In Wild Swans Jung 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.

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