Becoming Madame Mao

Nothing I say hasn't been said before. Min makes history come alive in her stories that are based on real people and the real record. Fascinating, descriptive, enjoyable. I will continue to buy every book she writes.

Reading Becoming Madame Mao has been a terrific experience for me. Pure art, for which I thank you, Anchee Min! The story simply moved me and my new goal is going to be researching modern Chinese history.

Anita, my young friend from Hangzhou, tells me that Mao "is like an uncle," a paternal figure of wisdom and kindliness. His last wife, Jiang Qing? She is "like the devil. All Chinese think so." Mao's spirit must be pleased. It is, after all, what he wanted. Thirty years after his death, his fat, bald, lunar visage still looms benignly over Tiananmen Square. He is still the First Citizen, still beloved, still a fatherly figure, revered if not adored, at least for now. Jiang Qing was evil, unquestionably so. Yet, for all the evil she did or that was attributed to her, for all the chaos, disruption and destruction that can be traced to her wasteful, mean, insane policies, for all her vindictiveness, jealousy and anger, for every loathsome attribute she had, for every death she caused directly and indirectly, for every family ruined and every person tortured and persecuted, she was, and is, a useful evil. While Mao still breathed, she was useful to him. In death, she continues to be useful to the Communist Party and the Chinese people, at least the ones who still love Mao. Whatever she was in life, her dark ghost looms large and menacing, out-Herods Herod and draws the blackness from the shade of Mao. He sparkles while she rots. Anchee Min's "Becoming Madam Mao" is an outrageous fiction. Min, who is bold enough to attempt literature in an adopted language (and audacious enough to do it well), redoubled her boldness and took on the task of creating a novel about Mao's most despicable consort. In prose that alternates from third person to first, she attempts to take us into the mind of this strange and devious woman, illuminate her times, and provide a human dimension to the "white boned demon," this woman who shared Mao's bed, mothered one of his children and became the instigator of one of the most disastrous experiments in societal manipulation, the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Min, by alternating persons from third to first, balances her fictional portrait, narrating events from the outside, then changing to the first person to view situations from the perspective of Madam Mao. The story unfolds in a series of fascinating vignettes, each one bringing us through the phases of Jiang Qing's life from her brutal and impoverished infancy to her final confrontation with her daughter, and her suicide. The Jiang Qing of Min's novel is a woman who creates and re-creates herself, insinuates the lives of people - men - to advance, first, her acting career, then her career in the Communist Party and in Politics. Born into poverty, the unwanted child of a concubine who has been expelled from her man's home, Jiang's early life is filled with uncertainty and misery. Even as a small child, she can't be cowed, however. Much to her mother's consternation, she refuses to have her feet bound, pulls the bindings from them, and won't be bound again. She finally finds some comfort in the home of her grandparents, where she's taught the basics of Chinese opera and l

This is an impressionist version of the life of the woman who became Jiang Qing, Madame Mao. The point of view shifts back and forth from within the mind of Jiang Qing, to the view of a bystander near to the action, to the view of a historian recounting from a distance in time as well as space. The effect is like a film which uses a hand-held camera with a zoom lens - you get a sense of perspective and detail at the same time. Not every writer could pull this off, but Anchee Min does it.This is a small book, and it assumes that the reader is fairly familiar with the historical drama of Mao's China which Jiang Qing helped direct and choreograph. It is an intimate book, totally focussed on the central character, with the other elements of history and fate revolving around her. Anchee Min succeeds in creating a character for Jiang Qing which accounts for much that seems inexplicable in her many-faceted career as she is in turn the unvalued daughter of an alcoholic peasant , a film starlet, a soldier, a wife and mother, a director of film and stage, and ultimately a dictator whose absolute power corrupted her absolutely. An easy, informative, and absorbing read.

The concubine does not even want a daughter, especially one who rejects tradition by refusing to bind her feet. So the teenage Yunhe eventually flees her oppressive family and what she believes is backwater customs to join an opera troupe. She quickly gained fame as a Shanghai actress named Lan Ping. Later she meets, falls in love with, and marries Mao Zedeng, who renames her Jiang Ching. Madame Mao supports her spouse during the revolutionary period when they spend time in hiding in the mountains until the Japanese lose. She accompanies him when the Communists take control of China. Madame Mao is part of the inner circle of advisers to her spouse, but constantly falls in and out of favor. When Mao dies in 1976, she makes a play to replace him only to lose. BECOMING MADAME MAO is deep, insightful historical fiction that looks inside the persona of Madame Mao while also providing external glimpses of how she saw the world, and how others saw her. The story line is loaded with different writing techniques that make this a unique and interesting tale. Madame Mao comes into full focus, as an intriguing twentieth century figure who deserves western attention in a novel that demonstrates Anchee Min is one of the sub-genre's top writers.Harriet Klausner