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Loading... Becoming Madame Mao (2001)by Anchee Min
None.  Donna828 | Sep 5, 2012 |  I thought the premise for this book was interesting from a historical perspective; however, there just wasn't anything for me to like about this character. Also, I felt the writing style was stilted and changed tenses and perspectives in a confusing manner (  ) dgmlrhodes | Feb 25, 2012 | Found a copy of _Becoming Madame Mao_ at Carpe Diem in the Jumeirah neighborhood in Dubai. Started reading it while waiting for friends and couldn't put it down. Brilliant, captivating narrative, that brings this woman to life. Looking forward to picking up where I left off the next time I am at Carpe Diem. 1  mdobe | Nov 16, 2011 | Anchee Min is an author to watch. She grew up in China's Cultural Revolution and wrote an astonishing memoir. She followed that with a novel, Katherine, about an American teaching English in China. So I was quick to pick up a copy of Becoming Madame Mao, but slow to read it. Generally, I prefer my historical novels to concern ordinary people. Becoming Madame Mao tells the story of Jiang Chiang, Mao's wife and leader of the infamous "Group of Four", but not in the form of a straightforward historical account. Min moves back and forth from the first person to a very close third person and restricts herself to following Madame Mao. She's an interesting, but difficult woman to follow, constantly concerned with positioning herself and with getting the attention she feels she deserves. The writing style worked perfectly with Min's subject. Told from the first person only, the book would have been too claustrophobic to read, in the third person, I would have missed out on who she was. An actress, Madame Mao was adept at projecting the face she wanted to towards the world. This book is a fascinating picture of a time, place and person I knew very little about. (  )1 RidgewayGirl | Jul 12, 2011 | I just could not get into this historical biography of Mao Zedong's wife. Jiang Qing, as she was later known, lived a fascinating life in twentieth-century China as both an actress and wife to a Communist dictator. However, while I knew a little about Jiang Qing's life, I failed to find Becoming Madame Mao compelling. While Anchee Min does a good job of describing Jiang Qing's background as an actress and its effect on her later actions, I found the novel difficult to follow and far from engrossing. However, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in historical fiction about Mao Zedong or Jiang Qing. (  ) wagner.sarah35 | May 4, 2011 | no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0618127003, Paperback)Many writers have engaged in the project of rescuing female figures from history, but few have tackled such an unsympathetic character as Anchee Min does in her historical novel Becoming Madame Mao. Known as the White Boned Demon during her reign of terror in China, Madame Mao was blamed for countless bloody and vengeful executions; she sought out those who had wronged her in the past and wiped them off the face of the earth. Eventually she was reviled in China and executed, even as her husband was revered as a hero.Before her stint as Mao's first lady, Jiang Ching, as she was then known, was an actress, a singer, and a star in Communist films. Anchee Min grew up in Red China and watched Jiang Ching from afar; she was fascinated by her for many years, by tales of her independence and strength, and by images of her beauty. In a way, the great villain and demon was a role model for Anchee Min, and her teenage devotion is the engine of her remarkable novel. Moving back and forth between stories of the actress and the evil dictator, Min complicates the Madame Mao of history. As a girl, Madame Mao narrowly escaped having her feet bound. The book opens with graphic descriptions of this process and of the ensuing infection that freed her. But if her feet were not bound, her spirit was. Reared by a mother who was the last concubine of a rich man, and a father who liked to hit his girls with shovels, Madame Mao as a young girl felt herself doomed: "I see my father hit Mother with a shovel. It happened suddenly. Without warning. I can hardly believe my eyes. He is mad. He calls Mother a slut. Mother's body curls up. My chest swells. He hits her back, front, shouting that he will break her bones." The father then goes on to treat his daughter the same way. Decades later, when Madame Mao manifests deep brutality, Min seems to be saying that what goes around comes around. Flawed by a clumsy structure that vacillates between third and first person arbitrarily, Becoming Madame Mao is nevertheless an immensely interesting work--defiant, morally ambiguous, and difficult to put down. --Emily White (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:33:32 -0500) In a sweeping, erotically charged story that moves gracefully from the intimately personal to the great stage of world history, Anchee Min renders a powerful tale of passion, betrayal, and survival and creates a finely nuanced and always ambiguous portrait of one of the most fascinating, and vilified, women of the twentieth century. Madame Mao is almost universally known as the "white-boned demon", ambitious, vindictive, and cruel, whose bid to succeed her husband led to the death of millions. But Min's story begins with a young girl named Yunhe, the unwanted daughter of a concubine who ignored her mother's pleas and refused to have her feet bound. It was the first act of rebellion for this headstrong, beautiful, and charismatic girl. She later fled the miseries of her family life, first to a provincial opera troupe, then to Shanghai and fame as an actress, and finally to the arid, mountainous regions of Yenan, where she fell in love with and married Mao Zedong. The great revolutionary leader proved to be an inattentive husband with a voracious appetite for infidelity, but the couple stayed together through the Communist victory, the disastrous Great Leap Forward, and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Min uses the facts of history and her lush, penetrating psychological imagination to take us beyond the myth of the person who so greatly influenced an entire generation of Chinese. The result is a complex portrait of a woman who railed against the confines of her culture, whose deep-seated insecurities propelled her to reinvent herself constantly, and whose ambition was matched only by her ferocious, never-to-be-fulfilled need to be loved.… (more) |
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3
I was slightly irritated by the writing style. Short, choppy sentences. Jumping from first to third person for no discernible purpose. However, in the end, I learned more about this period in China's history, and I was entertained. Maybe not the highest praise, but it fits into my description of a 3.5 star book: "Good but not great." (