A story "Wild Swans" by Jung Chang is an epic that covers the lives of three generations of Chinese women who lived in China's most politically vibrant times.It begins with the story about the author's grandmother. At the age of only two years old she had her feet bound. This was the procedure that entailed placing a piece of cloth tightly around the foot. All that was done in order to prevent the foot from growing. That procedure itself was a painful reminder of America's awful anorexia nervosa. When the author's grandmother was fifteen she was virtually sold as a concubine to the War Lord Xue.  It was her greedy and exploitive father who gave his native daughter into slavery for money.  Being a concubine she bore Xue a child. It was a little girl. She gave her a name Bao Qim. She was the author's mother. Then Xue died, and the author's grandmother became a free woman. After awhile she got acquainted with a married doctor named Xia. He seemed to be a very handsome man. She fell in love with him. However, Xia's family protested that marriage. Xia's parents were saying, "no good girl would become a concubine" [page133].

Bao Qim grew up living in the Japanese puppet state of Manchuke. As she got older, she became more and more disappointed with the treatment of women in China. Bao Qim believed in Mao's promises of equal treatment of Chinese men and women. That's why she became a communist. Soon Bao Qim married a Communist officer.  Like Bao Qim he thought that a husband must not own his wife. Bao Qim's husband did not agree with a statement that "a woman married to a dog should obey the dog, a woman who is married to a chicken should obey the chicken". He appeared to be an open minded and overall likable young man. However, later he turned out to be something of a raving lunatic who accused everyone of being "bourgeois". When Bao Qim was pregnant with his daughter he tried to decrease the amount of medicine she was taking. He thought,  "She needed to understand what it is to be a peasant". (Page188)