The whole thing started in a writing class at the School of the Art Institute in 1986, when the instructor assigned an essay about the students’ lives at age 12.
Anchee Min, a young woman from China, was still struggling with basic English. Notions of narrative, metaphor, slang-these were subordinate to the more necessary language of survival.
“I had nobody here,” she says. “No relatives, no friends. I wanted to have a hold of something, and China is such a big thing.”
Min had been in the U.S. for only two years then, an ordeal that began with a suggestion from her friend, actress Joan Chen. She’s still reluctant to discuss the details of the experience because of the effect they could have on friends and family back in China.
Most of Min’s classmates wrote cozy stories about their childhood, but her essay turned out to be a devastating account of life in China during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, a political upheaval that so marked her and her peers that they are now called the “ruined” generation.
“In China, people tried to forget about it,” she says. “It’s such a painful period. But here, I could remember. The distance, the comfort here, it made it possible to think about what happened. And I started to see things I would never see back in China-a lot of beauty, yes, and a lot of evil, too.”
Although she was a painting and art history major at the Art Institute, Min was so haunted by her memories that she became, by her own admission, obsessed with writing them down. The stories tumbled out of her, and years later the result is the book “Red Azalea” (Pantheon Books). Min will read from it at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Barbara’s Bookstore, 1350 N. Wells St.
Written in English, in a language that often seems only slightly removed from lyric poetry or music, “Red Azalea” details Min’s life as a Little Red Guard, one of Chairman Mao’s soldiers in the Cultural Revolution. The book follows her as a model student sent to a farm collective, then to a Beijing film studio where she’s been selected to play the role of “Red Azalea,” the heroine in a political opera. But Min is eventually betrayed, and by the time she regains her political footing, Chairman Mao dies and all of China convulses. She winds up as a set clerk for six years, in charge of the studio’s dreariest duties. The book ends with her arrival on U.S. soil. Min intends to recount her American experiences-“through Chinese eyes”-in a subsequent book.
The first account published in the West by someone who actually lived her childhood through the turmoil of the times, “Red Azalea” is being released in 13 languages. Min is currently negotiating with the same filmmaking group that produced “Farewell My Concubine” to bring her story to the screen. But in the meantime, the book has been banned in China.
“In the first draft of the book, I pictured myself very much as a victim of the revolution,” Min says. “But that wasn’t entirely true. If the (Communist) Party is the boat, then the people are the water. Without the water, the boat won’t get very far. Now it’s more truthful: I’m not a hero or a villain, and neither is anybody else.”
One of the most startling aspects of the book is its depiction of Min’s erotic relationship with her commander at the Red Fire Farm collective, a woman named Yan who both inspired and terrified her charges. “I was fascinated by her devotion to communism, and how she was so driven to make the world a better place,” Min says. “But her innocence, that was the most tragic thing of all.”
In “Red Azalea,” Min’s sexual frankness is a revelation. “I’m very interested in the psychology of desire, in the ways that desire-whether repressed or not-makes us behave,” she says. “When I met Yan, I didn’t know what a man and a woman might do, sexually. We were raised listening to the operas of Madam Mao, Jiang Ching. In six out of the eight operas, the heroes were women who had no private lives. This affected us all, an entire generation-our desire was completely suppressed.”
Although she began the book long before she had her daughter, when the baby arrived, Min realized the real purpose of her work.
“I think about my youth, how it was lost,” she says. “I wrote this to lay out history, to do my best to make sure it doesn’t happen again, that it doesn’t happen to my daughter’s generation. That is very important: To tell the truth.”
