Her formative years outside the home were filled by ranting, wooden-headed ideologues who would soon set her - and millions of youngsters like her - loose on the “revisionist elements” and “capitalist sprouts” of Chinese society. At the time Min was an impressionable young girl. Mao - insidiously - used children to carry out the national calamity known as the 'Cultural Revolution.' No one else in his and Madame Mao's view was ideologically pure enough. Naturally, no quasi-rational thinker could possibly live contentedly under such tyranny. Min possesses a powerful mind, and this was both her ball and chain, as well as the reason for her survival.

How did she do It? As we read we begin to sense how. She studied English independently on coming to America, too, which was said to have included regular viewings of 'Sesame Street.' Yet when I think of how hard the task of writing is in any language, when I think of how far Min has had to come, her achievement bowls me over. It was written by a native-Chinese speaker who decided to use the writing of her memoir as her means of learning English. Red Azalea takes apart the Chinese Communist experience with much the same rigorous assurance shown by Cheng, but its approach, its style, is quite different. But now I’m going to raise Red Azalea to a level equal with it. I’d always thought Cheng's book unassailable. Wu’s mission was to expose the horrendous policy of slave labor as a means of increasing China’s foreign exchange, and his book succeeds admirably in that respect while giving us his own story of near-death starvation and political persecution. Wu’s book is very good, but it does not rise to the literary level of Cheng’s. Harry Wu's Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag starts earlier, just after the Communist victory and takeover of 1949. This memoir begins with Cheng’s victimization by the state at the onset of the 'Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution' in 1966. The first is Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai. I can recommend three excellent books on the late 20th-century Chinese experience.

Red Azalea by Anchee Min