JUNG CHANG TURNS SIXTY

JUNG CHANG

b. March 25, 1952

JUNG CHANG

张戎

The author of WILD SWANS (and co-author of MAO: The Unknown Story) has an additional reason to celebrate as WILD SWANS the play, having had its world premiere in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently, is soon to open in London, where Dr. Chang has made her home for some years.

The Guardian had this comment on the initial impact of the book on which the play is based:

"There was a moment in the early 1990s when everybody everywhere seemed to be reading Wild Swans. The biggest grossing non-fiction paperback in publishing history, it sold more than 10m copies worldwide and was translated into 30 languages. ... Published two years after the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, Jung Chang's family memoir, following the lives of three generations of women through China's terrible 20th century, arrived at just the right time to satisfy a readership hungry for information about this unknown country."

For more about the play, including leads to more sources, see here and here and here and here.

WILD SWANS THE PLAY II

JUNG CHANG'S

WILD SWANS

AT THE

AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATER

TRANSPLANTING RICE BY HAND

CHINA 1981

This is not one of the images used in the American Repertory Theater production of Jung Chang's WILD SWANS, which I saw tonight, but there is a very similar scene played out by father and daughter and rice shoots, with a video clip of such rice transplantation being projected behind them.

Kudos to the actors, who give terrific performances, and to the American Repertory Company. Jung Chang said the play was a new work of art, and she is being proven right. What could have been just a set of tableaux of Chinese history since "Liberation," however cleverly done, comes to life and touches the heart.

Some video clips of the play can be found here; a photograph of the author and some more information, here. WILD SWANS the play runs through March 11 in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the theater's website is here.

THE WILD SWANS OF JUNG CHANG LAND ON THE STAGE AT AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATER

"WILD SWANS"

AUTHOR

JUNG CHANG

"WILD SWANS" THE PLAY

which had its world premiere

the American Repertory Theater

Cambridge, Massachusetts

yesterday

is based on her 1991 book

Some background on the play, including information about the playwright and director, and about how an eight-hundred page memoir subtitled "Three Daughters of China" (Jung Chang and her mother and grandmother) was worked into a two-hour drama focusing on the husband and wife of the middle generation, is to be found here and here and here. The theater's WILD SWANS website is here; the production runs through March 11 in the U.S. and then moves to the U.K.

The Boston Globe now has a review, here.

Some impressions of the play, seen March 1, here.