Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

As a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery, like that of the homeless ‘Little Match Girl’ in the Hans Christian Anderson story. When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say: ‘Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!’ In school, when they were trying to make us work harder, the teachers often said: ‘You are lucky to have a school to go to and books to read. In the capitalist countries children have to work to support their hungry families.’ Often when adults wanted us to accept something they would say that people in the West wanted it, but could not get it, and therefore we should appreciate our good fortune. I came to think this way automatically. When I saw a girl in my class wearing a new kind of pink translucent raincoat I had never seen, I thought how nice it would be to swap my commonplace old wax-paper umbrella for one. But I immediately castigated myself for this ‘bourgeois’ tendency, and wrote in my diary: ‘Think of all the children in the capitalist world—they can’t even think of owning an umbrella!’ In my mind foreigners were terrifying. All Chinese have black hair and brown eyes, so they regard differently coloured hair and eyes as strange. My image of a foreigner was more or less the official stereotype: a man with red, unkempt hair, strange-coloured eyes, very, very long nose, stumbling around drunk, pouring Coca-Cola into his mouth from a bottle, with his l...