Red Azalea: Life and Love

¶ … Red Azalea: Life and Love in China by Anchee Min. "Red Azalea" was the name of a film Anchee Min worked on at a film studio in China, but it was much more than that. It was the story of the "perfect" Chinese woman - a woman who was loyal to the Communist Party and its teachings above all else. Chairman Mao's wife, Madame Mao (Jiang Ching), wrote the film. She also wrote ten operas, which were the only form of entertainment allowed to the Chinese people.

All the operas celebrated strong women heroes, just as the film does. The film tells the story of Red Azalea, a woman who exemplifies everything Red and everything manipulated by the Communists. As Min writes, "Red Azalea was Comrade Jiang Ching's ideal, her creation, hr movie, her dream and her life" (Min 174). Thus, the heroine in the story is the ideal modern Chinese woman, who can love, but her greatest love should be for Mao, his words, and his ideas.

Red Azalea represents perfection, and the failure of Min to get the role shows that perfection is very hard, if not impossible to reach. The film means different things to the characters that are touched by it. For Min, it represents hope and the ability to make a name and a career for herself, and it represents respect from those around her. It also represents her absence from Yan, who she loves, or at least thinks she loves.

Min is touched by the story, but she is more impressed with what being a star will mean to her life and her family. However, because her dream of being a star does not come true, the film also represents the end of Min's dreams, or at least the end of her life with Yan and the beginning of a new life. Min writes, "In the dark I realized that it was a lion's den I had entered. The darkness silenced a roaring cry. The coldness of thoughts froze me.

I could hear the sound of my dream's spine breaking" (Min 170). Her dream of happiness seems like it will never come true, but that is not how the story ends. The film means something totally different for the Supervisor. Throughout the book, he seems larger than life before he actually appears, and then it is difficult to discern if he is a man or a woman.

The film for him will make his career and his reputation, but he is a wise man, and he really wants to make art, not party propaganda. He says, "We should not use fantasy to deceive our young people" (Min 238). He knows that the play is just rhetoric and the message is meaningless, and he must be enthusiastic about it to keep his own position. The film could mean his unbridled success, or it could mean his total failure.

It is also his chance to do what he really wants to do and say what he really wants to say, regardless of the repercussions. He is really a man who wants freedom, and the film is his way of breaking away and making a real statement to the people about their forced blind faith in Mao and Communism. However, he loves Jiang Ching, and supports her, and even believes she is somehow a part of him, and so her story is partly his story, too.

He believes wholeheartedly in Red Azalea even though he knows it is wrong and it will harm him in the end. He believes in Madame Mao, he believes in the power of her story, and so, even though he wants desperately to tell the truth, he will never have the chance. For Madame Mao, the film becomes her undoing. She has taken too much power and used it at the expense of others.

She begins to come under suspicion and so does her work, and that is why she becomes so critical of the film and of the cast. The story is actually her story, filled with her own fears and her own uncertainties that she felt, and the power that she has gained as she takes over the cultural ideals of the country. She is mad, therefore she can never be the "perfect" Communist woman, and that is why the film is flawed. She is flawed, and so is her life story.

For China, the story means great change. Mao will die, and Jiang Ching will fall out of favor. The story will become her undoing, and the Supervisor's undoing, too. The Supervisor tells Min that he truly loves Red Azalea because he thinks Red Azalea (or Jiang Ching) is really a part of himself, and a part of all of China. To kill the story and the film is to kill a part of himself.

He wants Min to hold on to her feelings about the film because he wants her to remember him and hold on to her feelings for him, too. The irony of this entire image is that the Red Azalea is a beautiful and delicate flower, which represents the best of China and what China has to offer, while Madame Mao could be the very worst China has to offer. Flowers have to wither and die, and so does Madame Mao's popularity after Mao's death.

As the Supervisor tells Min, "That's Chinese history. The fall of a kingdom in always the fault.