Red Azalea

WHEN Anchee Min wrote Red Azalea, she realised that it was not just her own story “but also the story of China, its yesterday, today and tomorrow”.

Bloomsbury; £7.99

She was born in 1957, in Shanghai, to parents who were teachers but forced to work in factories for their “re-education”.

At the age of 17, Anchee was sent to work on a labour collective farm. By day, she worked in the rice fields, plagued by leeches and heat; by night, she attended self-confession and criticism meetings. She became close to a beautiful young girl called Little Green, who managed to preserve some of her femininity in their grim surroundings. She also developed a passion for a woman called Yan, her commander, who seemed to epitomise the ideals of the communist party. Although Anchee was in love with Yan and managed to share her bed, Yan was in love with a man called Leopard Lee.

Anchee soon discovered the dangers of forming relationships, especially those of a sexual kind. One night, Little Green and her boyfriend were caught making love. A public trial was held and the man was sentenced to death. Little Green was “re-educated”, but slowly lost her mind.

Anchee was selected to be trained as an actress at the Shanghai Film Studios. Here, she finds the same jealousies and pettiness that contributed to the misery on the farm. The film world has the same negative attitude to sexual relationships. She is befriended by the director, who asks her to meet him in the Peace Park, and she discovers a secret life where couples meet illicitly. Anchee is kept on in a lowly role in the film studio, rather than being returned to the farm. In a postscript, we learn that she eventually escaped to the US. Unlike many memoirs about the Cultural Revolution, Red Azalea reveals the reality of the repressed, seething, sexual underbelly of Mao’s China.