Red Azalea by Anchee Min

Red Azalea by Anchee Min General overview of the book: Anchee Min has written an autobiographical book that is both a very good and in-depth exploration of what life was life in China during the "Cultural Revolution," and also a very explicit recounting of her private world, including the sensual side of life as a lesbian in hard core chauvinist China.

Min's work as a narrator in this book is exceptional, and full of ironies that are surprising, even shocking, and yet revealing of what it was like to live in a totalitarian regime.

On page 3 Min writes, "I was an adult since the age of five." That is both ironic and sad, since a child of five should be able to enjoy life as a child, and should be engaged in activities befitting a child; but in the Cultural Revolution (CR), there was nothing to do but obey, fight, survive, and try to stay one step ahead of a big social misstep or verbal mistake which could cause severe pain and anguish.

"It was like a regular meal that I got a purple cheek or a bloody nose," she wrote on page 5.

It did not bother me too much...I learned not to show my fear, because I had to be a model for the children, to show them what bravery meant." Bravery? For a child of five to be taking care of children, fighting kids in the streets, keeping the housework up while her parents labored long hours for the CR communist machine and didn't come home until late - all those things are ironic and horribly wrong, considering Min's age.

And her description of the lack of civil control in her community (5-6), and of the ongoing viciousness of their neighbors downstairs is chilling. She writes that "The revolution is about fairness" and then, in the next sentence, explains that her downstairs neighbors came up "night after night" and poured "*****" on their sleeping blankets. It is certainly ironic - and quite frankly, despicable - that the concepts of "fairness" and of pouring ***** on blankets should appear in the same paragraph.

We also learn that the Red Guard loots homes, and there are no police to protect innocent citizens; and we learn that neighbors are allowed to slash other neighbors with scissors, and a neighbor child can threatened to chop open another neighbor's head with a sharpened axe. Quite a brutal environment in which to grow up, and Min does a very competent job editorially explaining all this with profound understatement and clarity.

For example, on page 11, her family has moved and she attends "Long Happiness Elementary School," where neighborhood kids "attacked us often." Another irony, "happiness" juxtaposed with being "attacked." And as head of the "Little Red Guard," Min learned that being "a revolutionary was everything"; indeed, "everything" in this context meant that the real Red Guards "showed us how to destroy, how to worship." They even jumped off buildings "to show their loyalty to Mao." This is an incredible tale of a young woman being trained to be impervious to the madness and death and bloodshed all around her.

Her narrative abandons the harshness and brutality and brainwashing that was going on all around her, and reaches a much softer, human tone when she writes about her erotic desire for her friend Yan. Min has been writing letters for Yan, and giving the letters to the man Yan was fond of, Leopard Lee, on a daily basis.

The story (116-119) is both sad and erotic at this point, because Leopard Lee isn't the least bit interested in Yan, yet Min is very interested in her, and writes letters for Yan to Lee that Min would certainly rather be saying the things to Yan that Yan was saying - through Min - to a man who was entirely disinterested in her missives.

Through the closeness that evolves between the two (through Min's act of actually writing the letters), though, Min becomes something of a seducer of Yan, and this leads to one of the more romantic, erotic passages of the book. On page 118, the madness of the repression blends with, and then gives way to the loveliness of a caress. She grabbed my hand and pressed it to her chest. She asked me to feel her heart.

In the hammering of her heartbeat, the rising and falling of her chest, I saw a city of chaos. A mythical force drew me toward her. I felt the blazing of a fire rise inside me. Yan was wearing a thin shirt with a bra under it. The shirt was the color of roots. The bra was plain white. As she lazily stretched her body, my heart raged....Lips slightly parted. I could not bear it, the way she looked at me, like water penetrating rocks.

Passion overflowed in her eyes...She held me closer. Her breasts pressed against my shoulder...she was a rice shoot in a summer of drought. And so though Yan is politically and socially more mature than Min (Yan was a communist party secretary), Min is more mature sensually, and provides a much-needed sexual education for Yan; and in the meantime, each helps the other through the trying times of the madness of the brutal revolution and brainwashing.

The relationship is a humanizing bond for both of them, and their passionate relationship juxtaposed with the world outside is very tender and poignant for the reader. "She pulled my fingers to unbutton her bra," Min writes (129), in her style of short, understated sentences. "The moment I touched her breasts, I felt a sweet shock. My heart beat disorderly.

A wild horse broke off its reins...there was a gale mixed with thunder inside of me." Her use of metaphors and similes, in the erotic parts of her book and in the brutal "reality side," are highly effective: "I was a shell with its pearl missing," she wrote (159); "Four young women stepped out one after another like snowflakes dancing in the air" (165); "The clock in the living room sounded like a slow heartbeat" (216); "We went into the shadow of the trees where the lights were like the eyes of ghosts" (258).

"His lips were tender. Tender like naked lichee fruit. My heart drank its sticky juice"; "...their fronts and rears exposed like animals in mating season..." A gifted writer must be able to paint pictures with words, and Min certainly does that well. Implications of the ideas in the book: Relationships tell stories. And.