It’s the birthday of the novelist Anchee Min, born in 1957 in Shanghai. Her father taught astronomy. She and her parents and her three brothers and sisters lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment. Under the Maoist regime, they were suspected of being bourgeois intellectuals.
When she was 17, Min was selected to be sent to a labor camp called Red Fire Farm, where she could fulfill the noble cause of being a peasant. It was back-breaking work, and even worse psychologically. . . .Min had a secret love affair with a woman named Yan, one of her commanders, a dedicated Revolutionary.
She was whisked away from Red Fire Farm after she caught the eye of a film crew sent out by Jiang Ching, Mao’s wife, to find the perfect person for a new film. She wanted a “perfect peasant-type face.” Partway through production, Mao died, and Jiang Ching was suddenly hated, as was anyone connected with her.
She had a friend who helped get her to the United States. She didn’t know any English, so she applied to the University of Chicago because it was the only school where she didn’t have to actually prove that she knew English. She had a friend fill out her application and check the box saying that she spoke English, and she made it the United States.
When the University of Chicago found out that she didn’t know a word of English, they kicked her out, but she was allowed to stay in the country for six months, and was told that she would be deported if she couldn’t learn to speak English. So she watched “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” “Sesame Street,” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
She started writing as a way to improve her English, and slowly she wrote a memoir about her experiences in Communist China, a book called Red Azalea (1994). It became a New York Times best-seller, and since then she has written more novels, including Becoming Madame Mao (2001), about Jiang Ching, and Pearl of China (2010), about the novelist Pearl S. Buck. Her most recent book is The Coocked Seed: A Memoir (2013).
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