Wild Swans Literary Analysis

Bao Qin’s Never Ending Adversities Wild Swans is a classic full of drama that incorporates adversity for its characters to face throughout the whole book. As defined in the dictionary, adversity is a misfortune with hardship and suffering. This is important to know before the burdens the characters of this book faced are listed since the characters of this book lived in China. Their homeland provided many harsh conditions for the heroes of this book to even think about facing them. While this book spanned three generations of the author’s family, the story presented many difficulties for Yu Fang, Bao Qin and Jung Chang. Although Bao Qin made it look easy to face these problems, the troubles of her family and the political scene in China separated her from the rest when in comes to dealing with hardships. Throughout her life Bao Qin deals with numerous problems, but also other individuals rely on her to help them and at the same time she has to deal with the daily annoyances that they bring. For instance, she struggles daily to get along with her husband who never seems to take her as a priority, which is signified by her thoughts that his “first priority was to the revolution, and she was disappointed” (page 159). Wang Yu, Bao’s husband, only seems to care about his job, making sure he is portrayed as a good Communist. Unfortunately, he never seems to have any concern about his wife. Eventually Bao Qin has enough and says to her husband, “you are a good Communist, but a rotten husband” (page 219). In those times of Maoist China, any sort of support was essential to surviving the atrocities of that regime, and Bao Qin expects her husband at least to help her get through the evil times. However, Wang only seems to hurt her in every aspect of her life, questioning her every decision. These unsupportive decisions by Wang leads to many emotional swings for Bao Qin (including depressions) resulting in Bao Qin telling him “can’t you stand up for me just once” (page