Anchee Min - Red Azalea

He said he always liked to watch the smoke spiraling upward from the chimney of the Dragon Sight Crematorium. He said death was never frightening to him. He had never trusted the Chinese history books. Because those books were written by people who were impotent of desire. People who were paid by the generations of emperors. They were eunuchs. Their desires had been castrated.

He wanted to see me live. He wanted to see me live his life. You know my secret wish, and now keep it and nourish it for me. I wept, shivering. I said, I will, I promise. He said, Let’s hold each other and say nothing.

We held each other. I felt Yan-we were walking out of the darkness.

A week later Jiang Ching, Madam Mao, was arrested and denounced. The arrest was conducted by the new Party Central Bureau in Beijing led by Hua Guofeng, a man appointed by Mao. It was handled nobly and with good manners. The arrest was swift and clean. The public was greatly satisfied. They celebrated, bought crabs and boiled them, to go with wine. The female crabs symbolized Jiang Ching. She was eaten now. China was exuberant. Rallies, monster parades and fireworks all night long. Millions poured into the streets, beating drums and dancing like dumplings in boiling water. A year later Hua’s government was taken over by Deng Xiaoping, one of Mao’s Long March cadres. More rallies, parades and fireworks. Hua’s portraits were torn off the wall and replaced with the slogans that praised the new man. Jiang Ching was caged in the City of Ch’ing national prison waiting to be sentenced. People celebrated and shouted, Down! Down! Down!

For the next six years I worked once again as a set clerk at the Shanghai Film Studio. I copied scripts, put up shooting boards, recorded sets in various locations, mopped floors and filled up hot-water containers in offices. In six years of severe loneliness and abandonment, my health broke down. I coughed blood and fainted on the set. I had tuberculosis. I was not allowed to take a leave. In the Party’s dossier I was executed permanently. At night I felt so defeated that I lost my courage. I missed Yan and the Supervisor. In six years I had become a stone, deaf to passion.

One day in 1983 an overseas letter came from a young friend whom I used to know in film school. She had left China three years before and was now living in Los Angeles. She asked me whether I had ever thought of coming to America. The idea was as foreign to me as being asked to live on the moon, the moon as my father described it-icy, airless and soundless. Yet my despair made me fearless. Though I spoke not a word of English, though I hated to leave my parents, my sisters, my brother, and to fight for permission to leave would take all my energy, I knew that escaping China would be the only solution.

I fought for my way and I arrived in America on September 1, 1984.

Chicago, Christmas 1992

Born in Shanghai in 1957, Anchee Min came to America in 1984. While attending English as a Second Language classes, she worked as a waitress, a house cleaner, a fabric painter, and a model. In 1990 she received a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from the Art Institute of Chicago. Min wrote Red Azalea in English over an eight-year period. It won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in 1993 and was a New York Times Notable Book.