Then in 1976, Mao Zedong dies, and slowly people try to establish themselves on his throne, but they are removed and imprisoned no one knows who is in charge anymore. She falls in love with her agent and manager whom she affectionately refers to as ' The Supervisor.' But, the Supervisor does not know though that secretly, Anchee really loves Yan. She plays in a film rendition of a Jiang Qing political opera called Red Azalea. Then one day, a film scout finds Anchee and sees that she is very beautiful, so she is ordered to work in Shanghai again, but as an actor.

The reality of the situation is that she finds herself locked in a hellish reality where her actions have nothing to do with her success or failure. When the women slave away for a day's work, they are never praised for a job well done. Women are turning against each other almost for fun. The two women discuss privately the dark side of Maoism and the sadness of the constant injustices around them. She falls in love with the group leader Yan. Quickly, her reality sets in as the camp faces an intense famine.

Anchee is rewarded with the honor of this labor for helping condemn the teacher. She becomes employed by force at a hard labor camp in Southeast China almost to the ocean. The acting of several students is enough to make the teacher's fate certain, although Anchee never did find out whether she was executed.Īt 17, she is still regarded as an all-star student. She prides herself on her ability to quote long passages from Mao Zedong's books.īut then one day it's the teacher who becomes the subject of police investigation, and Anchee is charged with her community to publicly shame the teacher. In her young teenage years, Anchee succeeds in school and finds herself in a leadership position in the Little Red Guard, a kind of scout program, except that their club is tasked with spying on the other girls in the club and reporting anything suspicious to the Red Army. She talks about how quickly Chinese children are made to grow up and she says that by the age of five, she was essentially treated like an adult. Her mother was a teacher and her father was an art teacher. Anchee begins by introducing us to her in elementary school in Shanghai. Written by people who wish to remain anonymousĪnchee Min wrote her autobiography Red Azaleain response to her experience with Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution of China in the late 1960's and 1970's.

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Red azalea book