Red Azalea

Red Azalea spans the first few decades of Anchee Min’s life; this era of her life coincides with the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath in China. Serving as the historical backdrop for Min’s memories and narration, the complex social implications of the Cultural Revolution are vividly reflected in the various events Min describes, from her memory of school and her denunciation of her teacher as an imperialist, to her forced work at Red Fire Farm and her work at the movie studio in Shanghai. While the veracity of her memories of these events can be questioned, given that the memoir is composed decades after the original events, many of the events she describes coincide with the historical reality of the Cultural Revolution, and this gives her narration and memories a wider historical significance than a simple recollection of her own personal experiences.

Mao Zedong helped to establish the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921; his efforts were heavily influenced by the ideals of the Bolsheviks, the writings of Karl Marx, and the revolutionary teachings of Lenin, both of whom are mentioned in Red Azalea. Espousing disdain for the wealthy and landed classes, Mao and his forces engaged in guerilla warfare with the Nationalist forces which retained control of China until 1945. From 1945 to 1949, Nationalist and Communist forces fought openly for control, and in 1949, Chairman Mao helped to establish the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Following the establishment of the PRC, Mao’s government initiated a series of reforms known as the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s; in this political movement, collective models of agricultural production replaced individual farming, and this shift is reflected in the memoir’s descriptions of Red Fire Farm. As Min makes clear in her discussion of Red Fire Farm, this form of agricultural production was often insufficient, and many people died from famine. The political and cultural transformation known as the Cultural Revolution follows the Great Leap Forward and its transformation of industrial and agricultural production. Min argues that the Cultural Revolution, which she dates to 1964-1976 in her Preface, “brought destruction to every family in the nation and took millions of lives” (xiii). As a response to fears of internal corruption and the fears of foreign influence, the Cultural Revolution stressed the continuing importance of the class struggle. Supported by various groups, including factions of university students organized into “Red Guards,” the Cultural Revolution elevated Chairman Mao to the status of a mythological figure, as Min’s memories of her mother’s mistakes at work in Part 1 make clear. Mao, the primary figure associated with the Cultural Revolution, sought to combat an alleged resistance to proletarian ideals through a growing bureaucracy and what he and others saw as a continuance of class privilege. At Red Fire Farm, Lu embodies the kind of paranoia created by this movement, as she accuses others of holding to outdated ideas and privileges. Lu, Yan, and Anchee, among others, recite from Mao’s Little Red Book, demonstrating Mao’s role in the Cultural Revolution and the movement away from historical Chinese literature, traditional elements of Chinese society, and older figures of authority.

While the Great Leap Forward concentrated on industrial output, the subsequent Cultural Revolution focused on cultural and artistic output and the reordering of society, and thus, the third part of Red Azalea highlights this new focus. As they film Red Azalea with unknown actors, Sound of Rain, Soviet Wong, and the Supervisor embody the Chinese government’s attempts to remake values and priorities by substituting professionally trained and conventionally attractive actors with living embodiments of Mao’s revolution: workers, soldiers, and peasants. The paranoia created by the Cultural Revolution at Red Fire Farm also exists at the film studio. As the memoir progresses, the Supervisor’s increasingly tenuous position as head of the film’s artistic production demonstrates how much the loyalty-based political system and the Cultural Revolution depend on the cult of personality surrounding Mao. After Mao dies, the material circumstances of the Supervisor, Mao’s wife Jiang Ching, and Anchee all collapse immediately. Without individual identity and a system of predictable laws and regulations, Anchee suffers. The Cultural Revolution therefore destabilizes the very concept of individual identity, making everyone into actors who try desperately to perform for the Party.