Red Azalea

Name: Red Azalea
Rating: 4 (614 reviews)

by Anchee Min

First published 1993

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4.0(614)

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.

The memoir also reveals how political campaigns invade private emotion. Friendship, sexuality and artistic ambition must be expressed through officially acceptable language, while every personal relationship carries the risk of denunciation. Min’s movement from farm labour to film production shows different levels of the same system, linking the Cultural Revolution’s mass mobilisation to the intimate choices of people trying to preserve a private self.