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... Then there were her parents, the father Shou-yu, who joined the veterans of the Long March in Yan’an before becoming a very senior, and unusually honourable, Communist Party official in the province of Sichuan, and her mother De-hong (‘hong’ means ‘wild swan’) who faced the Japanese and then the Kuomintang in Manchuria before becoming a middle-ranking Communist official with her husband in Sichuan.
Both of them suffered frequent investigation, denunciation, and exile over a period when the author herself, originally called Er-hong (which means ‘second wild swan’), was briefly a Red Guard, then a peasant and ‘barefoot doctor’, next a steelworker and electrician, before finally becoming an English-language student which led her to leave China in 1978. ...
“Wild Swans” is a compulsive read and a wonderful introduction to recent China.
Approximate Word count = 933 Approximate Pages = 3.7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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