But being the wife of an internationally known firebrand would leave its mark on the young Ching-ling. Beskrivningarna av historiska händelser var bra för att kunna placera systrarna och deras betydelse i tiden, men jag hade önskat mer fokus på systrarna och mindre på männen i deras liv för ett bättre betyg. As a translator and advisor she is important to her husband (he also seems co-dependent, with her, later his son and maybe his previous wife and concubines). When he was captured by a warlord and about to be turned over to the communists, Little Sister, aided by Big Sister, arranged for his release.

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is the biography of the amazing Soong sisters who together made a huge impact on history. A little oddly for a group biography of three remarkable women, however, the book sometimes veers off into male-dominated accounts of their context. She miscarried during a traumatic escape, and was subsequently – to her great sorrow – unable to have children. This book, despite its length, fairly zips along, leaving you hungry to know more about China's extraordinary and turbulent history in the past hundred years. With the start of the Nationalist-Communist civil war, however, the sisters were permanently separated.As President Harry S Truman famously said of the Soong and Kung families, “They’re all thieves, every damn one of them. I found myself wanting to get back to the story about the sisters instead of the minutiae of the rise to power of this leader and the fall from grace of that leader. Their unions would influence the history of the world, yet all I could recite was the fairytale-like adage, “One loved money, one loved power, one loved her country. 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. This periodic sidelining of the women expresses, of course, the paradox of their status (a paradox that applies to many other female Chinese politicians of the past 100 years).

The sisters were merely on the background, supporting their husbands and the highlight is hardly on them until maybe, the last 100 pages or so. A humourless, conservative army man, Chiang had thrust his way to becoming Sun’s heir as leader of China’s first modern political party, the Nationalists, after Sun suddenly died of liver cancer in 1925. Big Sister married H H Kung (‘Kung’) who was a business man in name only because Big Sister was the brains and driving force behind him and Sun, both of whom she manipulated. Dari yg saya baca ini hidup mereka sangat tidak mudah dan enak dibayangkan oleh saya yg boleh dibilang lahir pd menjelang akhir abad 20.Here the author states that conflicts between them were reported in great detail in the press, giving the impression that the country was in utter confusion and chaos, while In fact, the fighting was sporadic and small-scale, and most outbursts lasted no more than a few days. The three women were sisters, the daughters of Soong Charlie, who rose from poverty to become a prominent business owner and supporter of a republic for China, and his devout Christian wife.