61 pages • 2 hours read
Jung ChangWild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “‘Three-Inch Golden Lilies’: Concubine to a Warlord General (1909-1933)”
Chang’s grandmother, Yu Fang, was born in 1909 in Yixian, a town in southwest Manchuria. At the age of two, her feet were broken and bound to prevent them from growing, a centuries-old practice designed to make young Chinese girls look more vulnerable and thus sexually attractive to men. By the time she was 15, Chang’s grandmother was a famous local beauty. Her father, Yang Ru-shan, was a minor police official but an otherwise ambitious man. One day, General Xue Zhi-heng, inspector general of the Metropolitan Police at Peking, visited Yixian. Chang’s great-grandfather managed to orchestrate several encounters between his daughter and General Xue. Smitten with the young girl, the general soon offered to take her as his concubine, “a kind of institutionalized mistress” (11).
Chang’s grandmother cried because she did not want to belong to a man in that way, but she also did not dare defy her father, who was ecstatic at having made this connection to a powerful man. General Xue allowed her to reside in a luxurious house near her family in Yixian, and he was not cruel to her, but she rarely saw him. One week after the ceremony that cemented her status as his concubine, General Xue left the house in Yixian and did not return for six years. She lived much of that time in solitude and extreme boredom. In 1930, the general suddenly returned, stayed for a few days, and once again departed. In spring 1931, Chang’s mother, Bao Qin, was born.
Upon hearing the news of his daughter’s birth, General Xue ordered Chang’s grandmother to bring the girl to his country estate near Lulong. When she arrived, Chang’s grandmother learned that the general’s wife planned to raise Bao Qin as her own. A month later, with the help of a friendly fellow concubine, Chang’s grandmother took her daughter and made a daring escape from Lulong back to Yixian, where she found refuge in the home of a kindly Manchu doctor named Xia. On his deathbed, General Xue gave Chang’s grandmother her freedom.
Chapter 2 Summary: “‘Even Plain Cold Water Is Sweet’: My Grandmother Marries a Manchu Doctor (1933-1938)”
Although her father grudgingly took her back, Chang’s grandmother discovered that her childhood home had changed for the worse. Her ambitious father now kept two concubines of his own, rendering her mother’s life miserable, and he made no secret of his desire to have his daughter remarried and out of his house. The stress caused Chang’s grandmother to have a nervous breakdown, which brought her once again to the attention of Dr. Xia. Though nearly 40 years her senior, Dr. Xia fell deeply in love with her, and she with him. They were to be married.
Except for Dr. Xia’s second son, De-gui, the entire Xia family opposed the match. The eldest son died by suicide in protest. Though devastated, Xia married Chang’s grandmother anyway and moved her into his compound along with her four-year-old daughter, Chang’s mother. Xia acted as the only father the little girl ever knew. Meanwhile, Xia’s family paid his new wife very little respect, and Chang’s mother was tormented by the other children. When one of these children, Xia’s hitherto favorite grandson, pushed Chang’s mother into a well, Xia decided that the situation at his compound was untenable. He took his young wife and adopted daughter and relocated to Jinzhou, the capital of one of Manchuria’s nine provinces.
Although they lived in extreme poverty, Chang’s grandmother remembered the first year in Jinzhou as a happy time. “If you have love,” she said, “even plain cold water is sweet” (38). Xia had to start over, but he succeeded in rebuilding his medical practice in this new city. In late 1937, Xia moved his family from a dilapidated shack into a red-brick, three-bedroom home on the city’s outskirts. Family life was good, but Jinzhou and the world were becoming dangerous places.
Chapter 3 Summary: “‘They All Say What a Happy Place Manchukuo Is’: Life Under the Japanese (1938-1945)”
The Japanese had occupied Manchuria (renamed “Manchukuo”), including the city of Jinzhou, since 1931. They had installed a puppet Manchu emperor, Pu Yi, to create the illusion of Manchu self-rule, but the Japanese controlled everything, including the schools. Chang’s mother attended an elementary school in which nearly all teachers were Japanese, and yet Japanese children attended separate schools. Resistance to the Japanese was fatal. Even failure to perform prescribed political rituals could result in severe punishment. One day, Xia’s youngest son, a schoolteacher in Yixian, forgot to bow to a portrait of Pu Yi and then, when chided by the zealous headmaster, refused to apologize. Xia’s son was branded a “thought criminal,” fled the city, and was never heard from again (50).
Meanwhile, Chang’s grandmother brought her mother, her younger brother Yu-lin, and her sister Lan to stay with the Xias in Jinzhou. Life with Chang’s great-grandfather and his two concubines had become unbearable for them. Lan married a man named Pei-o, who worked in a local prison and witnessed horrific acts of torture against prisoners who dared to resist the Japanese. Chang’s mother and her classmates were forced to work in a textile factory before moving on to junior high school. What little they knew about World War II came from Japanese propaganda—at least until American B-29 bombers began to appear in the skies above Jinzhou. Japanese desperation created more victims. One day, a classmate of Chang’s mother was caught with a banned book. The girl was tortured and then executed by firing squad in front of her schoolmates and teachers, one of whom, a young Japanese teacher named Miss Tanaka, wept.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Chapters 1-3 describe Chang’s grandmother’s experience as a young woman in early-20th-century China, first as a teenage concubine to a warlord general and then as wife to a Manchu doctor 40 years her senior.
Chang’s grandmother belonged to a generation of Chinese girls who were among the last to experience concubinage. Powerful men took young women as permanent mistresses, a practice solemnized by ceremony and sanctified by tradition. For men, concubines meant both sexual pleasure and enhanced status. For women, concubinage amounted to a form of domestic slavery. As evidenced by Chang’s grandmother and her tearful reaction, few women had any say in the matter. At 15, she envisioned a bleak future as a concubine, but her father’s authority was absolute. Chang’s grandmother also had been among the last victims of foot-binding, the ancient and excruciating practice by which an infant girl’s feet are broken and bound, thereby prevented from growing—all to enhance her sexual attraction by making her look vulnerable. The combination of concubinage and foot-binding, imposed on her by powerful men, makes Chang’s grandmother an early example of Complete Submission, one of the book’s major themes.
General Xue, the man who took Chang’s grandmother as a concubine, was indeed a powerful man, but the source of his power—China’s political chaos and descent into warlordism—was disappearing. Following the destruction of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), China experienced a short-lived republic (1911-16) under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen, but the republic quickly disintegrated into factional strife, each faction led by a “warlord” whose army controlled a particular region of the country. In 1924, when Chang’s grandmother became his concubine, General Xue served a warlord who controlled Peking, the nation’s capital. By the early 1930s, however, when Chang’s mother was born, the warlords’ power was receding, and the Kuomintang nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, were in control.
China’s political chaos and resulting weakness had a direct impact on Chang’s family. Her grandmother hailed from the town of Yixian in the troubled region of Manchuria, part of northeastern China. Manchurians had a strong historical connection to the rest of China, for the Qing Empire had been Manchu in its origins. In 1931, however, Japan invaded resource-rich Manchuria, renamed it “Manchukuo,” and set up a puppet government under Pu Yi, the former emperor. Dr. Xia and Chang’s grandmother witnessed Japan’s brutality against the people of Jinzhou, as did Chang’s mother, a young schoolgirl who “forced down her hate” when Japanese troops publicly executed her classmate (59).
