As a story of the human spirit and its blind, ceaseless perseverance, the writing excels. She seems hardly believable at times, and at others ignores clearly important details (the clarity of her relationships always comes through about as muddy as the mosquito netting above the bed). The fanaticism, which she attributes to the more despicable characters, is only matched by the ridiculous extent of her hero worship of others. Though I may see as the God That Never Dies, I also look at it from the perspective of a cynical westerner. Perhaps it is impossible to render a fair assessment of the accuracy in her writings. It also betrays a desire to be seen as a wounded, innocent victim in the middle of the mess that was politics and social “order” when indeed she herself was a good deal luckier than many of her contemporaries. And yet, the simplicity of her writing at times and the extremely limited scope of her autobiography betray an attempt for sympathy, if not for her personally, then for the Chinese People. The struggles with her classmates, the loss of her childhood pet, the struggle against the enemy Lu, the loss of her first lover, the loss of her new lover and her new chance at stardom amount to misery beyond that which most Westerners can imagine.

She writes of the events of her early life with a clarity that leaves even a steeled cynic feeling sympathy. She manages to escape the m4isery of the Red Fire Farm. She struggles and achieves intimacy with her hero Yan. It is amazing that in the context of the Cultural Revolution, in the painful struggle that was her life from the very start, Anchee Min can find at times some humor and happiness. Min describes a systematically deprived Shanghai childhood (the family was forced into successively meaner quarters) school days spent as a member of the Red Guard, spouting the words of Chairman Mao and being forced to publicly betray her favorite teacher and later teen years on a work farm in order to become a peasant because peasants were the only true vanguard. This is an honest and frightening memoir of growing up in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

Red Azalea by Anchee Min