Anchee Min wrote her autobiography Red Azalea in response to her experience with Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution of China in the late 1960's and 1970's. Anchee begins by introducing us to her in elementary school in Shanghai. Her mother was a teacher and her father was an art teacher. She talks about how quickly Chinese children are made to grow up and she says that by the age of five, she was essentially treated like an adult.
In her young teenage years, Anchee succeeds in school and finds herself in a leadership position in the Little Red Guard, a kind of scout program, except that their club is tasked with spying on the other girls in the club and reporting anything suspicious to the Red Army. She prides herself on her ability to quote long passages from Mao Zedong's books.
But then one day it's the teacher who becomes the subject of police investigation, and Anchee is charged with her community to publicly shame the teacher. The acting of several students is enough to make the teacher's fate certain, although Anchee never did find out whether she was executed.
At 17, she is still regarded as an all-star student. She becomes employed by force at a hard labor camp in Southeast China almost to the ocean. There are no men at the camp. Anchee is rewarded with the honor of this labor for helping condemn the teacher. Quickly, her reality sets in as the camp faces an intense famine. Salt has ruined the soil. She falls in love with the group leader Yan. The two women discuss privately the dark side of Maoism and the sadness of the constant injustices around them. Women are losing their minds here. Women are turning against each other almost for fun. When the women slave away for a day's work, they are never praised for a job well done. The reality of the situation is that she finds herself locked in a hellish reality where her actions have nothing to do with her success or failure. She's at the mercy of her fate.
Then one day, a film scout finds Anchee and sees that she is very beautiful, so she is ordered to work in Shanghai again, but as an actor. She plays in a film rendition of a Jiang Qing political opera called Red Azalea. She falls in love with her agent and manager whom she affectionately refers to as "The Supervisor." But, the Supervisor does not know though that secretly, Anchee really loves Yan. Then in 1976, Mao Zedong dies, and slowly people try to establish themselves on his throne, but they are removed and imprisoned; no one knows who is in charge anymore. Red Azalea never reached the theaters. She manages a meager career in theater as a janitor, more or less, until in 1984, she moves to America.
