[Below, Koenig favorably reviews Red Azalea.]

An agricultural worker who was selected from the rice fields for movie stardom, Anchee Min has a marvelous story to tell, but her account of her own career is less fantastic than her portrait of everyday life in China during the Cultural Revolution. The Maoists did all they could to promote cooperation, and produced a society riven with envy and hatred; they tried to drive out such inefficient emotions as lust and love, and created a country of perverts and hysterics. In 1967, when Min was 10 years old, the neighbors, angry because her family had a bigger apartment than theirs, poured the contents of their chamber pots over the Mins' furnishings and threatened them with an ax. ("There were no police. The police station was called a revisionist mechanism and had been shut down by the revolutionaries.") They were forced to move to a two-room apartment shared by two other families, with one toilet for all fourteen people. Several years later, Min goes to the public park at night with her first boyfriend. Passing the bulletin board with pictures of couples caught making love in the park, and evading the flashlights of the sex guards, they find a quiet place in the bushes. They begin caressing, and almost at once are surrounded by a "forest of masturbators." Her lover whispers, "They know they will be shot if caught—so do we…. The fright sweetens the mood. We are so near to death as well as to heaven."

Red Azalea is written almost entirely in simple declarative sentences, a style that suits the brutality of Min's story as well as her own childlike frankness and ferocity. When a rival steals her movie role, "I ate my rice cake in the dark in the smoking room. I felt like an animal who ate its own intestine. I could not eat any more." Her forthright manner also counterpoints the relentless hail of lies and insanity under which she lives: the boys and girls, so hungry they gobble fruit peels from trash cans, told to collect pennies for "the starving children in America"; a teacher warning her never to read a novel that "corrupted and destroyed" another girl ("I immediately wanted to read the book Jane Eyre, although this was the first time I had ever heard of it").

Despite the efforts of their government, some Chinese manage to keep alive a sense of humor, bravery, tenderness. Min's most poignant and dramatic story is that of her affair with another woman, a company commander on the farm where she has been sent to labor from five in the morning till nine at night. At first forbiddingly righteous and heroic, Yan turns out to have a need for love as great as Min's; expressing it puts them both in danger, which Yan meets, ironically, with a great soldier's craftiness and self-sacrifice. Her friend's book is a fitting tribute, as well as an ungrieving obituary for a loathsome time:

It was September 9, 1976. The reddest sun dropped from the sky of the Middle Kingdom. Mao passed away. Overnight the country became an ocean of white paper flowers. Mourners beat their heads against the door, on grocery-store counters and on walls…. The studio people gathered in the main meeting hall to moan. The sound of sobbing stretched like a hand-cranked gramophone at its spring's end. I had no tears. I cupped my face with my hands to hide my face.