The Art Of Memory

By Howard G. Chua-Eoan

WILD SWANS: THREE DAUGHTERS OF CHINA

by Jung Chang

Simon & Schuster; 524 pages; $25

From generation to generation, families wander through clouds of shared images, miasmas of memory, occlusions of oral remembrances. What is recalled of clan history is imprecise, simply because the stories take on shapes imposed by each teller. Sometimes, however, a family will be lucky, and an aunt, an uncle or a cousin will be able to re-create the past with a precision that makes the narrative virtually incontestable, a true copy of what has gone before. That is the nature of Jung Chang's mesmerizing memoir. With a calm that suggests infallibility, she tells the story of her mother and her maternal grandmother and, by doing so, makes visible, intimate and immediate the pain and horror that are cloaked in the silence of China's recent history.

For a people who pride themselves over three millenniums of civilization, the Chinese have perfected the art of forgetting. Mao Zedong once said he wanted the Chinese people to be a blank sheet of paper on which he could write anything he pleased. Throughout history, the Chinese have often obliged their rulers by volunteering to be such tabulae rasae. "Yes, that was a bad spell." "Yes, we suffered much." "No, let us not talk about it." The responses are the same, whether the period involved is the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists that embroiled the country in the '30s and '40s, or the epic struggle against Japanese invaders, or the chaotic Cultural Revolution. Notions of the past exist, but when tales are told they are often without context. Exotic ancestresses mince through the background on bound feet; pig-tailed great-grandfathers take to ship for lands of greater promise. What was it that they fled?

Chang does not attempt complicated sociological explanations. She simply tells stories and anecdotes, in straight chronological order, with little contrivance, providing real-life fables as open-ended answers to the puzzles of 20th century China. All this takes the form of a spectacular adventure traced from Chang's 19th century great-grandmother, who was born and given no name, to her grandmother, who was bartered into concubinage in exchange for a government position, to her mother, who was too smart and too pragmatic to be considered a good Communist by the party.

Wild Swans is not entirely Chang's story, but she makes it so. By beginning long before she was born, her voice becomes that of her grandmother and mother, before finally becoming her own. One can almost hear the older women whispering in her ear, telling Chang exactly what their lives were like. And so the narrative becomes that of one woman evolving through China's tumultuous past century, surviving war, famine, the conscious and unconscious cruelties of parents and the vicissitudes brought on by uncontrollable political forces.

While the women are impressive, one of the finest and most tragic images in Chang's book is that of her father, a self-sacrificing Communist official who denied his family party privileges as his part in an attempt to establish egalitarianism in the country. (At one point Chang's mother complained to him, "You are a good Communist but a rotten husband!" Her father only nodded, saying he knew.) He is swept away by the Cultural Revolution. But not before one supreme act of courage. Asked to praise so-called good officials by writing an adulatory wall poster, Chang's father refused -- even with the threat of beatings from Maoist thugs. His wife pleaded, "What is a poster compared to a life?" He answered, "I will not sell my soul."

Taken in pieces, Chang's narrative can be prosaic. But in its entirety, the author achieves a Dickensian tone with detailed portraits and intimate remembrances, with colorful minor characters and intricate yet fascinating side plots. There is a Chinese art of forgetting. Wild Swans is proof that there is an art of memory as well.