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

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Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, written in a compulsive style that sweeps the story along, is much the fullest account of their remarkable lives available in English… The warts-and-all portrait of “the Father of the Republic” is a welcome corrective to

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 Growing up in Mao’s China, Jung Chang heard repeated accounts of the three Soong sisters who helped shape her country’s republican revolution at the beginning of the 20th century. “One loved money, one loved power and one loved her country,” ran the party line, reducing the lives of Ei-ling (the sharp financial operator), May-ling (first “First Lady” of Republican China) and Ching-ling (Mao’s vice president) Soong to fairy-tale simplicity.

Red Sister, Ching-ling, married the ‘Father of China’, Sun Yat-sen, and rose to be Mao’s vice-chair. Red Sister, Ching-ling, married the 'Father of China', Sun Yat-sen, and rose to be Mao's vice-chair. I've already read Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by the same author, and I've read about the Soong sisters in Sterling Seagrave's The Soong Dynasty so I decided to give this book a try. If Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister were fiction, it would be criticized as farfetched. The attraction of the Soong sisters’ story is their completely implausible connections to just about everyone of celebrity or importance in modern China. The three husbands of the Soong sisters are there, of course – Sun Yatsen, Chiang Kaishek, and KMT finance minister HH Kung – but also Mao, Zhou Enlai, Eleanor Roosevelt, and even Elvis Presley makes an appearance. In almost every scene of China’s recent history, the Soong sisters appear. Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is the biography of the amazing Soong sisters who together made a huge impact on history.

The Song sisters—Qingling, Meiling and Ailing—on a visit with female nationalist soldiers in 1937.. Photo: Universal Images Group via Getty Images They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the center of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history. Huge, huge power. My father loved writing and encouraged us to write diaries. But I had to destroy my diary during the revolution.Chang ( Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, 2013, etc.) follows three renowned sisters across more than a century. Her breathtaking new triple biography restores these “tiger-willed” women to their extraordinarily complex humanity. I was constantly reminded of the Mitford sisters as I read of their witty, affectionate sibling bonds, glamorous lives, fiercely opposed political ideologies and privileged detachment from the street-level impact of those beliefs.

This is what makes this book such an enormous success: that it reads like a biographical novel, with political change at the forefront and character narratives existing upstage. Each chapter focusses on a shift in power that is equal parts personal and political, and the Soong sisters are always there but rarely at the forefront, at least until the book’s final third. The book’s greatest contributions are scenes of these three extraordinary lives – threads that run through a time of transformation in China. It is impossible to see up close the changes from the late 1800s to the late 1900s and not be astounded. The book underscores the importance of contingency to history: the parade of revolutions and inaugurations that make up the timeline of 20th-century China was not pre-ordained. It is hard to read about how conversations held at the pinnacles of power in Beijing or Nanjing reverberated across the continent and through the years and not pause to wonder what might have been.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.”