Wild swans

Thought I might as well write about books I read before school starts. I finished Wild Swans today. I encountered it as it was on my IB history reading list. I discovered it was much more than just some suggested reading.

I love stories about families. The names can be confusing, and it reminded me of One Hundred Years of Solitude in that names sound similar and you're wondering what's happening to whom. Like said book, it gives the reader great insight into a different culture, but Wild Swans to a nuance. I now know much more about 20C China than most in the Western world, all thanks to this book.

I made notes as I went along, and the perspectives of officials and officials' children gives something which a normal historian could not give: a first hand account of a normal person who was being persecuted. Jung Chang is a fantastic writer and I commend her.

This will definitely be of help to me when I do history next year and study Mao. Whether Mao actually believed in what he was doing, or was in a Stalin-esque way paranoid about power, who can really know? He seemed to protect himself best by making sure everyone resented each other, but not him. To the Chinese, or most of them at least, Mao was God.

Interestingly, the most recent edition of The Economist (Aug 1-7) discusses a What If about China: what if Chiang Kai-shek had won the civil war? Perhaps progress would have been quicker, lives would have been saved en masse, and relations with the West would be better. Whether this could be true, I'm not going to doubt experienced historians who have studied such a matter for years.

But had that happened, this book never would have entered my life, and it is one of my favourites now. Next I'm on to Watchmen, something completely new; I'm excited.