Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Jung Chang's 1991 family memoir that interweaves the lives of three generations of women in twentieth-century China: her grandmother, a concubine to a provincial warlord; her mother, a Communist Party official during the Cultural Revolution; and Chang herself, a Red Guard turned disillusioned intellectual who fled to the West. The narrative spans the fall of the Qing dynasty, the Japanese occupation, Mao's rise, and the Cultural Revolution, using the family's personal experiences — persecution, betrayal, survival — as a lens into China's cataclysmic modern history. Banned in mainland China, it has sold over 15 million copies worldwide.