Abstract

Jung Chang [Zhang Rong], the author of Wild Swans, comes from an entirely different generation than Wu Ningkun. The "offspring of a high-ranking cadre," she was born and grew up under the red flag. While Wu Ningkun was languishing in a "cowshed" [place in one's own work unit where one was usually kept in solitary confinement and made to write out confessions of so-called crimes during the Cultural Revolution—Trans.] and accused of being a "devil and demon," 14-year-old Jung Chang came from her native Chengdu to Beijing—the "center of world revolution"—as a Red Guard, to be reviewed by the Great Leader. As the Cultural Revolution grew in ferocity, her father was accused of being a counterrevolutionary for having supported Tao Zhu and was sent to a mountainous area to be reformed through labor. And so, Jung Chang lost the privileged life she had led and began her "travails." She was first sent to work in a rural production brigade, and then to serve as a barefoot doctor in a Tibetan village at the foot of the Himalayas