Yu-Fang
The author's real grandmother who was raised in China during a historically oppressive time, when women were forced to conform to unnatural cultural standards of beauty. The most notable was the binding of Yu-Fang's feet from the time she was two, to prevent them from growing healthily, so that her stunted feet would be regarded as petite and attractive to potential suitors. Her life was troubled already, but when her parents sold her out as a concubine to a local general, her life becomes unsustainable.
General Xue Zhi-Heng
This powerful man doesn't really enjoy his wife the way he used to, so he fills his time with occasional conjugal visits with his various concubines. He has children with his wife and with his concubines, and he impregnates Yu-Fang, but although he is the child's father, she doesn't want to live with him. Eventually, he insists, and she moves into his estate. When she is 24, he sets her free.
Bao Qin
This is the child of the general's union with Yu-Fang. She begins working for the Communist Party of China and the Red Army, having been raised nearby power. She meets Wang Yu, a ranking officer in Mao Zedong's vicious army. She travels China on food, pregnancy, to be at Nanjing for military training. She miscarries her child, and Bao's husband disavows his loyalty to her.
Jung Chang
The eventual child of Bao Qin, whose brutal and difficult life in the Red Army was bad enough, but when capitalist forces invade their town, Jung Chang watches her parents be publicly tortured for their political alliances. Chang spends the rest of Mao's dictatorship working to find a way to be educated. She finally studies English and escapes China.
