Red Azalea is an autobiographical novel written in English by Chinese author Anchee Min, telling events starting from her childhood up to the time she emigrated to the US.
Anchee (Jade of Peace) is the oldest of four siblings (two sisters, Blooming and Coral, and a brother, Space Conqueror.) Together with their parents, they live in a tiny apartment in Shanghai. Anchee is a dutiful daughter and works hard at school both in the educational and political sense, until at the end of her school education, Anchee sees her name as one of the people who have to go work in a farm/labor camp. Life is hard there, but one of her supervisors Yen and their relationship helps her through it even as she has major doubts when residents of the farm/work camp mentally break one of the girls for the sin of being in a relationship with a man.
Then one day, recruiters for a movie studio come along, searching for a natural beauty to play the main character in their new film (the titular Red Azalea), and Anchee is one of the four chosen. This means she has to leave the farm (leaving her much more fragile sister Blooming to go in her place as one child of each family had to be a farm worker). In the end, she doesn't get the role and is forced to work as a backdrop clerk, until the Producer himself has her play in the scenes they film. All well and good, but then Mao dies, and his wife Jiang Qing, on whose life Red Azalea is based and who was a big supporter of the Producer, is arrested, leaving the project scrapped and the Producer on the run. Soon Anchee leaves China for the US.
The rest of Anchee Min's story, after her emigration, is covered in the sequel novel The Cooked Seed.
This book provides examples of:
- Break Her Heart to Save Her: Yen arranges things so that Anchee sees her having sex with a man Yen barely even likes (and Anchee knows she doesn't like), because she knows that their relationship has no future.
- Crapsack World: Though it is not immediately apparent as we start with a child's point of view, China is portrayed as one.
- The Min family is so poor all of the children except Anchee (yes, including the youngest, boy Space Conqueror) have hand-me-down clothes (Anchee mentions she knew to take care of them, and so did her sisters, but after going through 3 kids, the garments were inevitably more patches and tears than clothes so her young brother would be severely bullied for them even though she stood up for him),
- They are also bordering on famine at the end of each month (resulting in a splurge of food as soon as the paychecks come),
- This despite the fact that the parents work hard and especially Mrs. Min, the mom, is being driven to sickness at the factory she was assigned to,
- Children are brainwashed and gaslighted into taking part in kangaroo courts
- Then sent to wherever the Party wants to send them, not where they want to go, wich each family having to contribute one farmer no matter which child it is,
- The farm Anchee is sent to is not fit for growing anything and is a hellhole,
- The way out in form of the studio is a viper's nest of intrigue, not to mention it leaves the much less suited Blooming to be sent to the farm...
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Producer is always only known as such.
- Ironic Name: One of the candidates for the role is called Bee (as in the insect) Oh-Yang. In her introduction she admits she is too timid to live up to her name, saying she has no sting and she has to "strengthen [her] soul".
- Kangaroo Court: Anchee is forced to be part of one against a beloved teacher called Falling Leaf. When she goes to apologize as a grown-up, the teacher pretends not to recognize her and says she never had a student named Anchee Min.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Anchee's reaction to being part of mentally and emotionally breaking a workmate/fellow teenager on the farm for being caught with a man. Yen, under whose orders the action was fulfilled, for her part, tirelessly tried to heal the girl (taking her to any doctor she could think of, collecting snakes as a good luck charm) and even wrote fake letters to the girl's family. The girl died anyway.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: Mrs. Min, Anchee's mother, used to work at a school but as she was exhausted and sickly, she made small mistakes (such as making a spelling mistake which resulted in a derogatory slogan about Mao and wiping after going to the toilet with a newspaper page which had Mao's picture on it as there was nothing else to wipe with). This resulted in first being sent to a reeducation camp and then to a hard factory from where she always comes home half-dead from exhaustion.
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: Anchee was the tomboy to her sisters Blooming and Coral.
