Blending the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history, Wild Swans has become a bestselling classic in thirty languages, with more than ten million copies sold. The story of three generations in twentieth-century China, it is an engrossing record of Mao`s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love.587~ describes the life of her grandmother, a warlord`s concubine; her mother`s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents` experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a "barefoot doctor," a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving x and ultimately uplifting x detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.