Rating: 5 stars
Cover synopsis: Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistantly gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th Century.
What an incredible story. This is a non-fiction book that is so rich in detail you feel as if you are there. Which is not necessarily a good thing, because the details are often disturbing displays of a nation's collective conscious failing -- humanity falling to its basest and cruellest instincts in a struggle to survive.
Chang takes us through her grandmother's life as a warlord's concubine, her parents' struggles as idealistic Communitists and her own eye-witness accounts of Mao's Red Guards and the Culturual Revolution. Incredibly fascinating and heart-breaking. It really made me think about the dark forces at work in our world. How Satan and his destroying angels are real, and how they can truly poison the hearts and minds of people. You wouldn't think that God's creatures would be capable of such atrocities, but so it is.
Through it all though, there are heroes. There is hope. I loved when the author's father was faced with the choice to stand up for what's right, even though it could jeopardize his family's well-being, his wife asks how he could do this to them. He retorts that it's better than jeopardizing his soul. If only more of mankind were concerned with their eternal welfare rather than their temporal affairs, think of what a world we would have. Or how different history would read.
