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

From the author of the international best seller, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, a brilliantly researched and evocative account of the lives of three other daughters of China: the Soong sisters, whose connections to Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek kept them at the very center of Chinese history over the course of a singularly tumultuous hundred years. Ai-ling, Ching-ling, and May-ling Soong were born into a wealthy Shanghai family and sent to the United States as children to receive their educations. They were worldly and independent-minded. Their father was an early supporter of Sun Yat-sen in his campaign to form a republic. And it was this closeness between the men that gave the sisters a step up into the spheres of power that shaped China over the twentieth Century. Ai-ling would be Sun Yat-sen's mistress before marrying Chiang Kai-shek's prime minister, H. H. Kung, and becoming one of the richest women in China; Ching-ling became Sun's second wife and eventually, as an ally of Mao, an honorary president of Communist China; and May-ling became the wife of Chiang Kai-shek and first lady of Nationalist China for more than two decades. Here is the sweeping and detailed story of the intertwined relationships, the complex feelings, and the moral dilemmas of three truly extraordinary women who shaped the lives of the men who helped establish the modern nation of China.