Blending the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history, Chang’s autobiographical family history has become an international bestseller although it remains banned in China. She illuminates a short span of extremely tumultuous years in Chinese history—from the imperial regime, to the rise of Communism and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution—through her grandmother’s, her mother’s, and her own personal experiences of the ensuing political maelstrom. Chang’s prose is gripping, evocative, and particularly poignant in the section where she describes her own disillusionment with Mao’s policies: within a few short years, she went from being a faithful Red Guard to watching her parents get publicly shamed during the Cultural Revolution.
