A heartrending read, as one would expect. Wild Swans follows the lives of three generations of Chinese women. The eldest is sold to a warlord as a concubine shortly before Japan takes over Manchuria. She eventually escapes and later marries a doctor, with whom she raises her daughter during first Japanese hegemony and then the Kuomintang. The daughter becomes an activist in the Communist movement, and eventually falls in love with a prominent communist, whom she then marries. Their relationship is constantly fraught with accusations from other communists about putting love before the movement, etc. Jung Chang describes her father as "incorruptible" - he refuses to give her mother any help or show favoritism, up to and including not wanting to give her medicine for tuberculosis while she is pregnant because the hospital only has enough for one person (or not even that).

This faith in the communist party and concept is repaid in years of tense suspicions, endless detentions and questionings because of the family's connection to the Kuomintang (y'know...while they were living under Kuomintang rule...and had to be connected...) and also petty revenge on the part of some of the people in power. Also, there is the Great Leap Forward resulting in famine as farming comes to a halt to produce iron, and then the Cultural Revolution, which ends in most of the people formerly in administrative or educational positions in work camps and the country's infrastructure in tatters.

Chang follows these events both as a detached historian, and as a young woman growing up in this culture of repression and duplicity. She is constantly clear about what was really happening, politically, but also about how she felt about it, and how long it took her to become aware of what was really happening and what Mao's role was. She is also eminently clear about the strain on her parents' relationship and the invasion into the privacy of their marriage which is endlessly impinged upon by the Party.