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A penetrating personal account of the brutalities of 20th century Chinese communism by Marjorie Arons-Barron
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang is a family history and autobiography of three generations of a Chinese family, spanning most of the 20th century in China. Published in 1991, the 650-page tome hadn’t come to my attention until recently. I delved in and found it fascinating. Released just after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and the massacre of student protesters in Tiananmen Square, Wild Swans tells the story of Chang’s grandmother, mother and herself against the backdrop of Chinese history.
Chang’s grandmother was a concubine, taken at the age of 15 as one of the several “wives” of a powerful warlord in Manchuria. She later married a highly respected doctor, and worked at keeping the family together during the war to drive the Japanese out of Manchuria and later under the hardships inflicted by Mao Zedong. The anti-Japanese Chinese were split. The Kuomintang, nationalists led by Chiang Kai Shek, were recognized as the new government of China by both the Soviet Union and the United States. Their power base was largely in the cities. The Communist stronghold was mostly in the countryside. After the Japanese were ousted, the Communists expanded and solidified their control and set about systematically persecuting the Kuomintang as counter-revolutionaries.
Author Chang’s mother was disgusted by the Kuomintang elite’s displays of wealth when others couldn’t feed their families. She became a firm believer in Mao’s communist philosophy and married Chang’s father, a poet and intellectual who became a top official in the Communist Party.
Initially the Communists redistributed land from affluent Kuomintang to peasants and provided grain and coal to the most destitute. But, as Mao became the iron-fisted patriarch, the radicalized Party set the terms not just for the politics of the country but for personal lives as well. Chang’s attachment to her mother and the rest of her family was seen as bourgeois weakness. Chang’s father was an absolutist, putting party over family and seeing suffering as the road to becoming a better communist.
Using scores of tape recordings made by her mother, Chang writes in great detail of the Communists’ betrayal of their early promises: the brutality with which they extracted party loyalty from all residents, the suffocating atmosphere of repression, deprivation of rights of speech, the barbarity unleashed by manipulating people’s hatreds, the crushing of culture, the smothering of education, and the end of individual expression in China.
The economy failed as well. Mao’s so-called “Great Leap Forward,” an attempt to move from an agrarian to an industrial society, collectivized farms and nationalized heavy industries (like steel). The program crushed food production and commerce, generating more profound poverty and famine. (At least 30 million died from starvation alone. More than that would die later from the purges of the Cultural Revolution.) Quality of health care and other benefits depended solely on status within the Communist Party.
As a student, Chang initially followed in her parents’ footsteps, but she found herself increasingly turned off by what had become the personality cult of Mao, even after Mao had reversed his brutalist economic policies. More than anything, she wanted to focus on her studies, to learn English, to read literature (some of which she subversively acquired through a black market in books.) Intellectuals were denounced as “capitalist-roaders” and sent to the country for reeducation as peasants, humiliated, subjected to beatings and worse.
Mao called on his Red Guards to smash up “old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits.” The sixties were a reign of terror, with Mao turning against even the existing Communist hierarchy. His goal was for everyone to be indoctrinated with loyalty to him alone rather than the Party. Anyone (including the author’s father) who spoke out against what was happening would be imprisoned, tortured or killed. Chang’s father was in and out of brutal detention, sinking into psychosis for a time. Her mother, separately, was in and out of detention between 1967 and 1969. Both were kept in detention camps from ’69 through ’72.
Chang is surprisingly devoid of self-pity despite having grown up with absentee parents. As she approached her 16th birthday (in 1968), she started writing poetry. One of her brothers engaged in black market activities; another brother joined a street gang. As she puts it, over these horrific years, she said, her “indoctrination was collapsing.”
She began to see the perpetual class conflict and the misery to which the Chinese people had been subjected in a more realistic light. She goes into fascinating detail about the influence Madame Mao wielded in exacerbating the repression, especially of women, and the relentlessness of Chairman Mao in destroying centuries of Chinese culture.
After Mao’s death in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping’s “rehabilitation,” the author competed successfully for university acceptance and ultimately for the opportunity to study in the West. Her mother’s visit to her in Britain in 1988 provided the chance to learn the details of the family’s history that make this book so noteworthy
Some readers may find there are too many details bogging down the narrative. I found they just make the intensity of the privation described and the daily struggles for survival that much more real. It also makes China’s emergence today as a world-leading economic power all the more remarkable and the tenacious pattern of government repression more understandable. Wild Swans has been translated into dozens of languages, but it should come as no surprise that it is banned in mainland China.
Lowell Politics: August 23, 2026
The Lowell City Council last met on Tuesday, August 11, 2026. I was away that week, so I was unable to write about that meeting on the following Sunday. However, I have since watched a recording of the meeting on YouTube and will write about it here.
The council covered many topics with no single issue dominating the meeting. Consequently, here are some comments on a range of things covered that night:
Separate motions on the structure of council subcommittees, one by Councilor Belinda Juran and the other by Councilor Dan Rourke, were discussed together. A big challenge is scheduling and holding subcommittee meetings. Each subcommittee meeting requires someone from the City Clerk’s office to be present to take minutes and do all the other things the clerk’s office is responsible for. Also, subcommittee meetings typically require the presence of other city employees so their schedules and availability must be considered.
I also believe everyone values recording the meeting on video so residents who can’t attend the meeting can see what’s going on. Since two rooms at city hall – the city council chamber and the mayor’s reception room – are outfitted with cameras and recording capabilities, meetings must be held in one of them. However, subcommittees compete with the Planning Board, the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Conservation Commission, the License Commission and other boards and commissions whose meetings are recorded.
Councilor Rourke identified the number of subcommittees as an obstacle. According to the city’s website, here are the current council subcommittees:
- Arts & Culture/Special Events
- Auditor & Clerk Oversight & Personnel
- Cannabis Control
- Economic Development
- Environment & Flood Issues
- Finance
- Frontrunner City Program
- Housing
- Municipal Facilities
- Neighborhoods
- Non-profit Organizations
- Parks & Recreation
- Public Safety
- Rules & Election Law
- Senior Citizen
- Substance Abuse
- Technology & Utilities
- Transportation
- Veterans
- Youth Services
- Zoning
That’s 21 subcommittees, each with a chair and two members.
Councilor Rourke suggested the existing 21 could be consolidated into six subcommittees and that membership could be increased to five councilors (making the quorum needed to hold a meeting just three). He further suggested that if the council were to make its summertime two-meetings-per-month permanent, the off weeks could be used for subcommittee meetings.
Councilor Juran’s motion was directed to the Rules Subcommittee while Rourke’s was a suggestion to the entire council, so it’s unclear when these will return to a regular council meeting. Still, it will be interesting to hear further discussion of the pros and cons of this concept.
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At the July 28, 2026, meeting the city council rejected City Manager Tom Golden’s request to transfer money to the city’s Health and Human Services Department so it can continue to pay its lease at 107 Merrimack Street. That night, the vote to make the transfer was seven in favor and four against so at first, everyone assumed it had passed. But someone immediately spoke up and said the transfer required a two-third majority to pass. That would have been eight votes. It only received seven, so the ruling was the transfer failed.
At this meeting, Councilor Sean McDonough, one of the four councilors to oppose the transfer back on July 28, had a motion to reconsider that vote. (A motion to reconsider can only be made by someone who was on the prevailing side of the original vote which McDonough was since he voted against the transfer.)
The discussion on the motion to reconsider unearthed multiple points of confusion. First, it seems that the original vote did not need a super majority to prevail but just a simple majority. With seven votes, it did achieve a simple majority so it should have been deemed to have passed that evening. When asked about the consequences of that, the City Solicitor advised that even though the original ruling on the need for a super majority was incorrect, no councilor challenged it that evening, so there was no recourse to now correct the ruling.
Next, both the city manager and the city solicitor suggested that the “cleanest way” to revisit this was for the city manager to bring the same vote back to the council at its next meeting. That prompted questions about the finality of council votes. If councilors vote against something, can it just be brought back repeatedly until a different result is achieved? That doesn’t seem quite right but wasn’t acknowledged as an impediment. (Perhaps the erroneous ruling on the first try distinguishes this issue.)
Then, the city manager explained that the contemplated move of the HHS department from 107 Merrimack Street to the city-owned building at 40 Market Street required negotiations with the union employees affected by the move since it would constitute a change in working conditions. I believe those negotiations have been scheduled but not held as of the August 11th meeting.
Finally, Councilor McDonough asked, if the same vote was coming back to the council anyway, was there a need to act on his motion to reconsider the original vote, or would it even be advisable to vote on the motion to reconsider. It seemed with no other way to dispose of the motion, a roll call was taken, and 10 councilors supported the motion to reconsider while none opposed it (Council Kim Scott was not at the meeting). I assume this means some of the councilors who opposed the transfer are now willing to support it, but one never knows until the next vote is taken.
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Councilors were officially notified at this meeting that the Cambodia Town neighborhood of Lowell has been designated a Transformative Development Initiative (TDI) district by MassDevelopment. This is a program intended to help targeted commercial districts in Gateway Cities in Massachusetts.
The designation provides several types of support over its three-year existence. First, it funds a “TDI Fellow” which is a fulltime employee with economic development training who is assigned to the community to help coordinate between local government, small business owners, property owners, and nonprofits. Second, the TDI designation makes technical and planning assistance from the state available. Third, TDI provides funding and grants for storefront improvement, placemaking projects, and some financing.
The TDI program is highly competitive which makes it extra impressive that the city landed this one for Cambodia Town since Lowell was the beneficiary of a TDI designation for the Acre back in 2022. I won’t get into the details of all the benefits that brought except to confirm that it did bring many benefits to the Acre neighborhood, benefits that will hopefully be duplicated in Cambodia Town (which for those unfamiliar with the place, includes the Middlesex and Branch Street stretches near Clemente Park and Pailin Plaza and, I believe, Cupples Square.)
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The council also received a report looking back on the employee layoffs that occurred in June. In all, 23 city employees lost their jobs which the administration calculates saved $1.9 million in the current fiscal year.
The report goes into considerable detail about the process that was followed, the timeline, and the factors considered in making the decisions. It also explains how most of the city budget comes from fixed costs that cannot be cut. This puts greater pressure on non-discretionary items such as salaries.
As for lessons learned, the report identified three. (Since I don’t fully understand exactly what two of them mean, I’ll include all three verbatim from the report):
- More frequent mid-year budget updates to departments to reduce the scale of year-end adjustments.
- Enhanced communication with unions and department leaders regarding fiscal conditions and potential workforce impacts.
- Additional cross-departmental workforce planning to minimize reductions in force.
Although I didn’t see it in the report, City Manager Golden explained that the abrupt notification of the effected employees was driven by the timing of the presentation of the budget to councilors. Someone realized at the last minute that since the proposed budget would omit the names of the employees who were being laid off, once the budget document became public, the absence of those employee names from the document would indicate that they were to lose their jobs. Since employees finding that out from the media or from seeing something online would be terrible, the administration speedily notified the employees in person on an accelerated timeline, hence the hurried nature of the notifications.
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Another interesting report dealt with the procedure for making a claim for damage caused by a pothole or a plow. The report provides considerable detail on how to make a claim and what type of supporting documentation would help resolve the claim quickly.
Importantly, it states that if the damage occurred on a state-owned road, the claim must be presented to the state and not to the city. (Although the state is only liable for personal injuries, not property damage, so it would have to have been a very big pothole.)
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A couple of other council meeting items to briefly note:
In a discussion on the state of upkeep of the UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center, City Manager Golden mentioned that a challenge to finding a new use (and owner) of the property is that it’s “underwater.” In real estate, that usually means the property owner owes more money to its lender than the property is now worth. In this case, I think it meant the property is worth less now than when the University of Massachusetts Building Authority bought it. To confirm that, I looked at the numbers. In 2009, UMBA paid $14.8 million to the prior owner, LHG LLC. According to the city assessor’s website, the ICC is now assessed for $10.1 million (which is $4.7 million less than the state paid for the property 17 years ago). Golden added that the value deficit is a substantial obstacle to the redevelopment of the property.
Another issue was identified during a discussion of the recent Puerto Rican Festival which turned out to be less than the organizers had hoped due, in part, to communication problems with the city. I couldn’t follow all the details, but it seemed like the organizers had used the city’s online reservation website to reserve the dates, thought they had everything confirmed, and proceeded accordingly. However, there was an unpaid bill for police services at a prior festival, so the city did not deem the event reservation to be finalized because of that unpaid bill. But because of turnover among the organizers, the current group was unaware of the unpaid bill and was relying on the confirmed reservation from the website, hence the confusion. It seems like the city’s reservation system should flag past due bills to avoid a replay of this in the future.
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This week in my Seen & Heard column, I reviewed a big new exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts called “American Stories: Revolution to Rockwell”; I commented on a blog post on “Why the Backlash Against Data Centers is So Potent”; noted a NYT article on unacknowledged brain injuries sustained by crewmembers of Coast Guard life boats; reviewed a book on The Enlightenment (which I read because I feel our current national trajectory is dragging us back to the Middle Ages in many ways); and analyzed the consequences of adopting Daylight Savings Time during the entire year.
I’ll be leading several Lowell history tours in the coming weeks for anyone who is interested:
Saturday, September 12, 2026, at 10am – Walking tour of the Tyler Park Historic District. The tour is free with no registration required. Just meet at the park. This tour is part of the Friends of Tyler Park “Autumn Market.” (For GPS purposes, Tyler Park’s address is 748 Westford Street.)
Saturday, September 26 & Sunday, September 27, 2026, both at 10am – Walking tour of Lowell Cemetery. The tour takes 90 minutes and begins at the Lawrence Street entrance to the cemetery. It is free and requires no registration. The same tour is offered on both days.
Saturday, October 17, 2026 – “Secrets of Lowell Cemetery” tour which is part of the of the Poe in Lowell Festival. Edgar Allan Poe came to Lowell at least three times to lecture but also to spend time with a female friend who is buried in Lowell Cemetery. Learn their story and the stories of others involved in their orbit. This tour is free and begins at the Knapp Avenue entrance of the cemetery (77 Knapp Avenue).
Fast Food, Spindle City
Fast Food, Spindle City
By Leo Racicot
In 1965, when radio and newspaper ads announced that a new type of eating place was coming to town, area excitement was high. The restaurant was called McDonald’s and promised to offer fast, cheap service, new kinds of food flavors different from the diner and restaurant fare people were accustomed to. McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Lowell on Rogers Street near the Tewksbury line in the summer of ’65. Always up for a new adventure, Aunt Marie headed her Rambler toward it first chance she got, with al of us in tow. I can still remember our mother pointing out, “There it is!” when she spied the matching pair of Golden Arches over to the right, The first sight of what would become a familiar part not only of America’s but also of the world’s landscapes. Once inside, we admired the look of the place; spanking clean, colorful, bright. Equally colorful and bright was the restaurant’s mascot, Ronald McDonald, the clown standing outside the front door handing out balloons. The place was packed. After sampling the new and unusual hamburgers, fries and a soda, we admitted it was a special place, a special taste we’d never tasted before. The service was, indeed, fast and amazingly affordable. We were to go back, as a family many times in the years ahead and I still stop in to a McDonald’s whenever I want a nosh. In summertime, I especially like treating myself to one of their Soft Serve vanilla ice cream cones for its airy texture and flavorful, almost paper-thin cones.
With the instant success of this new-fangled kind of dining came other fast food joints to Lowell. Howdy sprang up at the corner of Dutton and Thorndike Streets across the street from where the Dutton Dunkin’ Donuts now stands. My friend, Anthony Kalil and I, would ride our bikes up for a snack while “on the road”. I can still taste the distinctive flavor of a Howdy burger and shake. Its 10 cent hamburgers and 7 cent fries were out-of-this-world. When I was living in Las Vegas, the burgers the restaurant chain, Carl’s Jr. served reminded me of the taste of Howdy burgers. Unfortunately, Howdy’s didn’t stick around for long; it closed its doors in, I think, around 1970. It took a while to get used to the fact that it had disappeared.
Burger King became a alternative to McDonald’s; it was popular in a different way; its food had a char-broiled flavor as compared with McDonald’s salty, more savory flavors.
Wendy’s chain of restaurants boasted what founder, Dave Thomas, boasted were real hamburgers made with real beef, the implication being that other chains used meat substitutes in their food. He used an image of his daughter as his logo and in advertisements giving an impression of a healthier, sunnier more wholesome American vibe. Wendy’s, though inexpensive, was the slightly more expensive of the chains, the fancy fast food place. Adding to its popularity was an open salad bar from which customers could pick and choose from a dozen or more items and could return to replenish their plates as many times as they liked. Wendy’s topped this feature by replacing it with the Superbar. The Superbar consisted of three, distinct stations: The Garden Spot, featuring lettuce, diced tomatoes, cucumbers, bacon bits, boiled eggs, cheeses, and multiple dressing options. The bacon bits were my favorite. The Mexican Fiesta: A do-it-yourself taco and nacho bar equipped with taco shells, seasoned ground beef, nacho chips, shredded cheddar, salsa, and jalapenos. And last but not least, Pasta Pasta, an Italian station that included spaghetti, fettuccine Alfredo, marinara sauce, and even pizza. Wendy’s also offered up what’s become a familiar staple, a baked potato. Whenever he eats at Wendy’s, Joe likes to order the baked potato along with a small bowl of its classic chili. a hearty combination. What we liked about Wendy’s is that, unlike other fast food eateries, it had plastic Tiffany lamps hanging from the ceiling. One Christmas, I bought Joe a mock one at Miles next door to Chock Full of Nuts on Summer Street in downtown Boston. I think somewhere, he still has it. At Wendy’s, you never had to clean up after yourself or throw your items away; the “help” did that for you, like in real restaurants. I still stop in at the Wendy’s on Arlington Street after leaving nearby Parker Library to grab a snack while waiting for my bus home.
A final observation. after monopolizing the food culture for decades, fast service, cheap prices have given way to much slower service, higher costs. The other day I waited half-an-hour for a breakfast wrap and a small coffee. The guy in front of me who’d been waiting even longer for his order turned around saying, “Remember when fast food was fast?? Since Covid, wait staff concentrate more on the Drive-Thru line, less on the In-Store customer. I try steering clear of those self- service kiosks. I’m just no good with them. One time, I tried ordering a small coffee at a McDonald’s kiosk and out came a full hotcakes breakfast for me with a large McFlurry. Oy! Woe to the customer who just wants to order a hash brown. Get ready to be turned upside-down by a talking machine that wants your name/rank and serial number. Oh, and whether you want to donate your change to charity! The fast food experience isn’t what it used to be.
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Burger King

Howdy’s

Ronald McDonald

Wendy’s logo

Wendy’s Pseudo Tiffany Lamp

Wendy’s SuperBar
