Rating: 
Summary: Dangerous Desires
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: stunning and honest, erotically painful
Review: While I was fascinated and often frustrated by the experiences with Chinese communism, especially during the Maoist era, that Min has written so eloquently about, I have read and re-read her novel simply to take in the tantilizing details of her love affair with her commanding officer Yan. I am currently doing research on female homosexual relationships in China, and Red Azalea acts as an incredible source of information regarding Chinese attitudes towards homosexuality in the twentieth century. It turns out, contrary to what other reviewers have posted, that homosexuality is feared as much, if not more, in China than in the United States. I experienced this firsthand while studying in Beijing last year. While it is true that there are no religious barriers for homosexuals in China and Taiwan, there exist a multitude of other societal disagreements with homosexuality. Research is showing me, however, that this was not always the case. Female homosexual relationships in particular were tolerated and accepted in Chinese dynastic times. The drastic change in public opinion about homosexuality is due largely in part to Western influence, both in terms of religion and Western sexology, which was for the most part developed during the Victorian era. Min's novel is a heart-breaking example of the shame surrounding homosexual relationships that many womnen in China face on a daily basis. While physical closeness and indeed female homosexuality are common in modern day China, this does not indicate that society has accepted homosexual relationships back into the realm of the normal.
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