Red Azalea

Anchee Min, now a painter, film-maker, photographer and writer, left China for America in 1984. She had been a prize pupil and a model member of Mao Tse-tung's Red Guard. For her dutiful work for the Party, she was awarded a place at the arduous Red Fire Farm, where she experienced – at great personal risk – her sexual and emotional awakening with the female company leader. Selected from 20,000 candidates to be a star of propagandist films, she left behind the farm and her lover, for fame and an exotic affair with one of Madame Mao's leading emissaries. In this autobiography Anchee Min reveals, through a series of relationships, both a little-known China and her own character – independent, enquiring, and anxious to grasp every experience that comes within her reach. It is an erotic autobiography which, through the dialogue and characterizations of a novel, traces her life and relationships through the political and cultural upheavals of the era.