In the emergent society of consumption and mass media the older Marxian notion of history as social and political practice is receding from public purview and China's past is being dissolved into spectacles. Increasingly abstracted into economic, administrative, and exchange processes, the matrix of meaning and values that used to connect individuals to society and the past to the present has lost its self-evidence and cohesive power. Ruptures of the social fabrics accompany China's rapid pace of development and its integration into the global market, severing the connection between cultural memory and history. In conclusion, Chang's book is illuminating about the triangular relationship between the diasporan intellectual, the homeland, and transnational memory space at the time of writing and publishing the book. Secondly, it is retrospective memory, mediated by the author's anglicized perspective. First of all, it showcases essentialized national culture and history and managing trauma as symptoms of cultural deficiency.

This paper argues that the book is a bicultural product, involving constant negotiation between the site of experience and the place of writing. However, such a perception leaves out narrative politics and simplifies the multilayered process of writing in the diaspora. The way that academic and non-academic circles in the West readily embrace it betrays an unqualified equation of the book to a reliable source of knowledge regarding Chinese culture and history. Jung Chang's Wild Swans: Three Daughters of Chinaachieved spectacular success and received worldwide critical acclaim.

Novel wild swans