Red Azalea: A Memoir

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).