Foot-binding and concubinage reveal the total powerlessness of pre-revolutionary women

Chang opens with her grandmother's early life, given as a concubine to a powerful warlord general, her bound feet and arranged fate embodying how thoroughly women's bodies and futures belonged to others in this era. Foot-binding, causing lifelong pain and disability, was treated as an aesthetic and social requirement rather than an obvious cruelty, revealing how normalized women's suffering had become.

Her grandmother's escape from the general's household after his death, taking her infant daughter and defying enormous social pressure, becomes the book's founding act of resistance — a decision requiring real courage precisely because the surrounding system offered almost no legitimate path for a woman to determine her own life.

Chang uses this generational starting point deliberately, establishing how far conditions for women would need to travel across the following decades, and setting up the recurring theme that each generation's struggles share a common thread of women asserting agency against systems designed to deny it.

Takeaway: measuring progress requires remembering the actual baseline conditions people started from, not an idealized sense of "the past."