Even though I’ve had Jung Chang’s memoir Wild Swans on my TBR for a long time, I only recently decided to read it when I received an ARC of the sequel Fly, Wild Swans (which comes out later this month) due to the fact that I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to reading books within a series in order. My original plan was to read Wild Swans, then read its sequel right afterwards, but I faced a dilemma, as Chang’s memoir is long (500+ pages) and with all the other books on my list that I also wanted to get to, I wasn’t sure how I would be able to squeeze this one in. But then I remembered my plan to incorporate more audiobooks into my reading life in 2026, so I decided to read this one on audio.
Going into this book, I was excited at first, as it was a bestseller when it was first released back in 1991 and nowadays the book is considered a modern classic. The reviews have also been largely positive and the book continues to maintain a high rating across multiple platforms. So essentially, I had high expectations and was expecting to like this one as much as everyone else did. It turns out though, that I’m one of the outliers who didn’t enjoy this book much and while I didn’t DNF it, I did end up skipping parts of it (more on this later).
In hindsight, I probably should have done more research before choosing to go with the audiobook, as reading the book in that format contributed hugely to why the book wasn’t a good reading experience for me. Given the book’s subject matter and the knowledge that there would be a lot of untranslated Chinese words in the book, I was totally expecting the audiobook narrator to be Chinese or at least have a solid enough grasp of the Chinese language to be able to pronounce names, places, and other untranslated words/phrases correctly. Since this was a minimum requirement that I took for granted (aka I thought it was common sense that you have someone who knows the language narrate the book), I didn’t bother looking up who the narrator would be and went straight into listening to the Introduction. Twenty minutes in, when the narrator started butchering the Chinese pronunciations, I did what I should have done earlier – look up who the narrator was (turns out she is an American actress of Korean descent). Of course I was disappointed but I decided to stick with it hoping that the narration would get better – unfortunately, it didn’t, as not only did the narrator fail to pronounce any of the Chinese words correctly (the pronunciation was so off that I had to switch to the actual book to figure out what word she was trying to say), her delivery was also robotic and emotionless. At some point, I realized what the narration reminded me of – one of those voices on a pre-recorded telephone answering machine (press.one.for.English, press.two.for.Chinese…). It got to the point where I would cringe each time the narrator said something in Chinese (needless to say, the “skip forward by 30 seconds” button became my best friend for this book, lol) – after a while, I developed a strategy of starting each chapter in audio, then switching to the Kindle version halfway through the chapter so at least I could still get some of the audio experience and not have it completely go to waste.
Aside from the audiobook narration being a definite “miss,” the book itself was well-written, though way too long in my opinion. Some parts were engaging, especially the earlier sections about Chang’s grandmother and her journey going from a warlord’s concubine to the wife of a humble doctor, but the later parts about Chang’s parents and herself – basically the chapters that described in detail what life in China was like after Mao took over – I found to be really tedious (and at times boring). I’m thinking this is because I was already very familiar with everything Chang wrote about in these sections – being Chinese myself and having relatives who had lived through those turbulent (and horrific) Mao years first hand, I grew up listening to them recount nearly identical experiences, so none of what Chang recounted was “new” or surprising to me. Halfway through the book, I realized I was probably not the target audience for this book – it seemed to me that this was written more for a Western audience that was perhaps less familiar with modern Chinese history and the atrocities that occurred under Mao’s rule (which makes sense considering this book came out in the early 90s, when China wasn’t too far removed from the isolationist policies that Mao had imposed on the country for nearly 3 decades, with the country only starting to “open up” a few years after Mao’s death in 1976). It was also because of this deep familiarity with the book’s subject matter that, ultimately, I ended up skimming larger swaths of the book, as it was getting to be too much to have to “revisit” those harrowing experiences in such excruciating detail – though admittedly, part of this was timing too, as many of us spent most of last year dealing with similar feelings of anger / frustration / grief over the divisive political climate in our country currently and I don’t know about others, but I don’t want to start my new year reading about people blindly worshipping horrific, delusional, god-like leaders and engaging in all manner of cruel behavior as a result, thank you very much.
At this point, I am most likely not going to read this book’s sequel as originally planned, as all indication so far is that the sequel is in a similar vein and I honestly don’t think I can take another couple hundred pages of the same kind of stuff any time soon (it also doesn’t help that the reviews of the sequel have been largely “not great” so definitely makes me less motivated to read it).
Since part of my less-than-enjoyable experience reading this book was more of a “it’s me rather than the book,” issue, in all fairness, I decided to go for the “happy medium” of 3 stars for the rating. Those who are interested in this one should definitely pick it up, though I would suggest going with the print or e-book version instead of the audiobook if possible.
