Becoming Madame Mao

Rating:
Summary: Becoming Madame Mao
Review: I'm a hooked fan of historical fiction and have been reading this genre for decades. Anchee Min's Becoming Madame Mao is at the top of my list. Her insight into Jiang Ching, the woman who controlled the thinking of a billion people, is right on target. Although history paints Mao's wife as black, Min shows her to be a complicated individual, who only wanted someone to love her. In this case that someone was Mao, who plays everyone off against everyone else so he can stay in power. Madame Mao, as it turns out, appears to have been Mao's dupe. This books moves at the pace of a French bullet train with steamy windows. Also revealed is what was hidden behind the bamboo curtain during the cultural revolution. If you are a student of history, this book must be added to your list.

Rating:
Summary: Becoming Anchee Min
Review: I'm going to be brief in my review of this Novel. I think it's terrific. In fact, I'll go a step further and say it is the best fiction work I've read in a long time. Not since reading Shogun, have I enjoyed a style of writing more. Anchee Min seems to be able to combine the terse style of Hemingway with the ethereal style of E. L. Doctorow in Ragtime--to create an entire universe that allows the reader to gently plunge in. I can't find a thing wrong with this book. True it switches persons in an unusual way, but I remain unfettered in opinion by virtue of that technique. The words fall off the page with imagery and Min's prose feels like poetry. All the critical reviews placed inside the cover are correct. Possibly we live in an age of negative aesthetics--due to lower educational standards and TV. But I promise you, this book is aesthetic and educational. What a perspective--getting inside the head of Madame Mao Jiang Ching--the White Boned Demon of China. It's incredibly historical and filled with facts about one the most repressive regimes in modern history. And yet, it is pleasing to the sensibilities and true to the simplicity of the East. I applaud Anchee Min for her most excellent achievement.

Rating:
Summary: Loving Madame Mao
Review: If you loved Memoirs of a Geisha, you'll love this book. It has the same ability to zap you to another time and place and make you want to stay. Learning about a different life has never been so engaging. I loved it.

Rating:
Summary: twisted history by a dishonest author
Review: It is totally dishonest and irrespossible to Chinese history and to the Chinese people, especially those who suffered immensely when Jiang Qing was in power. Jiang Qing was the worst thing that ever happened to China. Isn't Anchee Min Chinese? Didn't she live through The Cultural Revolution? Where is her conscience? How could ANYONE possibly portray Jiang Qing as a woman doing everything out of love for Mao? That is disgusting! Anchee Min used all the cheapest devices to describe Jiang and Mao's love scene in a mountain cave. It reads like nothing more than a cheap romance novel.

Clearly, Min tailored her book to the American public who have little knowledge about China but love "exotic" things. Little did they know what kind of horror Min's beloved Madame Mao brought to China and the Chinese people. Can you imagine a book published by a major house that portrays Hitler as a man full of love and passion and that he killed millions of Jews because his mother or lover told him to? Can you imagine that happening in our publishing world? But sadly, Anchee Min found her freedom in America and in the name of fiction, she can just make it all up. It's a shame, unjust, and a total waste of paper for trashy books like this one. It's pathetic to see some of the readers actually rave about it and call it a gem and believe they had learned a lot about China. How dangerous and damaging that is!
There are many good books on China but this is not one of them.

Rating:
Summary: bad history and not a good read
Review: Maybe you would like this book if you don't know anything about modern China. But if you do, the book can make you cringe. Ms Min's portrayal of Madame Mao is not convincing in the Chinese cultural context. Moreover, the little mistakes Ms Min keeps making leads me to wonder how much she really knows about China. Take, for example, Madame Mao's name: If you follow the Pinyin romanization system (international standard promoted by the Chinese government and adopted by the United Nations), her name should be spelled as "Jiang Qing." If you use the older Wade-Giles romanization system (used as the standard romanization system for Chinese names and titles by the Library of Congress until a few years ago), then her name should be spelled as "Chiang Ch'ing." Ms. Min's spelling "Jiang Ching" follows neither system. Or take the historical charater Liu Shaoqi: Right before the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi was the chairman of the Chinese government (Mao was the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party). To avoid confusion with Mao's chairmanship, "chairman" of the government is often translated as "president." In the 1960s, Liu was referred to as Chairman Liu (or if you translate chairman of the government as "president," "President Liu"), but never "Vice Chairman Liu" as Ms Min sometimes calls him. Okay, I know these little mistakes have little to do with the plot of the story, but it still undermines the reader's confidence in the author's understanding of China. It's like reading a novel on England and finding the author calling Tony Blair the "President," or like reading a novel on the Nixon presidency and finding Kissinger referred to as "the foreign minister."

Rating:
Summary: Shifting perspective
Review: Min has written a very interesting book. If changing perspective is problematic I suggest to a couple of reviewers to try James Joyce. Complex and difficult books are a challenge and demanding of good readers. Certainly in this book one gets the impression Min knows what she is talking about. And her writing certainly is far above the norm. 5 stars and forget what the crybabies have to say.

Rating:
Summary: Shifting perspective
Review: Min has written a very interesting book. If changing perspective is problematic I suggest to a couple of reviewers to try James Joyce. Complex and difficult books are a challenge and demanding of good readers. Certainly in this book one gets the impression Min knows what she is talking about. And her writing certainly is far above the norm. 5 stars and forget what the crybabies have to say.

Rating:
Summary: One of the worst books I've suffered through in a long time
Review: Normally, I try to find good points in a novel and this one is not without any. There are some gems in here that kept me reading until the end, hoping to find more. But the good are too few and far between to make the time investment worth the trouble.

This book is one of the most overly-written, sentimental claptrap I've read in awhile -- full of nonsequitirs and grand but empty proclamations. If you had a friend who talked/wrote like this he/she would henceforth be referred to as "the drama queen." But don't take my word for it. Read for yourself some passages:

"Peace comes out of war, my lover teaches me. Life is paid for by death. There is no middle ground. There are times when we have to make decisions. Doubt is a subtitute word for danger."

"November 12, 1969, 6:45 A.M. Vice Chairman Liu's face suddenly glows. The wrinkles begin to stretch and his facial muscles relax. Eternity settles in. There is almost a smile when the great heart stops beating."

Awful, tiresome language like this would been ripped apart by your high school and college writing teachers. In this book, they are served up on every other page.

In addition, the constant switching between first and third person perspectives was annoying and puzzling. The third person served no discernible purpose whatsoever.

Another problem with the story is the appearance and disappearance of minor characters. For example, we are introduced to Mao's daughter Nah in the Prologue, she is born and sporadically jumps in and out of the story, and then we suddenly witness an adult Nah antagonistic to her mother -- with no explanation why she is hostile and, worse yet, no real rhyme or reason for her inclusion in the story. Ostensibly, Madame Mao's relationship with Nah is intended to illuminate the alienation of this ruthless woman from everyone, including her daughter. But this illumination is dim at best.

Like many people, I read this book because I have an interest in modern Chinese history. And Jiang Qing (or Jiang Ching as Min calls her) is as interesting as historical figures come. It's strange, then, that Anchee Min manages to make Madame Mao one of the most boring characters I've ever read.

Min offers many insights into the motivations behind one of the most fearsome women of modern history. Mining the self-help section of bookstores, she suggests they stem from pyschological traumas -- everything from early childhood rejection to fear of abandonment -- to explain Madame Mao's vindictive and cold actions. But what she finally settles on as the driving forces of Madame Mao's behavior are a desperate love for the selfish Mao Tse-tung, outdone only by a need by Jiang Qing to see herself as a tragic leading lady on the grand stage of life.

I wouldn't have minded that Min finally settled on these two needs except that she then droned on and on for seemingly endless pages about them. I don't blame Min; she needs a better editor. After 337 pages, I closed the book in disbelief that Min was able to make the Cultural Revolution such a snoozer.

I generally don't like giving books a 1-star rating because I like to give writers credit for creating a story with imaginative characters. But I was so angry with myself for putting the time in to read this book that I thought: Why should I be the only one suffering?

Rating:
Summary: Vapid, pretentious and oh so "Artistic"!
Review: Seems Ms Min thought that the way to fictionalize this complex personality of Madame Mao was to write one paragraph of history followed by one of "fiction," i.e. some internal monologue that editorized the "facts." The result is awkward and offensive. Ms Min assumed that the readers are: 1) not knowledgeable about the recent history of China; 2) cannot tell fact from fiction. Worst of all, the voice of this "fictional" character is flat, there are no insights into the external experiences. The voice of this book sounds exactly the same as Ms Min's other works. The pretentious tone is really a put-off. Like one of the reviewers said, you won't learn anything you don't already know about Madame Mao even if you had only read a few articles about the Cultural Revolution in any news magazine.

If you want history, read the list of books at the end of the "novel." If you want a good story set in an exotic country, read someone else.

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly excellent work on Madame Mao
Review: 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