Anchee Min

I have read a few memoirs and novels of the Cultural Revolution but this one was very unique. She started as very much believing in the cause and then you see her faith chipped away as the cruelty of those involved takes away so much she finds dear. The writing is very powerful, even though it is quite simple at times. I think I was most struck by how absolutely horribly people can behave when in a situation either where they have a great deal of power or must not step outside the defined show more norms. It made me think alot about how quickly a society can fall apart. show less

A very readable account of the early life of the Dowager Empress Cixi. From relatively humble beginnings, she is selected as one of the concubines of the rather feeble, uninspiring Emperor.
In the harem of the Forbidden City, there is rivalry...sometimes murderously so...among the womenfolk. Jealous over sharing her husband...and limited in the contact she gets to have with her own son, as the official wife takes precedence....Orchid's life is difficult.
Yet as enemy nations wade in, as the show more Emperor falls ill and as palace officials jockey for position, her world becomes yet more difficult.
Informative, rather horrific in places... Anchee Min falls into the trap of many historic novels on strong women, where the heroine feels a rather TOO 21st century, all-action female.
But all set to read the sequel... show less

I've never read anything by Anchee Min, or Pearl Buck but this book made me crave more. Min's writing had me actually seeing the things she described in China, smelling the jasmine and the cooking, and wanting to know everything.

The two main characters Willow and Pearl are lifelong best friends, and the characters were very strongly developed. They were in my head even when I wasn't reading. This story engulfed me. All I wanted to do the last few days was be in the book.

I love Min's writing show more style, the people - all of them, that were so real and came to life on the pages, and all the political events that happened during the span of Willow's life. I felt like a part of the family.

This book is magical. show less

I was considered a “cooked seed” -- no chance to sprout.

That was Anchee (in Chinese, An-Qi) Min, left in the wake of China's Cultural Revolution to be a twentysomething with no potential.

I knew I wanted to read this memoir when I saw the author on CSPAN2/BookTV, in a segment from Chicago’s Printers Row Lit Fest where she talked about her incredibly uphill climb as a Chinese immigrant to Chicago during the 1980s (and later, near Los Angeles). Her words were inspiring, but it was her show more face in one moment that captured me -- as she recalled embarking on one particular goal, her gaze softened and moved from the audience toward the open air space above, as though to re-envision the goal. But her eyes didn’t rise to the height of Mt. Everest as would have been deserved; they settled middle-height. A woman who viewed an impossible challenge as a moderate one? -- this was a woman I wanted to know more about.

And I got it in this memoir, where Min relates her struggles to learn English; to scrape together an education, a living and a family; to stay ahead of deportation back to China; literally to stay alive. And to sprout.

Lying awake at night, I asked myself the question, “Who are you, Anchee Min?” If I ever had a chance to learn what it meant to “stay positive,” it was now. I did not yet know the American I was becoming, but I was sure that I was no longer the same An-Qi from China. {…} I could be crushed, but I would not be conquered. And that, I concluded, was who I truly was. Who I would be.

This is one determined woman. There is intensely hard work, deplorable living conditions, desolation from the scams that catch her. And finally joy with her successes, particularly when she begins to write. The memoir reads like a literary marathon -- fast and practical and straightforward, which seems like Min herself -- though to me it slowed a bit when she got to easier times. Her passages about Chinese culture and the Cultural Revolution make me eager to read her prior memoir, Red Azalea, and I wager there’ll be no waning tension in those years.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.) show less