Fly, Wild Swans

Chang returns to the territory of her landmark Wild Swans three decades later, this time centering her elderly mother, whom she has been unable to visit in China since 2018, and turning the same unflinching scrutiny on her own life and career that she once trained on her family's history. Reviewers have called it her most nakedly personal book, but also noted a crowding problem: so many people and settings move through the narrative that some fail to register individually, a side effect of trying to compress both a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese politics and an intimate mother-daughter reckoning into one volume. The book is strongest exactly where Wild Swans was, in the granular, specific memory.