I can recommend three excellent books on the late 20th-century Chinese experience. The first is Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai. This memoir begins with Cheng’s victimization by the state at the onset of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in 1966. Harry Wu's Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag starts earlier, just after the Communist victory and takeover of 1949. Wu’s book is very good, but it does not rise to the literary level of Cheng’s. Wu’s mission was to expose the horrendous policy of slave labor as a means of increasing China’s foreign exchange, and his book succeeds admirably in that respect while giving us his own story of near-death starvation and political persecution. Bitter Winds is written in a flat, stark, understated style, which while highly readable in my view does not rise to the level of Cheng’s book, which I’d always thought unassailable. But now I’m going to raise Red Azalea to a level almost equal with it. Red Azalea takes apart the Chinese Communist experience with much the same rigorous assurance shown by Cheng, but its approach, its style, is quite different. Red Azalea is a hypnotic book. It was written by a native-Chinese speaker who decided to use the writing of her memoir as a means of learning English. She studied English independently on coming to America, too, which was said to have included regular viewings of "Sesame Street." Yet when I think of how hard the task of writing is in any language, when I think of how far Min has had to come, her achievement bowls me over. How did she do It? As we read we begin to sense how. Min possesses a powerful mind, and this was both her ball and chain, as well as the reason for her survival.Naturally, no quasi-rational thinker could possibly live contentedly under such tyranny. Mao — insidiously — used children to carry out the national calamity known as the "Cultural Revolution." No one else in his and Madame Mao's view was ideologically pure enough. At the time Min was an impressionable young girl. Her formative years outside the home were filled by ranting, wooden-headed ideologues who would soon set her — and millions of youngsters like her — loose on the “revisionist elements” and “capitalist sprouts” of Chinese society. The memoir's first in-depth scene shows a Party secretary by the name of Chain, a mindless political cog, leading a "struggle meeting" against Min's beloved teacher, Autumn Leaves. Min can't be 12 here. Autumn Leaves's crime? Why, being born in the U.S. and teaching the subversive texts of Hans Christen Andersen. The teacher, an innocent of Chinese-American parentage, whose father loved China so much that he sent his only daughter back to the old country to be part of the great national resurgence, is manhandled by goons for being a "foreign spy" and forced to admit crimes which are nothing more than the calumnies of idiotic apparatchiks like Party Secretary Chain. One senses that the Autumn Leaves incident was in some sense the author's intellectual awakening. After this event, in which she was made to vociferously condemn her favorite teacher, she turns against the system. Next we leap to age 18 or so, when Min was sent to Red Fire Farm, a collective farm on the Soviet model, near the East China Sea. Among those she meets there is Little Green, a beautiful, young woman who loves many of the things young women often love: makeup, nail polish, clothing, etc. The hours at Red Fire Farm are brutal: 5 am to 9 pm. The Party secretary is Yan, a woman with a massive physique who is legendary for her ability to haul great loads all day like an ox. Late in the wee hours one night Min and her barracks-mates are awakened and told to get their weapons and gear. Yan then leads her “soldiers” on a belly-crawl to a nearby stand of bamboo. Here sounds of sexual gratification fill the air. "Now," Yan shouts, and at that instant all the young women snap on flashlights. There we see the bare-assed Little Green inflagrante delicto with a local man. "Rapist," shouts Yan, "rapist." Little Green, the victim, is whisked away. In short order the man is executed. In the coming weeks, Little Green goes insane. Her hygiene declines radically. When she returns to the farm from the asylum she is as "big as a bear," presumably from medication, her great beauty destroyed. Now, unaccountably, or so Min feels, she finds her own sexuality asserting itself. It puzzles her. Amid this amorphous desire, she finds herself drawn to the workhorse Yan who is also her superior. She knows Yan is to blame for Little Green's ruin, and she holds this against her, yet she cannot suppress her admiration for the woman. What follows are two beautiful stretches of portraiture. The first is of Comrade Lu, Yan's second in command, and a spewer of Maoist homilies. The other is of Yan herself. Yan lacks Lu's gift of revolutionary gab and suffers for it. Lu, who wants to bump Yan from her post, taunts her until Yan's inarticulateness explodes in curses. Apparatchik Lu sleeps with a skull which she kisses goodnight at lights out. Such are the head games and displays of Marxist-Leninist spunk that some of these revolutionaries adopt.When Yan confesses her love for Leopard Lee, a young man running a nearby collective, Min writes letters in Yan's name and also serves as go between. But Lee isn't interested and doesn’t reply. Long discussions ensue between Min and Yan as to why this might be. Perhaps he's busy, or, like Yan, simply not gifted with the pen. Their discussions intensify. They pull their sleeping rolls next to each other under the same mosquito net. With their minds bent toward the problem of Leopard Lee, they do not see their own growing physical attraction for each other. This is beautifully done. A mutual affection overcomes them almost unawares, and the reader wonders if he might not also be experiencing something akin to their own delight when they finally discover each other. I usually dislike sex in literature for the simple reason that it isn't sex but text, a poor approximation of sexual experience. Almost always sex scenes seem grafted on in literature, like an excrescence, interrupting the flow of the story. Min’s great achievement has been to make the lovemaking an integral part of the development of her characters. She produces erotic passages that I have read and reread, and yet I cannot see how they were done. There seems to be no artifice. Min’s writing has the flatness of Wu and his cowriter, Carolyn Wakeman, but Min possesses a lyrical gift as well so her English sings. I wondered if this was not simply what happens when the Chinese pictograph becomes English. For Min’s writing, especially in the early sections, produces a lightly rhythmic, almost percussive effect. I've read many translations from the Chinese, and the works of many speakers like Ha Jin writing in English, and Min's achievement is unlike anything I’ve ever come across. It is either genius or some form of naïve mastery. At this point in the narrative something fantastic happens. One day a car appears at the farm while Min and Yan and others are slaving in the fields. A retinue of five or six people emerge in crisp uniforms with clipboards. They’re clearly from a higher Party echelon, an elite one. It turns out they are scouts searching for the raw talent who will ultimately play the role of the great Chinese female revolutionary, Red Azalea. At first it feels like a Hollywood story arc has been plunked down in the midst of the wretched collective farm. I confess I worried that the book would now turn into a familiar rags to riches tale, that we would now follow Min on her triumphal progress. (Min was eventually spirited off to America by Joan Chen, a fine actress perhaps best known for her work in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor.) That, thankfully, doesn't happen.When Min returns to Shanghai, her hometown, where she will complete the competition for the role of Red Azalea at a local film studio, the deceit and political backstabbing reach new lows. Min is viewed as the ideal peasant type to play Red Azalea, the politically correct choice. The others thus fear her “ideological” purity and quickly move to smear her as a “capitalist sprout" and “revisionist element.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet marshaled against her is an older actress, Soviet Wong, who studied acting long ago in Moscow, but whose style is now too polished and professional — too Western — and so she is out of favor. Her machinations, her base cruelty and underhandedness astounds the reader and makes the skull-kissing Lu seem a veritable girl scout.Now we come to the most extraordinary part of the book. I don’t want to say too much about it. This closing section centers on Min’s growing relationship with the man known as the Supervisor. I was dazzled by Min’s interchanges with the Supervisor, who was part of Madame Mao’s — Jiang Qing’s — Beijing circle. Suffice it to say that the language of sexual desire and longing she used so effectively when describing her earlier relationship with Yan becomes, perhaps because of her improved English, almost exponentially more intense. The way their love has to hide itself away here, the way it has to go underground because of the Supervisor’s high political standing, approaches the tragic. Red Azalea is a masterpiece of emotional honesty. One never sees where it’s going. I will read it again — and perhaps again. For lovers of Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai, it is essential reading. Prepare yourselves, some of you, the lucky ones, for an extraordinary literary experience.
Red Azalea is supposed to be Anchee Min's memoir of her life in China. The name is taken from a propaganda opera in which Min acted. The book is divided into three sections, which deals with different phases in the author's life. The writing is stilted. Reading short sentences for 300 pages was a chore. The author also does not use quotations, so the book is really hard to read. There are hundreds of "she said" and "I said" scattered over every page and separated only by commas, and sometimes not even that. There are times when I could not make out who was speaking because of this style of writing. In short, very badly written.She said she welcomed us to break out of the small world of our personal concerns to be part of an operation on such a grand scale. She said that we had just made our first step of the Long March. Suddenly raising her voice, she said that she wanted to introduce herself. She said, My name is Yan Sheng. Yan, as in discipline; Sheng, as in victory. You can call me Yan. She said she was the Party secretary and commander of this company. A company that was making earth-shaking changes in everythingThere were some really horrible metaphors, which made me cringe. Seriously, who writes descriptions like this?She said, As always, you know me better than the worms in my intestine. She had a small thin mouth. So small that it looked like the anus of my hen Big Beard.The ears of grain were thin, thinner than mice shit, heaped around my feet, heaped up, burying me.Disgusting!The first part of the memoir was about the author's childhood. It was really interesting and absorbing. There was this keen interest for the reader on what was going to come. Some of the experiences suffered by the author and her family aroused my sympathy. If I only had to rate the book on this section alone, I would have rated it 3.The second part deals with Min being sent to Red Fire Farm, a slave labour camp to which every family needed to contribute a slave. The beginning of this section was quite interesting with descriptions of farm life and how people dealt with the propaganda, the cut-throat business of survival and working from five in the morning to nine at night. After this, the author begins to talk about a lesbian affair she had, and the story dramatically falls in quality and interest. It takes on a romance-porn quality from which it never recovers. The fact that the bulk of the book is devoted to the romance does not help matters. It is boring, and I do not care. The third section is about Min being selected to perform in an opera. Pining for ex-lesbian lover, petty cat fights between the various opera girls, and another boring romance with a man, makes up the bulk of this section. By the time we reach the end, Mao is dead and the author chooses to cover this momentous event in just one page. One page! Out of more than 300 pages, just one is devoted to Mao's death, while she went on and on and on about her boring affairs. This is really bad story telling from any perspective.The author even fails to talk about her friends and family and how the Cultural Revolution affected them. Beyond the really short first section, her family just provide a background for her to pine for her lovers or to complain about her opera comrades. All the momentous political events taking place around her are completely left out. What happened to her parents, her siblings are not detailed. Nothing of interest is explored in the book. Just pages and pages of her two romantic experiences. In the end, I ceased to care about the author or her experiences. I might as well have read a Mills & Boon instead!I do not recommend this book to anyone. There are much better books on slave labour, Cultural Revolution, China, and romance.
What do You think about Red Azalea (2006)?
At one point in this memoir, Anchee Min quotes the proverb "Poverty gives birth to evil personalities". This book shows that happening, but it is not just material poverty -- the women who have so little power battle each other like a pack of starving dogs fighting over a very small crust. Min's main theme, too, is the drought of desire in a sexually and emotionally repressive culture. Friendship is subversive and cannot survive, sex is subversive. Min weaves together her themes in a subtle and skillful structure, selecting details and observations from among her memories. Almost all the major characters presented are women. The language is rather graceless, it never lets you forget that the author is translating her memories from Chinese; yet it's very effective, and never falls into English clichés.
—Vasha7
Min writes an honest memoir of coming-of-age through Mao's cultural revolution. I was going to write bluntly honest, but decided that blunt described the memoir itself. Her sentence structure is short and punchy. She tells it as it was. She bares her emotions, rubbed raw by injustice and oppression. Nearly everyone is broken by Mao's machine.I found her stories of farm labor interesting. Her relationship with Yan surprised me - in its innocence and path. Found it hard to believe that they could share a bed and not be found out. But this was a memoir, and it was true. The summary of how she ended up in the states was also blunt. I would have liked more info on it, a follow-up book perhaps?
—Mmars
Anchee Min grew up during China's Cultural Revolution, and she has an interesting story to tell about growing up as an excellent student, being sent to the country to work as a communal farm laborer to fill her family's peasant quota, and then being selected to receive acting lessons. I have two main gripes about the book: her prose is extremely choppy, which was very distracting to me, and she dwelt at length on some parts of her story while barely talking about others. I'm surprised I finished it--I kept hoping it would improve!
—Nancy
