The book traces the history of China from 1909 to 1978: from feudal and imperial China to the end of the Cultural Revolution, through the Japanese invasion and the struggle for independence, the civil war between the Communists and the Kuomintang, Mao's victory and the birth of the People's Republic, the long years of perpetual revolution waged by the Red Guards, and the ensuing social upheavals.
These dramatic events are recounted from the perspective of three women: the grandmother, still a prisoner of traditional society; the mother, who embodies the figure of the emancipated Chinese woman; and finally the daughter, Jung Chang, protagonist and narrator, an expression of the new China.
The narrative concludes with Chang’s departure for America.
It is a vast historical fresco, so detailed as to become a sort of reportage (neither essay nor novel), with the consequence of flattening individual lives and fragmenting major political and social events, rendering them inexplicable.
Summarizing the book is pointless; it is far more worthwhile to dwell on certain fundamental themes.
What does it mean to live inside a grand myth that dissolves slowly yet inexorably? The young Chang grew up in the cult of Mao, and until the very end attempts to salvage his figure.

What had turned people into monsters? Why all that useless brutality? It was then that my devotion to Mao began to waver.
(...) Doubts about Mao’s infallibility began to creep into my mind, but at that stage, like other people, I blamed mostly Mao’s wife and the Cultural Revolution Authority.
Mao, the deified emperor, was still above suspicion

.
Then, she somehow justifies him.

Mao found the idea of peaceful progress suffocating: he was a restless military leader, a warrior-poet, and he needed action—violent action

.
And finally, she reaches a definitive turning point: her certainties collapse, shattering her very bond with China.

Now I asked myself: if this is paradise, what then is hell? (...) somewhere in the world there really did exist a place laden with even greater suffering.
(...) It was in that frame of mind that I composed the poem.
I spoke of the death of my indoctrinated and innocent past as dead leaves torn from a tree by a whirlwind and carried away into a world of no return.

What also fractures her deep devotion to Mao is the conflict between familial bonds and communal values.
Chang’s mother risked her life for the liberation of China and for the communist ideal, yet because of her independent nature and her regard for life’s authentic values, such as friendship, she is singled out for public disapproval.
When she asks what matters she must seek instructions on from the Party, she is answered: “All of them.”
There is no individual space.

My mother was eighteen, had just married, and was full of hopes for a new life, yet she felt miserable.
(...) She found she could not blame the Party, which seemed to her to be in the right, so she blamed my father—first for getting her pregnant, and then for failing to support her when she was attacked and rejected

.
Chang’s decision to leave China is also an escape from the fate of her mother, who had so thoroughly internalized the Party’s authority that she failed to realize that the appeal to communal values was hypocritical and absurd, serving only to justify absolute power.
In Chang’s detachment from her native country, in her rejection of her homeland and her idealization of the West, her father also plays a part—a man whose devotion to communism is absolute, a man “faithful above all to the revolution.”
Yet when he was forced to burn his books, he broke down into a

heart-wrenching, faltering, and wild weeping, the crying of a man unaccustomed to shedding tears

.
The only response is affection—a “bourgeois” weakness condemned by the Party.

I was so terrified that at first I dared not do anything to comfort him.
In the end, I put my arms around him from behind and held him tight, but I did not know what to say.
(...) After the bonfire, I had a distinct feeling that something in his mind had changed

: Madness is the only outcome of a life wholly consecrated to political faith.

The long historical sweep has a happy ending for Chang (she wins a scholarship and is able to go to America), but ends poorly for China: a place no longer loved by the young woman.
It would have been a compelling theme had it not been handled by a hybrid book: it is not a work of history because history, to be useful, can only be studied “from above,” so as to provide an overarching view; nor is it a novel, because that would have required a narrative style richer in language and imagery, demanding a deeper exploration of the characters’ feelings and interpersonal relationships, paring back the minutiae rather than merely describing, striving instead to convey and articulate the cultural and social climate.
In short, one cannot speak of a place if one no longer loves it.
One cannot write history from a microcosm.

Why not read it? It is long, flat, prolix; it does nothing to help understand China’s recent history.

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China