Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

A term Mao Zedong applied to all who resisted his absolute authority, in particular those officials who opposed his 1958 Great Leap Forward. In Mao’s regime, a “capitalist-roader” became tainted with the suspicion that he or she secretly wished to reverse the Communist Revolution and take the country down the road to capitalism. In truth, most of the accused officials, such as Chang’s father, had been dedicated Communists, in some cases for decades, whose only real crime was to tell the truth about Mao’s policies.

Chengdu was the largest city in Sichuan Province and the provincial capital. Chang’s parents moved the family to Chengdu from Yibin in 1953, and Chang spent most of her childhood and teenage years in the city. During the Cultural Revolution, the city’s Rebels split into two factions, “26 August” and “Red Chengdu.”

A concubine was “a kind of institutionalized mistress” (11). For centuries, powerful Chinese men took girls and young women as sexual servants, offering them “protection” in exchange for complete submission. In 1924, at the age of 15, Chang’s grandmother became a concubine to General Xue Zhi-heng. He was not cruel to her in the ordinary sense, but her feelings and interests counted for nothing, and she belonged to him in much the same way that slaves belong to their masters.