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Summary: Candor and simple beauty
Review: A beginging so heart throbing and tretorous only leads to the life in Communist China. As a kindergartener a little girl has had to have the responsibilities of an adult. Her thoughts about family, yet her heart a flight. This little girl soon grows up in a communist camp...a scary, yet sad story of life.
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Summary: a place where only strong ones are to be found.
Review: A life where ones has live and had support through itself and yet had showed no fear .
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Summary: A powerful, hypnotic read
Review: A powerful, beautiful, achingly honest book. I was blown away when I first read this book. Beauty and pain co-exist side by side in this firsthand account of growing up under the Mao revolution. An extremely moving account of essentially what it's like to live under oppression. This book stayed in my memory for a long time.
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Summary: A detailed description of a life raised in Communism.
Review: After I read the first page of this book, I couldn't believe what I was reading. For instance, the graphic details with her family's disturbing neighbors, and the accusations made on her mother by the whole town. If anything even remotely close like that ever happened to me, I wouldn't take it. Because nice people will probably be reading this, I won't go into detail. On a brighter note, this book helped me understand communism much better. It was a very blurry picture to me before. This book also helped me take what rights I do have in the US (that most people, including myself, take for granted), and understand them with so much more appreciation. I definitely recommend reading this book. Its for your own good.
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Summary: Yet another "I survived the Cultural Revolution" whine-fest
Review: Anchee Min could be a somewhat decent writer if only she was so self-conscious and self-indulgent. This shows in the early parts of the book, where Min casually portrays the grand tragedy of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution years via small, personal sorrows. The bizarre, forced relocation of her family and the tale of her pet chicken shine with the subtly humorous depth of the personal farce. Later, the passing portrayals of her parents and neighbors exhibit a similar tender insight.The problem arises when Min steps in front of her own camera, so to speak. The aspiring starlet can only manage Maoist opera-style overacting and melodrama, losing her coherency of narrative in her eagerness to be the tragic heroine. It is the rare writer who can pull off an unironic first person narrative without waxing self-important. Like other contemporary Chinese women writers, such as Hong Ying and Wei Hui, Anchee Min is unaware of how tiresome navel-staring can be in literature. Moreover, while description is essential to a story, Red Azeala relies excessively on flowerly language, falling ever deeper in its mire until the final chapters, which are unreadable for all the decaying rose petals the author buries us in. That sort of exotic erotic orientalized imagery may sell books, but it also destroys their integrity.
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Summary: Powerful, joltingly honest account of life under Mao
Review: 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.
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Summary: Interesting but flawed
Review: Anchee Min tells the story of her experiences in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Most Americans understand too little about the Chinese political situation, and Ms. Min's story can help us to understand the human side of the story, the suffering and humiliation suffered by so many. Unfortunately, her story doesn't bring much new to the table, except perhaps the lesbian aspect of her sexuality. This aspect remains unexplored, and instead seems almost inserted as an afterthought, for the purposes of titillation rather than real exploration. There are many books about the Cultural Revolution. If one is interested in Ms. Min's story, they would do well to use it as a starting point for reading, rather than as a destination in itself. Too much is left unsaid; the situation leading to the Cultural Revolution was incredibly complex. As light history, Ms. Min's book is interesting, but her writing is often stiff and without the fire that moves the rea! der.
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Summary: Red Azalea, alias Mao's Dog, Jiang Ching
Review: Anchee Min's book about her life during and after the Cultural Revolution is rather naive. She doesn't even mention the real reason behind the CR, namely the fact that Mao lost the majority in the Central Committee and unleashed the youth in order to regain his power, causing millions of deaths (see Simon Leys: The new Clothes of Chairman Mao.)
The only comment on the CR in this book reads as follows:'Jiang Ching's unfulfilled desire ... that made ancient tragedies stir the souls and foster civilizations. And it was that very same desire that sparkled the flame of the Great Cultural Revolution.'(p.250)
This comment is also an extremely flattery (an euphemism) portrait of Mrs. Mao ('She was a heroine.' p. 243), while it was not a secret that she took control of the Cultural Ministry to take revenge (by tortures and assassinations) on all people (e.g. movie directors) who had refused to give her major roles in their movies.
As a member of the Gang of Four she tries to take Mao's place after his death. For a formidable portrait of Mrs. Mao I recommend Lucien Bodard's masterpiece 'Le Chien de Mao'.
The work camp scenes, the erotic encounters and the mass rally to insult a forged 'class enemy' are more convincing. They show us that each member of the Red Guard had to loose its individuality and privacy (no sex, no secrecy, no free speech, mass confessions) and had to be a 'cog in a big revolutionary machine'. It was a jail life under the iron fist of the proletarian revolution with the slogan 'killing the chickens to shock the monkeys'.
But underneath the 'purity' of the revolutionaries we discover jealousies, drive for power and dominance, manipulations, fierce competition, fear and lies. The author herself is far from innocent: 'I am my ambition.' (p. 245)
Overall, the atmosphere in this book is rather sentimental and not without a certain narcissism. Also, the sudden change in the character of one of the main players seems extraordinary.
This is certainly, and by far, not the best book on the Cultural Revolution or on the work camps.
Therefore I can recommend two masterpieces: Nieng Cheng's 'Life and Death in Shanghai' ( a moving and inhumanly biting biography of an innocent woman caught in a political quagmire) and Xianliang Zhang's 'Half Man is Woman' (a formidable tale about work camp inmates and an in depth analysis of the gender battle).
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Summary: Mysteries seem just under the surface
Review: Anchee Min's book is very subtle and I am impressed not only by what she reveals about China in the Maoist era, but also by what she hints at throughout the book. I wonder if other readers get the same sense that she holds back as much as she offers. If the book is a memoir and not fiction, then the mysterious Supervisor must be a real person. I am intrigued by the parallels between the Supervisor, whose name she is never told, and Jiang Ching, whom she says she has never met. Did Anchee Min ever meet Madame Mao? Why does the Supervisor provoke the same feelings she has for Yan? Anchee Min's lack of quotation marks and blending of dialogue in paragraphs made it tricky to keep straight who said what. I wonder if this was purposeful--to keep enough ambiguity in the writing to protect the identities. Certainly an American editor would have pointed out the conventions of print dialogue. The ending of the memoir is also a puzzle, since it seems to end on such a despairing note for the rights of women in China. The gender equality that Red Azalea (the fictional heroine of the opera)seems to represent is finally and permanently suppressed with the imprisonment of Madame Mao. Yet I wonder how the author rose above these social conditions and her own despair, during the years that followed the book, and escaped to the United States. Wouldn't she have needed help to get across the ocean? Details of these crucial years, and whatever events may have led to her coming to the United States, are not included. Indeed, the letter from the friend from the U.S.A. seems to be a deus ex machina that doesn't quite explain the situation for me. Why don't we hear about this friend in the course of the narration? There is more to the story than Anchee Min has revealed. I hope she will someday write about her voyage to America.
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Summary: Powerful personal history
Review: 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.
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