Growing up in Shanghai in the 1960s, Min was the best student in her class, a junior Red Guard who memorized the revolutionary operas of Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and sang them all day. But her faith was tested when she was told to denounce a beloved teacher, who had been accused of spying. Sobbing, Min spat criticisms into a microphone.-She still feels the agonizing guilt.
At 17 Min was ordered to the countryside to work at a collective farm, and although she tried to muster the appropriate zeal, she and her family grieved as she boarded the truck. “My family stood in front of me, as if taking a dull picture,” she writes. “It was a picture of sadness, a picture of never the same.” Red Fire Farm was a desolate place, but Min was quickly drawn to the commander of her unit, Yan. “She had weather-beaten skin [and] a full mouth, in the shape of a water chestnut… She burned me with the sun in her eyes. I felt bare.” Eventually the two shared a bed, although four other women slept in the room. “I told her not to wash the mosquito net because the dirt made it less transparent,” writes Min.
On the basis of her looks and political reliability, Min was plucked from the farm to star in a movie called “Red Azalea,” one of Madame Mao’s projects. At the film studio she fell in love with a mysterious man she calls “the Supervisor,” a powerful ally of Madame Mao’s. But before the movie was finished, Mao died, his wife was denounced and the Supervisor’s fortunes collapsed. Min spent the next six years washing the studio’s floors. In 1983 she received a letter from a friend in the United States, the actress Joan Chen. Would Min like to leave? “My despair made me fearless,” she writes. The book ends with her arrival in Chicago in 1984.
Today the harsh scenes of China that Min conjures so vividly seem distant indeed. Min, 37, lives with her Chinese emigre husband and their 2-year-old daughter in Chicago, where she and her husband paint and Min writes. During her first years in this country she worked at numerous jobs waitressing, fixing toilets, painting fabrics-while studying English and art. “I didn’t even bother to take off my clothes at night,” she says. “Red Azalea!’ (306 pages. Pantheon. $22) began as an assignment for her English class; the book has 40,000 copies in print, and Min is at work on a sequel. That’s happy news for readers who turned the last page of “Red Azalea” slowly-longing to know what happened next.
