Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“The move to Dr. Xia’s house brought my grandmother a real measure of freedom for the first time—but also a degree of entrapment. For my mother it was no less ambivalent. Dr. Xia was extremely kind to her and brought her up as his own daughter. She called him “Father,” and he gave her his own name, Xia, which she carries to this day—and a new given name, “De-hong,” which is made up of two characters: Hong, meaning “wild swan,” and De, the generation name, meaning ‘virtue.’”

From the younger members of Xia’s family, Chang’s grandmother encountered near-unanimous opposition to her marriage. After the marriage, that opposition endured in the form of silent tension. Meanwhile, some of Xia’s grandchildren bullied Chang’s mother, who was only four years old. Still, as this passage indicates, Xia represented a warm and loving presence in their lives. Until then, Chang’s grandmother had experienced only submission and family dysfunction.

“Her parents hurriedly married her off to a petty government official. After Japan’s defeat her husband was branded as a collaborator, and as a result the only job his wife could get was in a chemical plant. There were no pollution controls, and when my mother went back to Jinzhou in 1984 and tracked her down she had gone almost blind from the chemicals. She was wry about the ironies of her life: having beaten the Japanese in a race, she had ended up being treated as a kind of collaborator. Even so, she said she had no regrets about winning the race.”

As young girls, Chang’s mother and the woman in the chemical plant had run in the same race. On the advice of her Chinese coach, Chang’s mother did not put forth her best effort, but the other girl ran hard and won the race. Her school’s Japanese headmaster later had the victorious girl expelled for failing to bow properly before a portrait of the emperor but, in reality, it was because she had defied Japanese expectations by winning. The Japanese people had been taught to believe that they were racially superior to the Chinese. Although the story of the woman in the chemical plant occupies only four paragraphs, her refusal to feed Japanese racism by diminishing herself, coupled with her refusal to harbor regrets over how her life had unfolded as a consequence, makes her one of the most courageous figures in the book.