Customer Reviews

Red Azalea: A True Story of Life and Love in China

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As required reading for a college course on Asian history, I picked up this book one night and finished it the next. It is a heart-stoppingly real, rough and dramatic account of a young woman's ascent and descent in the Red Army during Mao's reign in China. At times I was moved to tears, literally -- while commuting on a subway. I was enthralled with the author's "voice" in telling her own sad, victorious, heart wrenching story from childhood through adulthood. Red Azalea is an important piece of writing which I'd recommend not only to students interested in Chinese history, but to anyone who enjoys a real human story with historical reality.

Anchee Min's raw, abrupt writing style is a good vehicle for this compelling account of her life during China's misbegotten Cultural Revolution. From party loyalist to disillusioned communal farm serf to candidate for the starring role in an important propaganda film, her journey embodies the phrase "the personal is political." Surely few documented lives have been so victimized by politics as hers was. With all its rough edges, her spare, direct prose speaks through remembered pain to put experience into a larger perspective. Leaving the incredibly cramped quarters of her intellectualized family for the huge labor farm was an adventure that quickly soured, redeemed only by the dangerous passion she shared with an admired woman named Yan. The punishment meted out to a heterosexual couple found making love in the fields at night reflects the risks she and Yan were taking. Later, selected as the potential lead for a propaganda film, she competed fiercely with other young women equally desperate to escape the brutalities of farm life. Her story demonstrates how love does not depend on gender. One of the most remarkable sections of this memoir details the efforts she undertook to have a love affair with a party official referred to only as the Supervisor -- trying to connect in the midst of an anonymous crowd at a mountain Buddhist temple, and meeting him after dark in a notorious public park frequented by scores of others searching for love, or sex, in the midst of a regime that repressed sexual expression along with political freedoms. Indeed, in a society so fundamentally paranoid as she depicts, where citizens were conditioned to betray their neighbors over the pettiest infractions of party doctrine, it is a small miracle that she finally managed to leave China at all. Anchee Min is one of the lucky ones. The effects of the Cultural Revolution were felt long after it ended. As late as 1989, the democracy demonstrations in Tianamen Square were a direct, if delayed, reaction against it. Her book stands as a testament to the personal toll of a dictatorial government.

Anchee Min has created a powerful sense of life in China during its darkest period: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The year was 1966, revolution powered by the Red Army just began to crumple the country. 9-year-old Min was the most excellent student in her grade for her revolutionary mind. She had memorized Mao's Little Red Book, secretively criticized her parents' reactionary (counter-revolutionary) behaviors, sang heroic operas raved by Jiang Ching (Madame Mao) and was selected as the head of student Red Guard. Utterly ignorant of the revolution's poignant consequence, Min, afterall, was too young to understand the meaning of public criticisms and purges. Manipulated and brainwashed by the Party members at her school, Min openly criticized and betrayed her most favorite teacher by accusing her as being a spy from the United States.

At the age of 17, Min was told that she needed to be a model to the graduates as a student leader. The ambitious I'll-go-where-Chairman-Mao's-finger-points attitude stirred Min's heart and made her eager to devote herself in hardship at the Red Fire Farm. Upon cancelling her residency in Shanghai, along with million other youths Min joined the Advanced 7th Company to plant rice in leech-filled water along the eastern coast. There Min finally caught up with the terror and hardship of Mao's ambitious revolution. She befriended with and eventually worshippped and fell in love with Party commander Yan. Here Min contrasted the dark horror of Communist China, the purges and the criticisms with her own desirous passion. She picked fight with the deputy commander Lu who diligently sought to catch Yan's mistakes. The secret meeting with Yan at the brick factory, the fondling and cuddling in bed under the mosqutio net-such personal desires are politically dangerous that the culprit could be rewarded a death sentence. Min was then engaged in an affair with the "Supervisor" who directed the revolutionary film Red Azalea. After Cultural Revolution and the arrest of Jiang Ching, pro-Revolutionist like Min was labeled. She continued to work as a set clark at the film studio. The Party sent her younger sister Coral to the Red Fire Farm in order to fulfill the peasant quota for each family. She was not granted sick leave even though she caught TB. "My despair made me fearless", noted Min. She decided to fight for permission to leave not only the film studio but the country. The year was 1984. At the age of 27, Min immigrated to the United States. *Red Azalea* is her powerful memoir-a joltingly honest testimony to life in China under Mao. The prose is haunting, heartbreaking, and erotic. 4.1 stars.

When Anchee Min was 9 years old, she was the perfect revolutionary. She had memorized Mao's Little Red Book, sang heroic operas and was head of her school's Little Red Guard. The year was 1966, and the Cultural Revolution had just begun to turn Chinese society inside out. Too young to understand the public criticisms and purges, Min thought she was fighting for the ''final peace of the planet.'' Then the hardship and terror caught up with her.

Red Azalea is her achingly beautiful memoir of the time, a story remarkable for its absence of anger or recrimination against the Communist Party and Chinese government. Told to serve the revolution as a peasant when she turned 17, Min left her family in Shanghai and joined the Advanced Seventh Company to plant rice near the East China Sea, toiling 16-hour days in muddy, leech- filled water. Two years later she returned to Shanghai to compete with three other women for the title role in Red Azalea, a film project based on the revolution, written by Mao's wife.

**Min contrasts the gray regimen of her society with her own passions, first for a female lover in the army and later for a mysterious man who supervises the production of Red Azalea. Each secret rendezvous and illicit tryst -- whether in a Shanghai bathhouse or a Buddhist temple brimming with scents of incense, jasmine and the crush of worshippers -- is all the more poignant in a country where personal desires are politically dangerous.

Min emigrated to America in 1984, but in Red Azalea she has created a powerful sense of life in China during that country's most heartbreaking time.

Excellent prose and a powerful story add up to one of the better books about life in modern China under the rule of Mao. This story of life under the repressive regime of Mao after the cultural revolution is eye-opening in regards to how one can take freedom for granted.

Red Azalea is not difficult to read - it is a book easily consumed in one or two sittings. However, when it comes to the digestion of what's been read, that's a different story altogether. Red Azalea is the story of the author's childhood under China's Cultural Revolution, but tackled with seemingly simple language that manages to impart complicated undercurrents of meaning to the reader. Min has stated in interviews that she admires the painting style of Henri Matisse, and that her writing style is a reflection of that simplicity and naivete.

Red Azalea tells Min's story from elementary school where she is a good communist leader right off the bat, to her time spent at a farm where she has a relationship with her supervisor, to being chosen to star in a film version of one of Madame Mao's operas, Red Azalea. I found Min to be inaccessible, and the memoir difficult to ground in reality; however, this did not prevent me from enjoying the book and being vastly educated by it. The tone of the book was almost otherworldly, perhaps because of the lack of everyday details that would somehow anchor the events. I found myself often glancing back at the cover of the book, as if to remind myself that this was indeed nonfiction. Red Azalea is quite different from any book I've ever read: a memoir both complicated and simple, a plot both clear and elusive. Recommended for a challenge where you'd least expect one.

There are many books dealing with Mao's China and Red Azalea would be a fine choice to begin. It is a truthful account of life under an oppressive political system and does much to help one understand what it was like to live and struggle and survive in such a difficult period.

Red Azelia is the most poetically accurate account of life, love, and sexuality in Chinese culture to date. From western sensibilities, the relationship between the narrator and Yan seems a little strange until one realizes that there is a fundimental difference in Chinese and western views on sex, sensuality, and physical/emotional fulfillment. To a westerner, the relationship seems to have not been entirely satisfying for the two people involved. However, in the cultural framework in which it occured it must have been deliciously satisfying for the two participants.

The book shows the results of the Chinese (both Mainland and Nationalist) tendancy to marry much later than westerners. Few women marry before 25 and few men before 30. For women, sexual relationships before marriage are devestating if future husbands are aware of them. As a result, may women turn to each other for physical intimacy (as opposed to men visiting prostitutes for the same purpose). This book places this cultural tendency in the context of another cultural disaster in China: The Cultural Revolution.

I can not recommend this book too highly, especially for people who have a vested interest in understanding sexual aspects of Chinese culture that most Chinese are unwilling to discuss openly.

One must also understand that sensual expression between two people of the same sex is not viewed as negatively in Chinese culture as it is in the west. It is common to see two women waling hand in hand or see two women dancing in the clubs (often quite sensually).

A rather quick read for such a heavy subject. Min writes with an odd matter-of-factness so that all the details of her life both good and bad are given equal weight as she reports them. It is difficult sometimes to judge how things affected her. I come away feeling I have learned more about the Cultural Revolution but Min still remains a mystery.

Very touching, and although I consider myself to be a rather slow reader, I finished this book in a day and then re-read it again the next day. I found the perspective on madame Mao to be somewhat peculiar, but I am no historian...see what you think. This is an exceptionally well-told memoir of an extremely talented writer. I highly recommend reading this book, along with "Wild Swans" by Jung Chang for added insight on life in a China of the not so distant past.