Red Azalea

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.


touching and informative   November 3, 2005
Liang Ming (New York)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful

There are many books dealing with Mao's China and Red Azalea would be a fine choice to begin. It is a truthful account of life under an oppressive political system and does much to help one understand what it was like to live and struggle and survive in such a difficult period.





Incredible   September 15, 1998
11 out of 12 found this review helpful

Red Azelia is the most poetically accurate account of life, love, and sexuality in Chinese culture to date. From western sensibilities, the relationship between the narrator and Yan seems a little strange until one realizes that there is a fundimental difference in Chinese and western views on sex, sensuality, and physical/emotional fulfillment. To a westerner, the relationship seems to have not been entirely satisfying for the two people involved. However, in the cultural framework in which it occured it must have been deliciously satisfying for the two participants.

The book shows the results of the Chinese (both Mainland and Nationalist) tendancy to marry much later than westerners. Few women marry before 25 and few men before 30. For women, sexual relationships before marriage are devestating if future husbands are aware of them. As a result, may women turn to each other for physical intimacy (as opposed to men visiting prostitutes for the same purpose). This book places this cultural tendency in the context of another cultural disaster in China: The Cultural Revolution.

I can not recommend this book too highly, especially for people who have a vested interest in understanding sexual aspects of Chinese culture that most Chinese are unwilling to discuss openly.

One must also understand that sensual expression between two people of the same sex is not viewed as negatively in Chinese culture as it is in the west. It is common to see two women waling hand in hand or see two women dancing in the clubs (often quite sensually).