In the globally and even cosmically tumultuous year of 1910, little could have seemed less significant than the birth of a peasant girl in the far reaches of southeastern China. That year, the Great Fire wiped out a vast swath of northwestern U.S. woodlands, the flooding Seine swamped the Paris Métro, and the earth passed through the tail of Halley’s comet. Mexico erupted in revolution, Japan annexed Korea, and Egypt’s first native prime minister was assassinated. So disturbing was the changing world that the Vatican demanded that its new priests renounce Modernism.

But the most stunning and epochal convulsion of all was unfolding in China, the world’s oldest continuous civilization, where the Qing dynasty had entered its death throes. Two thousand years of dynastic rule in Asia’s largest and most populous nation were crashing onto the shores of the twentieth century, launching what was to be four decades of upheaval and civil war and, on the tide of world wars, reshaping the global order.

Only months prior to the fall of the last Chinese dynasty, the peasant girl was born in the obscure village of Yeping to the Wei family. In traditional China, the birth of a boy was called jieguo, “the bearing of fruit,” and was considered a boon to the family. The birth of a girl was called kaihua, “a flowering”—though visually pleasing, ultimately unrewarding because only her eventual in-laws would prosper from her labor and offspring.

The little girl had entered a world of rigid gender and birth-order politics, a realm of oppressive spirits, ancestral ghosts, and Daoist, Confucian,