Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Jung Chang
New York: Anchor Books (Doubleday); originally published by Simon and Schuster, 1991
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism
Doris Kearns Goodwin
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013
For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man”s Quest for Grammatical Perfection
David Marsh
London: Guardian Books, 2013
Wild Swans sat around our house for too long. My wife, Joy, picked it up a couple of years ago while traveling with our daughter in Vietnam. In the face of other pressures, it sat on the back shelf until recently when, on another trip, she finished it and urged me to take it up. When Joy recommends, I read. And once I opened Wild Swans, I couldn”t stop.
Minette Marrin of the Sunday Telegraph captures my feeling on the back cover: “The book arouses all the emotions, such as pity and terror, that great tragedy is supposed to evoke, and also a complex mixture of admiration, despair, and delight at seeing a luminous intelligence directed at the heart of darkness.”
The “three daughters of China” are Yu-fang, the grandmother; Bao Qin/De-hong, the mother; and Jung, daughter and author. It”s a loving family chronicle; it is also an always-fascinating history of 20th-century China from the days of the warlords through World War II and the civil war between the Kuomintang (Chiang Kai-shek”s forces) and the Communists (Mao Tse-tung”s), up to the recent trend toward capitalism led by Deng Xiaoping.
It”s a study in cultural evolution as well. Grandmother Yu-fang”s feet were bound (crushed and stunted) as a youngster to make her more sexually appealing. She was virtually sold as a concubine, an honored position in her culture, but a kind of slavery nonetheless. Her daughter became a dedicated Communist leader, convinced that Mao could lead China to freedom, equality, and prosperity. She and her idealistic husband paid dearly for their illusions, beaten and imprisoned repeatedly for the crime of thinking for themselves.
Their daughter joined the Red Guards when she was 14, so through her eyes we get the inside story on the insanity that destroyed so much of the finest in China”s culture. She labored as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor” (she learned her medicine on the job), a steelworker, and an electrician, whatever she had to do to make a living””and stay alive.
Wild Swan grabbed me as few books have. I kept turning pages in spite of weariness; I had to see what was going to happen next (it would probably be terrible) to these courageous, inspiring women. You can”t read this book and enjoy someone”s flip allusion to “the weaker sex.”
And you can”t help wondering why Hitler gets all the attention as the primary monster of the 20th century. He gets the publicity, I suppose, because the survivors of his victims have had the means to tell the story.
China is more remote to us than Germany, so we were slower in learning Mao”s horrific story. The word is out now, though. This book, for example, has been a best seller in 30 languages. It deserves to be.
I should confess that while I was reading this hardback, I was working my way through Simon Sebag Montefiore”s Young Stalin (2009) and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2007). While I marveled at the bravery and strength of the “three swans,” I search almost in vain to find someone in Stalin”s circle to admire. I kept wishing Montefiore”s books were fiction so I could toss them for depicting cruelty beyond belief. But Montefiore ransacked the archives. He documents his claims. Stalin, this man who was directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of 30 million of his own people, was a monster.
Contrasting Temperaments, Common Causes
With a sign of relief and the anticipation of a good read, I turned from the depressing doings of Stalin and Mao to Doris Kearns Goodwin”s The Bully Pulpit. The author of Team of Rivals, my favorite book on leadership in general and Abraham Lincoln”s leadership style in particular, Goodwin has once again delivered a volume of stellar scholarship, good storytelling, and compelling characterization. It”s a hefty tome (more than 900 pages), but my interest never flagged.
Of course, it isn”t too hard to make Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft interesting. The supporting cast of “muckrakers” (Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, William Allen White, Ray Baker, et al.) are no less so, these fearless reformers who were as vital in reforming America”s corrupt politics as were the two presidents who championed their causes. Altogether, these politicians and journalists dominated an era that addressed some of America”s most needed problems, leading to such reforms as women”s suffrage, the eight-hour workday, child labor laws, and curtailing of rampant and sometimes vicious laissez-faire capitalism.
The dominant story, though, is of the beautiful friendship of the ebullient, impulsive, politically savvy, charismatic Roosevelt and the thoughtful, genial, kind, highly principled but less egotistic Taft. I”ve always been fascinated by Rough Rider Roosevelt, charging off to war in Cuba and later booming from his bully pulpit, the presidency. One of our best presidents, I thought. After all, his face is etched on Mount Rushmore. Taft has always seemed to pale in comparison.
Not on these pages, he doesn”t. Goodwin presents Roosevelt”s hand-picked successor as more introverted and judicial, to be certain, but every bit as intelligent and committed to the progressive cause””just more cautious in pursuing his goals and much less confident that whatever he thought was, because it must be, absolutely without error. Roosevelt split the Republican Party when he challenged Taft and Woodrow Wilson for the presidency. Taft worked to preserve its unity.
I finished this book after reading Montefiore on Stalin and Chang on Mao Tse-tung. You can find fault with Roosevelt and Taft; they were, as are we all, flawed. But give them this: they didn”t murder their adversaries. And you can be critical of our American political system, as I often am, but so far, at least, we”ve chosen to do battle with ballots and bully pulpits and not by slaughtering those who stand in our way.
Breaking the Rules
OK, OK, I know this last book is one only someone fixated on the English language could love. But I am, and I do.
If you remember your high school English class, you caught the mistake in the title. It should be “For Whom. . . .”
Use who for the subject but whom for the object of the preposition. Well, that”s the way it used to be anyway, back when I was an English teacher and we knew what was right.
The truth is, many of the rules I insisted my students obey have been overthrown. You can go ahead and split that infinitive, if you want to: “to boldly go” is as good as “to go boldly,” and makes for better television.
You can put the preposition at the end of the sentence; sometimes it works better, as in this sentence Marsh stole from Steven Pinker who stole it from somebody else: “Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don”t want to be read to out of up for?”
And you can start a sentence with a conjunction if you want.
Marsh is the production editor of The Guardian, so he flavors his advice with his strong preference for English English, sometimes disdaining the creative improvements we Americans have made on our common tongue. He confesses bafflement with some of our most popular additions: pony up, mojo, sledding, duke it out, suck, dweeb, first lady, double dip, balding (don”t they do this in England?), boost, top secret. But what would we do without them?
Marsh is anything but a stuffy Englishman. If you like words, you”ll like For Who the Bell Tolls.
LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary, Johnson City, Tennessee. He also serves as a Christian Standard contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing”s Publishing Committee.
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