Anchee Min - Talent of China
Since China seems to dominate most of the economic and political discussions these days, I thought it would be interesting to focus on its literature in this edition of Mosaic Minds. It would have been easier to weed out the Amazon rainforest with my bare teeth than to choose one Chinese author to focus on. Such a gigantic country with more than 1.3 billion people offers a gigantic field of literature. I had many, many authors to choose from and I even had a choice between Chinese authors who stayed in China and Chinese authors who left--sometimes fled--the country. The latter seemed more interesting to me since China heavily censors the works of authors living in the country while refugees are in countries where they are free to speak their minds. The books by the migrants are more daring and truthful.
I chose to focus on Anchee Min, a refugee who fled to the United States. She was born in Shanghai in 1957 and she grew up completely under the yoke of the communist political system. The way politics can influence a person's life and sometimes even dominate the most remote corners of the mind is made clear in her autobiography, Red Azalea.
Red Azalea deals with nearly the whole of the author's life under the communist rulers, from the moment she first felt she had a conscience to the moment that Madame Mao, the wife of Mao, was arrested in 1976. At the tender age of five, Anchee had already started taking care of her three younger siblings and had to became adult-like since her parents relied on her. She was a model student, studying Mao's writings and learning most of them by heart. While reading this autobiography I could not help but wonder how deep this communist system impacted the lives of the ordinary men and women. Everyone was influenced by it, from young to old, man and woman, rich or poor. Under this system the "peach upon" culture was invasive. When somebody displayed a reactionary attitude or individualistic behaviour, or anyone wanted revenge upon him or her for any reason, he or she could be peached upon and the consequences could be deadly.
Sometimes the system was used to make people choose sides. In Red Azalea Anchee. as a student, is forced to choose between an innocent teacher and the system, just for the sake of choosing. Corrupted and scared of the consequences, she chooses for the system, a choice she will never forget and a choice her teacher understandably could never forgive her for. The same system shocked me in her first novel Katherine, as well. Anchee Min displays a great talent for making her reader see sames in the same way that she sees them.
Most of her autobiography centers around a labour collective that she was sent to. In this period she becomes conscious of the awakening of her body and the frustration of not being free to satisfy her desires the way she wants. She feels that she withers away. She is not the only one: her life is an example of many hundreds and thousands of people who lived a lie instead of a life while their youth passed them by.
When Jiang Ching, also known as Madame Mao, needed actresses for her opera, Anchee found a way out of the labour collective by applying and being accepted into the cast. However, the whole event was never realized due to the death of Mao and the arrest of his wife soon after. Anchee's autobiography ends at this point. In 1983 she received a letter from her friend Joan Chen, a known Chinese actress living in the United States, and a year later Amchee arrived in the land of opportunity. Within ten years of learning English she wrote her autobiography and a novel called Katherine. Later she wrote a kind of combination of the two forms: Madame Mao, a novelized biography of Madame Mao. But honestly, whether she writes a novel or an (auto)biography, every ingredient is there: characters, dialogues, setting, tension and a plot.
Reading the books of Anchee Min broadened my horizons and helped me understand the China of today.
The following is a list of other Chinese female authors living in the USA. They show a similar talent for writing about China in a literary way, while at the same time weaving personal, autobiographical elements into their work.
Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club)
Jung Chang (Wild Swans)
Iris Chang (Thread of the Silk Worm)
Gish Jen (Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land)
Bette Bao Lord (Eighth Moon)