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Red Azalea
by Anchee Min
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Anchee Min recalls growing up in Shanghai as a devoted child of Maoist China. She is required to denounce a teacher, joins the Little Red Guards and, at seventeen, is sent to the Red Fire Farm, where political surveillance, exhausting labour and the threat of punishment govern daily life during the Cultural Revolution.
At the farm, Min’s secret relationship with the commander Yan provides intimacy in a society that attempts to regulate private feeling. Her selection to play the revolutionary heroine Red Azalea takes her to the Shanghai Film Studio and closer to the cultural machinery controlled by Jiang Qing, but Mao’s death and the collapse of the project leave her searching for another future.
Historical people
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