Red Azalea

Red Azalea is Anchee Min’s celebrated memoir of growing up in the last years of Mao’s China. As a child, she was asked to publicly humiliate a teacher; at seventeen, she was sent to work at a labor collective. Forbidden to speak, dress, read, write, or love as she pleased, she found a lifeline in a secret love affair with another woman. Miraculously selected for the film version of one of Madame Mao’s political operas, Min’s life changed overnight. Then Chairman Mao suddenly died, taking with him an entire world. A revelatory and disturbing portrait of China, Anchee Min’s memoir is exceptional for its candor, its poignancy, its courage, and for its prose which Newsweek calls "as delicate and evocative as a traditional Chinese brush painting."

what a great writer. this book brought me into the story. I have learned so much about China. and felt like I was there.

I read three of Anchee Min's other novels before this - the Empress duology and Becoming Madame Mao. Compared to these, this book is not as good, especially since Min uses a lot of short sentences, so some parts almost feel like 'See Spot Run'. This offers a nice firsthand account of the Cultural Revolution, but does not offer a whole picture - not that Min can be blamed, since she had been confined to Red Fire Farm so much. I do wish she could have provided more detail on her home life - what was it like for her and her family to live in just two rooms after being forced out of their bigger apartment?

I wish that Ms. Min could have focused a little more on her family, childhood, and outside events, because compared to 'Empress Orchid', this book comes out as rather dry and lacking when it comes to description. If you're new to Anchee Min, I recommend that you read Empress Orchid before this book. It's a enjoyable read, but not the best memoir.

"Red Azalea" is to Maoist China what Anne Frank's "Diary" is to Nazi Germany, what Ayn Rand's "We The Living" and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "Ivan Denisovich" and "Gulag Archipelago" are to Soviet Russia. It should be required reading in every High School literature class in the semi-free world, even with its frank eroticism - today's students are already getting stuff far more explicit, and in this case it's there for a valid reason.

The imperative to read this work is especially true given the fact that high-ranking members of the current American(!) Administration, most notably one Anita Dunn, have expressed deep admiration for the collectivist butcher Mao - a dictator who murdered in excess of 30 million people, who engineered precisely the vast, subhuman misery chronicled by Anchee Min in this autobiography. Note too that "Red Azalea" focuses primarily on a period from the mid-1970s to her escape from the P.R.C. roughly a decade later - the events of this horrific story occurred only a very short time ago.

"Red Azalea" is not just a report on the unspeakable evil that is collectivism, it's a meditation on the will to survive, and on the psychological methods by which people under extreme material and spiritual bondage cope with the destruction of freedom and the extermination of hope. "Hope" - now there's an ironic word, huh?

I myself had read all of the dry factual data about what Mao and his regime had done - and to a degree are still doing - to the people of China, but aside from the outsider's peek beneath the veneer of collectivist China afforded by Mark Salzman in his excellent book and film "Iron and Silk," I was fully unprepared for the stark, riveting story of day-to-day life - if you want to call it "life" - that Anchee Min relates in this book. The first fifty pages read like a horror novel - but this is an *autobiography* of a woman born in 1957, and of events she survived, from childhood right up to the 1980s.

Min's prose is bleak and unadorned with literary flourishes - and is all the more moving, even poetic, for that carbide-steel starkness. In a 2008 interview Min said she started Red Azalea as a practical exercise in learning English, and that querying people on elevators on grammatical corrections was her primary means of editing her work. The result, amazingly, is a book that reads more like a novel than an autobiography, to the point that I found myself repeatedly stunned by the self-reminder: "This - is - REAL." When you finish the last page of "Red Azalea," you will find yourself breathing a silent, horrified "Thank You" to the people who forged America's Declaration of Independence and Constitution, to America's first Founder, Aristotle, and to the people who today are struggling to defend those Founding principles from America's own unspeakably-corrupt collectivists.

In exactly the same way that American collectivist "intellectuals" denied the facts chronicled by Rand and by Solzhenitsyn about Russia - and who continue to evade those truths even in the face of the mountain of data released in the wake of the Soviet collapse - so American collectivist "intellectuals" stand up and, with utter ethical agnosticism, profess open *admiration* for Mao (not to mention the dictators Chavez, Castro, Ahmadinejad and the like.) Monsters like Anita Dunn - and politicians who place such monsters in official positions within government - are only able to live their hypocritical lives and to avoid the public ridicule and ostracism that justice would demand, by the fact that We The People rarely find enough information about horrors visited upon people halfway around the world - by the very same totalitarian dictators America's collectivists continue to worship. As in the case of the Soviet empire, we can be assured that the Dunn/Obama types will continue their corrupt flight from facts and ethics long after the Maoist regime has faded, China has embarked on the road to becoming a nation of ethics and liberty, and the old regime's human rights crimes have been fully exposed. Ms. Min deserves the highest gratitude and admiration for having first survived, then having related this harrowing life story to the eyes of the world. The rest of us should consider it essential reading.

Run, don't walk, to checkout for this book. Get extras and give them to family and friends - this story deserves to be heard as widely as possible. I would say it's a ready-made movie script, but Hollywood's "writers" and producers are orders of magnitude more corrupt and evil than even our collectivist politicians. So...just get the book.

History books tell us facts and figures. We know how egregious were the acts perpetrated against the citizens of China under Mao. But, to read it as lived by a child who grows up from psychological indoctrination that enslaves to disillusionment that causes her to question and finally freedom from entrapment to emigrate, brings it home on a very personal level.

Anchee Min tells her story in a concise way. No wasted words, yet the feeling is that nothing of significance was left out. I was so enthralled with Red Azalea that I read it through in one day; couldn't seem to put it down.

I was surprised to learn that Madame Mao was the worse of the two; the one who brought Mao to the apex of his power. Strange to me is how she is seen as reprehensible (and rightfully so) while he is still thought of by many with affection. They were both monsters in their souls.

This is a book that must be read if one wants to understand the impact Mao had on the life of the average Chinese citizen and their society as a whole. The depths of abject poverty and despair to which he plunged them.

It is a lesson we in America, given the present political agenda, must be very cognizant of in order to avoid becoming such a country. We are the last true bastion of liberty, to which the Anchee Mins are able to emigrate. If we fall, there will be no refuge - for us as well as anyone else.

All aspects of the purchase were fine. Book in good shape and arrived as predicted.