The Cooked Seed
Anchee Min, Bloomsbury, R244
****
Its almost two decades since Anchee Min’s raw, jolting memoir of growing up during China’s Cultural Revolution, Red Azalea, catapulted her into the literary limelight. Since then, the Shanghai-born, US-based author has wooed millions of readers with six acclaimed historical novels, including The Last Empress.
Min has been on a mission to expose buried truths ever since she left China for America in 1984. “I wanted to look a little bit differently at Chinese history because Chinese history, especially about women, was never complete. There’s nothing good written about women in Chinese history,” she says. But in writing The Cooked Seed, Min, who is now 56, seems to have gone a step further.
Ostensibly a sequel to Red Azalea, the memoir not only reprises some of her experiences in China but also reveals with a painfully raw honesty “those things that I think most Chinese women never tell.
The things that we consider shameful and embarrassing, and just bury.” She also wanted to write with honesty for her daughter Lauryann. “As a Chinese woman, I’m expected to stay silent about whatever embarrassing things have happened to me, even my divorce. But I feared my daughter would end up like me. I never knew my mother and she never got to know me.”
It was only years after Min went to America that she discovered her mother was a Christian, but had been too frightened to reveal this for fear Min would denounce her. Min, who was seven at the time of the Cultural Revolution, was sent off to a labour camp in East China for re-education. Three years of hardship later, she was shipped to Madame Mao’s Shanghai film studios on the basis of her “proletarian” looks, only to be disgraced soon after when Madame Mao was sentenced to death. Forced into menial labour, Min gambled all on going to America.
“My life in China ended and there was no other way but charging forward. To simplify it, I was Madame Mao’s trash.
“But I was just like so many people. It was the whole generation who were deprived of an education. Today a lot of people in China don’t have any skills; they do work like being a maid, a dishwasher — very, very low jobs. So it’s an invisible generation within the new China. I think because of that I came to America. I never expected that I would be entitled to the American Dream. I came here to beg for an opportunity to survive.”
After years of hardship on the bottom rung of American society, Min penned her way to a new life with Red Azalea, an international bestseller.
Proudly American, she still identifies in part with China’s “invisible generation” and says: “I’m not surprised that China is doing well economically, because of people like me. We suffered everything so we don’t take anything for granted and nobody can fool us.
“I worry about the next generation, the digital generation. They will create a kingdom where there are smart students and kids who score high, but is there a human soul in it? Or will they just be jerks? That’s what I worry about and that’s what I fear.” — @BronSibree
Book details
- The Cooked Seed by Anchee Min
EAN: 9781408838174
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