Jung Chang’s grandmother’s feet were bound as a child, and she was given to a warlord general as a concubine. As the general lay dying, she fled with her infant daughter. That daughter grew up to become active in the Communist movement’s civil war against the Kuomintang. Following the Communist victory in 1949 she and her husband became senior officials. Jung Chang, their daughter, was raised in the privileged circles of China’s Communist elite, but was to take the unimaginable step of questioning Mao himself. Her parents were denounced and tortured, and she herself was exiled to the edge of the Himalayas.
