Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China

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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. Outstanding... As with her previous books, most famously Wild Swans, it is Chang’s sympathetic, storyteller’s eye — her attention to deeply human detail during the most extraordinary circumstances — that makes her work remarkable. Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is another triumph. William Moore, Evening Standard

For a biography supposedly focussing on the three most famous women in Chinese history I found it strange that the initial chapters deal with men (Sun Yat-sen and the girls’ father). And this, I think, is the problem with the book. The sisters are viewed through the lens of their role relative to men, rather than in their own right. And so the book has become a history of Chinese politics and the roles the men in the sisters’ lives played, rather than a group biography of these three remarkable women. Once upon a time, a wealthy man lived in Shanghai with his devoutly Christian wife, with whom he had three sons and three daughters. The girls grew up to be educated, cultured and stylish, and their family’s money and status attracted many aspiring suitors. In an era when China was experiencing significant political upheaval, each sister married an influential man and secured her position at the top of society. Their selection of husbands appeared to crystallize an essential aspect of each woman’s character, as summed up by an oft-repeated saying: “One loved money, one loved power and one loved China.” To say more would turn this review into a summary of the entire book but it’s hard to resist when its narrative proved to be so utterly compelling, even down to the few brief mentions of Mao as he existed in the shadows during the days of power of Sun and Chiang Kai-shek.The subject of an earlier biography by Jung Chang, the Dowager Empress was in reality a far worthier person than she is generally portrayed as being. “A former imperial concubine, this extraordinary woman had seized power through a palace coup after her husband’s death in 1861, whereupon she had begun to bring the medieval country into the modern age.” After earl All three sisters enjoyed tremendous privilege and glory, but also endured constant mortal danger. They showed great courage and experienced passionate love, as well as despair and heartbreak. They remained close emotionally, even when they embraced opposing political camps and Ching-ling dedicated herself to destroying her two sisters' worlds. The complicated history of China during this period is little-known to most Westerners, so this readable book helps fill a gap. By hooking it onto personalities, Jung Chang has been able to chart a comprehensible way through these decades and an immense mass of information that could otherwise be difficult to digest.” — Washington Times If you know anything at all about China, reading this book will fill in a lot of very interesting gaps. I studied Chinese history for six years, and so much for what Jung Chang has laid out here about these important sisters simply wasn't in the books. But DON'T listen to this reading of it. Joanna David has not been drilled in Chinese pronunciation, and even some English words are strangely beyond her, especially 'surveillance' and 'surveilling', which she pronounces as 'surveyance' and 'surveying'. She is simply out of her depth, and doesn't sound confident, even though the writing is.

A major new biography from the internationally bestselling author of Wild Swans, Mao and Empress Dowager Cixi: a gripping story of sisterhood, revolution and betrayal, and three women who helped shape the course of modern Chinese history. The Soong sisters were an extraordinary trio… Jung Chang has shown, in books such as Wild Swans, her instinct for a compelling story, and that instinct stands her in good stead here as she weaves her way through the complex history of China … Well worth reading…” (Rana Mitter Sunday Times)

I’m not normally a great fan of non-fiction, especially political tales, however this riveting biography is so well written it at no time becomes weighed down. The three sisters, their lives and loves, make for some fascinating reading. Moving from grand parties in Shanghai to penthouses in New York, from exiles’ quarters in Japan and Berlin to secret meetings in Moscow we read about power struggles, godfather style assassinations, secret talks and bribes making this a book that is compulsive reading.

A remarkable story of war, communism and espionage related with nuanced sympathy... The lives of the three Song sisters – the subjects of Jung Chang’s spirited new book – are more than worthy of an operatic plot. Julia Lovell, Guardian So Sun Yat-sen the aforementioned “father” of modern China, and Chiang Kai-shek the nationalist leader / dictator get at least as much if not more attention. Chang’s early insertions of Mao into the narrative are there for the sake of fact and transparency (which is what makes her such a celebrated historian), but because of just who Mao is, they have the added effect of foreshadowing a villain, like those fleeting moments in a horror film where something unknown darts past the camera. Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister upends a great many myths that have been propagated both by the Chinese government in Beijing and the China Lobby in the US.

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Miss Ni was an “unyieldingly independent” character who had rebelled against her parents’ attempts to bind her feet (as they had done with her siblings) and developed a serene spirituality. May-ling recalled that one of her strongest childhood memories was “Mother going to a room she kept for the purpose on the third floor to pray. She spent hours in prayer, often beginning before dawn.” My mother inspired me to ask questions. She came to stay with me in 1988 and said, “I want a serious talk”, and started to tell me stories including how she and my father had to walk from Manchuria to Sichuan, a journey of more than 2,000 miles. My mother suffered a miscarriage on the way. As she was talking, I began to think I must write all this down. This book’s successes go beyond bringing to light the accomplishments of these three sisters; it also manages to greatly humanise China’s larger-than-life ‘great men’ in the process. It paints an honest picture of Sun Yat-sen as a self-involved, shallow, callous man, as unveiled by his treatment of Ching-ling and the other women in his life. The Song sisters—Qingling, Meiling and Ailing—on a visit with female nationalist soldiers in 1937.. Photo: Universal Images Group via Getty Images

This is an epic undertaking by an excellent writer and historian. Jung Chang brings the early twentieth century to life as she explores the world of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-Shek. She shows their progress towards revolution, seen through the lives of the family who knew them. Taking the three sisters as the focal point is a clever way of exploring the twists and turns of Chinese society and politics as it moves from a monarchy through to communism.

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He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. Yg bagus dari buku ini adalah author sebisa mungkin obyektif terhadap tokoh-tokoh yg ditulisnya ini. Krn semua tokohnya juga sudah meninggal, author mengumpulkan data dari buku-buku, epistolary (korespondensi) yg dilakukan mereka kpd teman-teman terdekat mereka, sehingga kita diberi cukup banyak ttg pandangan mereka ttg Cina dan ideologi mereka yg bertentangan. Juga motif-motif kenapa mereka tetap mempertahankan pendirian mereka. Secara pribadi, saya paling menyukai Ai Ling yg sangat brilian dlm ide-ide mencari uang dan pandangannya ttg keluarga. Saya juga lebih menyukai May-Ling, walau terkesan "manja" dibandingkan saudarinya yg lain, May-Ling justru yg paling baik hati, paling bisa beradaptasi dan paling beruntung. Saya justru kurang suka dgn Ching-Ling (pdhl ini adalah favorit almarhumah mama saya) krn menurut saya dia terlalu idealis dan romantis sekaligus terlalu subyektif. Three daughters of Charlie Soong are introduced and their lives and impacts on society skillfully unfolded for a neophyte reader on this topic. Author Jung Chang does a clear and compelling job at showing how their parents' and their childhood in various places informed life choices, while keeping the threads of family bonds in place no matter how far they traveled. Not that they were non-contentious - they were, but they needed each other if only to keep each other close and know who was doing what through all the societal changes that happened during their lifetimes. The lives, deeds, and triumphs of these three sisters are nothing less than phenomenal. And the fact that I – and likely countless others – had never even known of their existence is a crying shame. But Jung Chang is here to fix that. Through Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister she has proven the importance and consequence of women in revolutionary China. The story of the Soong sisters, writes the author, is a kind of modern fairy tale. The Christian Shanghainese family into which they were born was prosperous but not especially influential, and the girls themselves “were not great beauties by traditional standards.” Yet, self-confident and determined, each made her mark. Ei-ling, the oldest, born in 1889, became one of the richest women in the country; Ching-ling, born in 1893, married Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the republican movement in China, whose renown endures throughout the Chinese-speaking world; and May-ling, born in 1898, married Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Nationalist government of China. According to the fairy tale, one sister loved money, another power, and the third her country—though, depending on one’s politics, the third attribute could belong to any of them. Chang recounts the lives of the sisters and their deeds, as when May-ling, in the face of an impending Communist invasion, flew from the mainland to Taiwan, “a huge boost for the Nationalists’ morale”; after Chiang died in 1975, she lived in seclusion in New York, her life spanning across three centuries. Ching-ling embraced the Communist cause, though it was only on her deathbed that she joined the party, acclaimed as “Honorary President of the People’s Republic of China.” Of the three, Ei-ling’s life is the least compelling, though she had her accomplishments, as well. Chang’s story is worth attention on the strength of the three sisters’ notable doings, though her writing is often flat—“Above all, she had found fulfillment as a mother”; “The Generalissimo came to appreciate what his wife did”; “A whole new world opened up to Little Sister.”