I made myself read the international bestseller Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, a memoir by Jung Chang (Touchstone edition; Simon and Schuster, 2003.) Why? So– I might know real historic details of life under a totalitarian regime such as Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.”
The daughter of a high Communist official, Jung tells her personal family story of the excruciatingly painful suffering of the Chinese people and her family, whose Father even had this VIP government role.
Growing up as a young girl until her early twenties, Jung endured oppressive physical and psychological conditions: forced communal living and separated marriages (even high Communist officials could not live together with their spouses).
Forced concubines for many. Ruthless, harassing local and national leaders, food rationing, and starvation. And arduous journeys by foot for registration papers to government offices and required relocations to new compounds.
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She experienced the suicides of family and friends, incarceration, and the mental breakdown of her Father when betrayed by Communist officials. The abject cruelty of public shaming rituals staged in a public square for critics of the government or those suspected of disloyalty.
The constant surveillance of every day activities by officials and even neighbors. Mindless broadcasts of intercom propaganda blasting on town loudspeakers. Massive corruption in all levels of government.
The government manipulated conflicts/tensions between people and groups (communists vs. “rightists,” peasants vs. highbrow, neighbor vs. neighbor, ethnic group vs. other ethnic groups, etc.–sound familiar?)
Young Jung finally leaves China in 1978 with a prestigious scholarship award to Britain, where she meets her future husband, London’s Jon Halliday.
It seems incredulous that she survived and excelled amid such misery. She was gifted with extraordinary fortitude and inner intelligence.
With a maturing conscience, she learns from her experiences and discerns the evil manipulation of Dictator Mao, who continually propagandized as a “God” in her early school days.
She writes how nature consoled her—the natural beauty and life-giving landscape of flora and fauna among the plains and mountainous Chinese landscape. Recording her mystical and meditative times of solitude in nature, she often preferred being away from people, where she could think and rely on her own instincts.
Like Jung Chang, New Hampshire’s Lily Tang Williams is a Chinese-born survivor of the same totalitarian regime known as the “CCP.” With extraordinary fortitude and intelligence, Lily Tang escaped to FREEDOM in 1988 when she came to study in America.
She later met her future husband, John Williams, and her family now lives in Weare, New Hampshire. She travels throughout America with her passionate message for “Victims of Communism.” Running for U.S. Congress in NH District 2, Lily has a great purpose: to save America from an emerging tyrannical government acquiescence to Congressional and corporate elites colluding with the CCP and Communist practices.
Lily Tang Williams will not cave in as many do (even Republicans.) She knows better.
I trust Lily more than the other District 2 Congressional candidates. Only she can shock Congress out of collusion with a cultural revolution in America.
