Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
InWild SwansJung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and  insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the  political maelstrom of China during the 20th century. Chang's grandmother was a  warlord's concubine. Her gently raised mother struggled with hardships in the early days  of Mao's revolution and rose, like her husband, to a prominent position in the Communist  Party before being denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself marched,  worked, and breathed for Mao until doubt crept in over the excesses of his policies and  purges. Born just a few decades apart, their lives overlap with the end of the warlords'  regime and overthrow of the Japanese occupation, violent struggles between the  Kuomintang and the Communists to carve up China, and, most poignant for the author,  the vicious cycle of purges orchestrated by Chairman Mao that discredited and crushed  millions of people, including her parents.