You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.78 AVERAGE
3.78 AVERAGE
This is an easy, fairly quick read, and one that is hard to put down. It read like a novel, but is actually a memoir of Anchee Min's growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China. During the 1960's, and probably before the 60's, China shunned all things Western. The author's parents were both educated professionals who were forced to work very menial jobs, her mother in a shoe factory. Anchee describes how her family lived in a tiny run-down building with several other families, and how they had only one toilet for everyone. She excels in school, and is a good little communist, until her favorite teacher is accused of being a spy and of fostering Western ideals in her students. Even after that, Anchee tries to be a loyal party member. When she is assigned to a labor camp after high school, she goes without complaint. At that time every family had to send one child to a labor camp, to be a "peasant" and work for the greater good of the country.
Conditions are physically deplorable there, and mentally even worse. They work hours in the fields every day, sleep in rough cabins with dirt floors, go hungry, and are basically expected to be devoid of normal human feelings.
Anchee gradually begins to question everything, and this is when the story gets really interesting. This is basically a saga of one woman's awakening and her struggle to break fee of an establishment so rigid, that an attempt to free oneself could bring serious consequences, imprisonment, or even death. There is n exquisite twist or two, which I will let you find out by reading this book.
Conditions are physically deplorable there, and mentally even worse. They work hours in the fields every day, sleep in rough cabins with dirt floors, go hungry, and are basically expected to be devoid of normal human feelings.
Anchee gradually begins to question everything, and this is when the story gets really interesting. This is basically a saga of one woman's awakening and her struggle to break fee of an establishment so rigid, that an attempt to free oneself could bring serious consequences, imprisonment, or even death. There is n exquisite twist or two, which I will let you find out by reading this book.
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Memoir.
Melancholic, poetic, honest - this reminds me in many ways of The Diary of Anne Frank and I find it hard that it isn’t discussed more. Min’s writing is unpolished but sincere and full of loved experience, providing a glimpse into a young girl’s coming of age in the dying days of Mao’s China. Min’s tendency to state her thoughts bluntly instead of reflecting through a later-learned lens gives the memoir a gritty quality that accentuates the cultural revolution as her context, rather than her identity.
Melancholic, poetic, honest - this reminds me in many ways of The Diary of Anne Frank and I find it hard that it isn’t discussed more. Min’s writing is unpolished but sincere and full of loved experience, providing a glimpse into a young girl’s coming of age in the dying days of Mao’s China. Min’s tendency to state her thoughts bluntly instead of reflecting through a later-learned lens gives the memoir a gritty quality that accentuates the cultural revolution as her context, rather than her identity.
An interesting insight to communist China. A good read with a straight forward 'plot'.
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
4.5/5
There are books that make me especially grateful that I don't write reviews for anyone but myself, in that I am perfectly free to write what I want, how I want, with more attention paid to what I thought and the terms of civil discourse than the 'proper' way of reviewing. This is one of them.
What we have here is a memoir written by a woman who grew to adulthood on the tail end of Mao's reign, the book itself ending a few pages after the death of the Chairman who spearheaded the Cultural Revolution. Anchee, a name that she translates as 'Jade of Peace', grew up in a family fully conformed to the ideals of the Communism. Her youth is filled with absorbing the ideals of the Communist Party in forms both written and sung, the texts of Chairman Mao and the operas of Madame Mao, Comrade Jiang Ching. The older she grows, the more conflicted she becomes about the life that has been planned for her, a struggle that begins when she is made to denounce her beloved teacher as a 'capitalist spy' and continues with her burgeoning sexuality that favors women over men.
This is not a book that I feel comfortable delineating in the usual sense, going through the construction of themes and commenting on what the author achieves with their writing. For one, this is a piece of Chinese literature that fully expresses its culture in every word of prose, something that I have no real experience with. Two, this is a memoir that is much more concerned with detailing the facts and feelings of a life than teasing out an overarching meaning to it all. So I will discuss what struck me and stayed in my thoughts, and leave it at that.
Communism is not nearly as dangerous a word in the US as it was more than sixty years ago, but it is still heavily contextualized in fearful and hateful terms. The memoir fully demonstrates the negative aspects of living in a country that embraces Communistic ideologies, and I won't argue that it wasn't a horribly oppressive time to be alive. However, if you asked me to differentiate between the palls of overwhelming fear of conspiracy and betrayal that existed in both the Cultural Revolution and the McCarthy era, I would say that this was not a matter of Communism and Democracy. These two periods of time in two separate countries were both concerned with a government fearing the spread of contrary ideologies in the masses, and due to cultural differences took different measures to control what they thought was a problem. One side believed that it was necessary to have people experience all classes of existence, whether or not their skills were more suited to other, more intellectual forms of labor. The other didn't see the need for breaking down class barriers, and instead focused more heavily on the witch-hunt aspect of rooting out 'spies' and 'infiltrations of the enemy'. One side suffered greatly over their convictions in terms of starvation and constant leadership upheavals. The other forgot.
Essentially, if you asked me if this book made me think that Communism is evil, I would say no, it didn't. If you think that I'm evil for saying that, so be it. My concerns lie outside the realm of political machinations.
One of these concerns is the plight of women the world over, a theme that for all its cultural differences was strongly expressed in the later pages of this book. The aforementioned Madame Mao was a powerful figure in the Cultural Revolution who helped keep a tight rein over the masses through the use of entertainment in the form of operas. Despite her immense contributions to the Party using power given to her by Mao during his time of need, the death of the Chairman led to her downfall; she was quickly swept away on the tide of countrymen calling her whore, calling her bitch, calling her a power-hungry murdereress.
I knew Mao's name before this book. I did not know Jiang Ching's, not even as 'Madame Mao'. This is not the first time that a woman in a position of predominantly masculine power, whether political or militant, has been swept under the rug of history in the midst of obfuscation and scoffs. It will certainly not be the last.
Finally, I must give special mention to Min's prose, short and sweetly staccato and ripe with metaphors that my mind, subsumed as it is in European and American literature, rarely encounters. It especially shines while she is in the full throes of her sexuality, the mindfulness of the nonconforming aspects of its passion drowned in the delight of its realization, both during the beginning of one love:
There are books that make me especially grateful that I don't write reviews for anyone but myself, in that I am perfectly free to write what I want, how I want, with more attention paid to what I thought and the terms of civil discourse than the 'proper' way of reviewing. This is one of them.
What we have here is a memoir written by a woman who grew to adulthood on the tail end of Mao's reign, the book itself ending a few pages after the death of the Chairman who spearheaded the Cultural Revolution. Anchee, a name that she translates as 'Jade of Peace', grew up in a family fully conformed to the ideals of the Communism. Her youth is filled with absorbing the ideals of the Communist Party in forms both written and sung, the texts of Chairman Mao and the operas of Madame Mao, Comrade Jiang Ching. The older she grows, the more conflicted she becomes about the life that has been planned for her, a struggle that begins when she is made to denounce her beloved teacher as a 'capitalist spy' and continues with her burgeoning sexuality that favors women over men.
This is not a book that I feel comfortable delineating in the usual sense, going through the construction of themes and commenting on what the author achieves with their writing. For one, this is a piece of Chinese literature that fully expresses its culture in every word of prose, something that I have no real experience with. Two, this is a memoir that is much more concerned with detailing the facts and feelings of a life than teasing out an overarching meaning to it all. So I will discuss what struck me and stayed in my thoughts, and leave it at that.
Communism is not nearly as dangerous a word in the US as it was more than sixty years ago, but it is still heavily contextualized in fearful and hateful terms. The memoir fully demonstrates the negative aspects of living in a country that embraces Communistic ideologies, and I won't argue that it wasn't a horribly oppressive time to be alive. However, if you asked me to differentiate between the palls of overwhelming fear of conspiracy and betrayal that existed in both the Cultural Revolution and the McCarthy era, I would say that this was not a matter of Communism and Democracy. These two periods of time in two separate countries were both concerned with a government fearing the spread of contrary ideologies in the masses, and due to cultural differences took different measures to control what they thought was a problem. One side believed that it was necessary to have people experience all classes of existence, whether or not their skills were more suited to other, more intellectual forms of labor. The other didn't see the need for breaking down class barriers, and instead focused more heavily on the witch-hunt aspect of rooting out 'spies' and 'infiltrations of the enemy'. One side suffered greatly over their convictions in terms of starvation and constant leadership upheavals. The other forgot.
Essentially, if you asked me if this book made me think that Communism is evil, I would say no, it didn't. If you think that I'm evil for saying that, so be it. My concerns lie outside the realm of political machinations.
One of these concerns is the plight of women the world over, a theme that for all its cultural differences was strongly expressed in the later pages of this book. The aforementioned Madame Mao was a powerful figure in the Cultural Revolution who helped keep a tight rein over the masses through the use of entertainment in the form of operas. Despite her immense contributions to the Party using power given to her by Mao during his time of need, the death of the Chairman led to her downfall; she was quickly swept away on the tide of countrymen calling her whore, calling her bitch, calling her a power-hungry murdereress.
I knew Mao's name before this book. I did not know Jiang Ching's, not even as 'Madame Mao'. This is not the first time that a woman in a position of predominantly masculine power, whether political or militant, has been swept under the rug of history in the midst of obfuscation and scoffs. It will certainly not be the last.
Finally, I must give special mention to Min's prose, short and sweetly staccato and ripe with metaphors that my mind, subsumed as it is in European and American literature, rarely encounters. It especially shines while she is in the full throes of her sexuality, the mindfulness of the nonconforming aspects of its passion drowned in the delight of its realization, both during the beginning of one love:
The moment I touched her breasts, I felt a sweet shock. My heart beat disorderly. A wild horse broke off its reins. She whispered something I could not hear. She was melting snow. I did not know what role I was playing anymore: her imagined man or myself. I was drawn to her. The horse kept running wild. I went where the sun rose. Her lips were the color of a tomato. There was a gale mixed with thunder inside of me. I was spellbound by desire. I wanted to be touched. Her hands skimmed my breasts. My mind maddened. My senses cheered frantically in a raging fire. I begged her to hold me tight. I heard a little voice rising in the back of my head demanding me to stop. As I hesitated, she caught my lips and kissed me fervently. The little voice disappeared. I lost myself in caresses.And the end:
We did not want to realize that we had been holding on to something, a dead past that could no longer prosper. We were rice shoots that had been pulled out of the mud. We lay, roots exposed. But we did not want to submit. We would never submit. We were heroines. We just tried to bridge the gap. We were trying our best. The rice shoots were trying to grow without mud. Trying to survive the impossible. We had been resisting the brutality of the beating weather. The hopelessness had sunk into the cores of our flesh. I would not let her see me cry. But she saw my tears in the kisses.I read for many reasons, mainly for self-improvement but also for the desire to hear the words of someone a world away in a life that I will never experience, to understand and relate to the innate humanity of those who by chance of birth differ from me in terms of race, culture, sexuality, and a whole host of myriad aspects both physical and ideological. This book achieved exactly that, and I only wish that there were more like it.
A really interesting (true) story, but a bit overwrought and melodramatically written at times for my taste, especially near the end. Maybe there's no other way to write about torrid forbidden young love though. (The story, btw, is about a girl during the Cultural Revolution in China and her assignment first to a commune and then to rigorous acting training and auditions, with a few desperate romantic encounters along the way).
Now that I think about it, I may be underwhelmed because I've read several other memoirs of growing up in or living through the Cultural Revolution, and in general they were better. If this is your first exposure to CR memoirs then it's a decent introduction, although a lot of it is more internally focused rather than looking out on the times, and also a lot of it takes place in generally sequestered places away from the societal ravages of the CR.
Now that I think about it, I may be underwhelmed because I've read several other memoirs of growing up in or living through the Cultural Revolution, and in general they were better. If this is your first exposure to CR memoirs then it's a decent introduction, although a lot of it is more internally focused rather than looking out on the times, and also a lot of it takes place in generally sequestered places away from the societal ravages of the CR.
The book covers the author's childhood, losing her faith in communism while working on a farm and falling in love with one of her comrades, and being chosen as one of several candidates to audition for a role in an opera/movie written by Chairman Mao's wife. There's a huge air of suspense in the book, even though you know she lives to tell the tale, and the love story is sweet and hot. I think the book will stay in my thoughts for a long time. I highly recommend this one.
A first hand account about life in the Cultural Revolution. At first I thought this book would be more like the other books where the author would talk about their experience in the Cultural Revolution and then their current life. However, with reading this book, it became evident that the book was solely focused on the author's life during the Cultural REvolution. Nevertheless, I thought this was a good read, especially adding to what life was like during the Cultural Revolution.
challenging
inspiring
reflective
Was very interesting. It told the story of when communism came to china n the life if field workers. I highly recommend it.