Red Azalea

The first part of Red Azalea introduces not only the Cultural Revolution but also the creeping censorship and totalitarian rule that permeates the everyday life that Min depicts in these pages. Chairman Mao and his wife, Jiang Ching, never appear as more than reported figures or the subjects of adoration, and the reader hears only the sayings, proverbs, and theoretical claims that Mao makes about the class struggle and the danger of bourgeois influence. This spectral influence seems intentional—echoing Marx’s opening of The Communist Manifesto, which claims that the specter of communism haunts Europe. In Min’s memoir, she makes it clear that The Pervasive Reach of Mao’s Propaganda haunts her life and those of her family, friends, and coworkers. Mao doesn’t need to appear in person because, as Anchee’s willing denouncement of Autumn Leaves proves, his ideas permeate every level of mid-century Chinese society.

The structure of Red Azalea makes Anchee’s role as a narrator especially important, for her memories demonstrate how Mao’s pervasive propaganda convinces Anchee that The Pursuit of Freedom means accepting limits on personal agency and individual identity. As Min’s preface makes clear, her own daughter’s dreams oppose her own childhood aspirations. In her preface, she states, “[My] young American-born daughter’s dream of becoming the one who would help to discover the cure for cancer reminds me of my own childhood dream of devoting myself to protecting my country” (xiii-xiv). However, while Min’s daughter dreams of saving lives by helping to cure a deadly disease, the young Min once dreamed of using her body in battle to blow up the Americans in Vietnam and protect her country through violence and destruction. Thus, it is clear that when warped by the ideals of the Cultural Revolution, the pursuit of freedom devolves into a misguided pursuit of further subjugation; this sentiment is made crystal-clear when Min claims that the Cultural Revolution “brought destruction to every family in the nation and took millions of lives” (xiii).

Min’s choice to highlight the contrasts between her own politically fraught childhood and the childhood ideals of her American-born daughter offers a fitting opening to her memories of her education during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. While she mentions other Western sources in her memories, she claims that she “was raised on the teachings of Mao and on the operas of Madam Mao, Comrade Jiang Ching” (3). In this cultural context, concepts such as fairness and equality become twisted, for Mao’s propaganda convinces the people around Anchee to pursue revolutionary concepts regardless of the cost to themselves. At the beginning of her memoir, she describes how her neighbors terrorize her family simply because Anchee’s parents have an apartment that is perceived to be too big for the family it houses. At the time, young Anchee claims that the revolution “was about fairness. They came up with chamber pots and poured shit on our blankets” (5). Her juxtaposition of a concept like fairness with her neighbors’ dehumanizing actions presents one of the more jarring effects of The Pervasive Reach of Mao’s Propaganda.

Mao, ubiquitous in the family’s discussions, intrudes even into Anchee’s own home. After they move to a smaller and less comfortable apartment, Anchee meets a neighbor child her age who is called Little Coffin. Invited by Little Coffin to study Mao in the evening, Anchee asks her father, who denies her permission, refusing to have a “revolution at home” (9). Regardless of her father’s warning and her close connections to her family, Anchee falls prey to this precise dynamic, for she is eventually shaped and molded by the very propaganda designed to turn friends and family into treacherous informers. In a moment that heavily foreshadows her betrayal of her favorite teacher Autumn Leaves, Anchee admits that she “spent a night thinking whether my father was a hidden counterrevolutionary and whether or not I should report him” (9).

The threads of political indoctrination that Part 1 introduces ultimately culminate in Anchee’s betrayal of Autumn Leaves when the girl denounces the teacher as an American spy; her condemnation is based on scant evidence and is motivated by her own naive fidelity to the revolutionary principles she has been taught. As a young member of the Little Red Guards, a staple organization of the Cultural Revolution, Anchee notes how its members embody the act of internalizing Mao’s totalitarian vision of a China that has been stripped of its history and tradition. Embracing death in life, the “Red Guards [demonstrated] how to destroy, how to worship. They jumped off buildings to show their loyalty to Mao” (11). These examples of absolute loyalty to a revolutionary ideal prime Anchee to do the Party’s bidding at any cost, for she imagines herself to be pursuing freedom from bourgeois influence.

After Secretary Chain, the school’s Party secretary, tells Anchee that Autumn Leaves has infiltrated the school as an American spy, Anchee quickly pivots from disbelief and admiration for her teacher to belief in the idea of her guilt. Although her own mother has been a teacher and Anchee reminisces about Autumn Leaves’s dedication to the profession, Anchee only resists Secretary Chain briefly before succumbing to his unjust view of the matter. As Anchee states, over two hours, “Secretary Chain convinced me that Autumn Leaves was a secret agent of the imperialists and was using teaching as a weapon to destroy our minds” (29). Thus, this scene represents the power of Mao’s political regime to twist young minds into perceiving even benevolent mentors as dangerous agents; in the secretary’s warped version of events, he paradoxically uses Autumn Leaves’s excellence at her profession as evidence of her guilt. Only such a dedicated teacher could be dedicated to destroying Anchee’s faith in the revolution, he seems to imply.

During Autumn Leaves’s public trial, Anchee is tasked with denouncing her teacher and hesitates only once, before the portrait of Mao which hangs in the room reminds her of her duty and resolves her to the necessity of breaking any bond in order to safeguard the ideals of the revolution. Thus, as Anchee relates, the omnipresent image of Mao reminds her of her duty to “fight against anyone who dare[s] to oppose Mao’s teaching. The shouting of the slogans encourage[s] me” (37). Thus, even at this early stage of Anchee’s life, The Pervasive Reach of Mao’s Propaganda becomes clear. Buttressed by the sight of her leader and the excitement of her audience, Anchee does the unthinkable. In this way, Anchee’s willing participation in Autumn Leaves’s unjust trial signals how dangerous the girl has become in pursuit of the ideals with which she has been indoctrinated. Even her own mother recognizes this harsh reality when she discovers the truth of Anchee’s actions. As Part 1 ends, however, Anchee is forced to become a peasant and go to Red Fire Farm, and thus, The Pursuit of Freedom becomes tainted. Rather than working to safeguard individual identity and personal agency, the Cultural Revolution “frees” people from the burden of caring about specific people and instead offers freedom from the previous cultural standards. For Anchee, the Cultural Revolution offers freedom at the cost of destroying her own humanity.