While not perfect, it fills a beautiful gap in English-language literature on the plight of individual families during China's turmoil in the 20th century. To read how much society not only changed, but how war, politicization and indoctrination affected everyone down to the smallest individual is humbling and distressing. To see the amount of personal vindictiveness, manipulation and downright lack of hope in the lives of ordinary Chinese gives you new perspective on how the Chinese view their government today. Because while China today isn't perfect, you can see how after the instability and downright terror faced by families only 50 years ago, today's communist party is an entirely different animal.

One of my favorite books -probably top 20 of everything I've read. The characters are amazing and the mother daughter grandmother relationships are so intriguing and applicable to any culture, but is is a fascinating insight into Chinese culture and the changes both socially and politically that impact a family.

A friend loaned me this book and I remember being enthralled. It's an excellent tale.

That it took me months to get through this book is no commentary on its readability and interest. Very glad to have read this and learned so much about Communist China through much of the 1900's. Would recommend to everyone who likes nonfiction sagas.

This was so good. There’s nothing like history told by a person who has lived through it. Jung Chang not only tells her own story – living through the Cultural Revolution in China – but that of her mother and her grandmother.

Her grandmother was the concubine of a warlord in Manchuria, but managed to escape with her infant daughter, and then married a doctor. Jung Chang’s mother lived under the Kuomintang and worked undercover for the Communist rebels, then became an official in the Communist Party in Sichuan, and finally was denounced and persecuted. Jung Chang was one of five children, and she witnessed her father’s transition from a highly principled and idealistic official to a broken man. Gradually Jung Chang herself lost her belief in Mao.

I was mesmerized, shocked and educated by this memoir, and would recommend it to anyone who wants a more complete picture of China during the 50s and 60s.

Impressive.
Between three generations this family saw China go from warlords to communism and dealt had to try playing by sets of rules which were constantly changing. The family's ambitions were strikingly similar to any family in the world's: happiness, security, a better life for their children, peace, justice, food and shelter. What's amazing is how few of these things they were able to obtain through no real fault of their own.
The shifting rules are the real draw to the book as the people are not nearly as exceptional as their circumstances. The grandmother belonged to the last generations to bind their feet then became a concubine and dealt with all of the social restrictions imposed on her status. Then she is moved to Manchuria, whose culture seems to be excessively tradition-laden even to the Chinese. These traditions seem to make winners of no one: those who do well by them are jealously opposed by those who do not. There is a constant struggle of one side imposing authority and the other trying to undermine their superiors. It's relentless and exhausting for the people in the book and makes the reader constantly wonder how they would do at cultural navigation if they found themselves in these circumstances.
Then the Japanese take over, then the Kuomintang and then Mao's forces. Each time the rules change and any connections made with the previous authorities in order to survive can offend the next group that takes over. Each time the powers-that-be interfere with people living their lives and threaten their subsistence.
The mother and her husband start off as members of the Communist party and do quite well for a time. Then Mao's purges after the Great Leap Forward and especially during the Cultural Revolution throw everyone's lives into uncertainty. People rise and fall, are hailed and then punished often with little rhyme, reason or predictability. The father of the family is more loyal to the concept of communism than Mao and gains respect, resentment and humiliating penalties for these convictions. Much is made of the fear and turmoil during that time and the façade that normal people had to create in order to avoid destroying themselves and their families.
The author has done much research and you can see why she subsequently published a book on the life of Mao. Also, for someone who only started studying English intensely at university, her writing is excellent. She definitely takes some artistic license as she articulates specific feelings of relatives long deceased or political figures' motivations; neither of which which can ever be known for certain. She makes no effort to hide her opinions of political leaders for the sake of supposed impartiality.
These things, however, do not deter from the pleasure of reading a well-written book about a fascinating time and place in history. Her perspective of people effected but powerless by the politics of their time is compelling. The duality of what people said and did versus what they actually thought during the Cultural Revolution really comes across and being a very complex and human situation. We are lucky that someone with literary talent lived through these times, researched their history and took the years necessary to write about this intelligently and compellingly.
Highly recommended!

I didn't particularly enjoy this book. I know that I'm in a minority in that opinion though. It's not an easy book to read. It plods along, but is fascinating and unsettling. It was interesting to me to see the changes that occurred in China in just a few short generations.

Historically it's fascinating and follows the lives of a woman and her mother and grandmother through the reign and fall of warlords, the Japanese occupation, and the rise of Communism and Chairman Mao.

But, more than anything, it's heartbreakingly sad. It's a well-written, interesting book. I just didn't like it.