Red Azalea

Anchee Min is born in Shanghai in 1957 and grows up in the last years of Mao's China. As a child in the Little Red Guards, she is asked to betray and publicly humiliate a teacher she loves. Red Azalea is her memoir of that political and emotional education.

At seventeen she is sent to the Red Fire Farm, a labor collective, where fear, deprivation and hardship shape her days. She is forbidden to speak, dress, read, write or love as she pleases. Under a worn mosquito net, wary of a vindictive colleague who could expose her, she finds comfort in a love affair with the woman who leads her company.

Later she is chosen as a finalist from a pool of twenty thousand candidates for the film version of one of Madame Mao's political operas. While shooting begins, Chairman Mao dies. The world she knew ends, and her life takes a different course.

This is a first-person account of the Cultural Revolution and what it cost the young men and women swept into it. The tone is candid and often disturbing, and the book keeps close to one woman's private experience of fear, desire and survival rather than to public events.