrow, people were always looking out for the tiniest variations. It was a real test of ingenuity to look different and attractive, and yet similar enough to everyone else so that nobody with an accusing finger could pinpoint what exactly was heretical. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

5 " Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels: before, reading a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of criticism about being a bourgeois intellectual. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

6 " We visited Mao's old house, which had been turned into a museum-cum-shrine. It was rather grand––quite different from my idea of a lodging for exploited peasants, as I had expected it to be. A caption underneath an enormous photograph of Mao's mother said that she had been a very kind person and, because her family was relatively well off, had often given food to the poor. So our Great Leader's parents had been rich peasants! But rich peasants were class enemies! Why were Chairman Mao's parents heroes when other class enemies were objects of hate? The question frightened me so much that I immediately suppressed it. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

7 " When he asked my grandmother if she would mind being poor, she said she would be happy just to have her daughter and himself: 'If you have love, even plain water is sweet. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

8 " If you have love, even plain cold water is sweet. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

9 " ...go in the direction your head is pointed in. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

10 " ...boredom was as exhausting as backbreaking labor. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

11 " As a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery, like that of the homeless 'Little Match Girl'in the Hans Christian Andersen story. When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say:'Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world! "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

12 " When a man gets power, even his chickens and dogs rise to heaven. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

13 " Father is close, Mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

14 " Both my mother and father regarded a traditional ceremony as old-fashioned and redundant. Both she and my father wanted to get rid of rituals like that, which they felt had nothing to do with their feelings. Love was the only thing that mattered to these two revolutionaries. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

15 " A cautionary tale I had carried with me from China, and which I firmly believed, was that anyone who attempted to have a foreign lover would be drugged and carted back to China in a jute sack. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

16 " ...Inflation had risen to the unimaginable figure of just over 100,000 percent by the end of 1947--and it was to go to 2,870,000 percent by the end of 1948... "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

17 " They verbally attacked each other with Mao's quotations, making cynical use of his guru-like elusiveness––it was easy to select a quotation of Mao's to suit any situation, or even both sides of the same argument. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

18 " Before our "company" set off, at a wink from the officer, Plumpie stood up and proposed a search. I could see that some of the others thought she was wasting our time, but our company commander cheerfully seconded her proposal. He suggested we search him first. A boy was called to do this, and found a big bunch of keys on him. Our commander acted as though he had been genuinely careless, and gave Plumpie a victorious smile. The rest of us searched each other. This roundabout way of doing things reflected a Maoist practice: things had to look as though they were the wish of the people, rather than commands from above. Hypocrisy and playacting were taken for granted. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

19 " But her greatest assets were her bound feet, called in Chinese "three-inch golden lilies" (san-tsun-gin-lian). This meant she walked "like a tender young willow shoot in a spring breeze," as Chinese connoisseurs of women traditionally put it. The sight of a woman teetering on bound feet was supposed to have an erotic effect on men, partly because her vulnerability induced a feeling of protectiveness in the onlooker. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

20 " Mao’s rule was best understood in terms of a medieval court, in which he exercised spellbinding power over his courtiers and subjects. He was also a maestro at ‘divide and rule’, and at manipulating men’s inclination to throw others to the wolves. "

― Jung Chang , Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China