Red Azalea provides further proof for an opinion I’ve long held: history can only be truly understood through personal narratives that vividly recreate the individual’s experience and place the reader inside the individual’s skin. Only this intimate style allows the reader to experience anything close to the events themselves. Where personal narratives (and fiction as well) succeed in giving us the experience of a particular time and place, retrospective history, with its stoic prose and supposed objectivity can, at times, only portray the statistics of a tumultuous past from a peaceful actuarial present, often putting an even greater distance between us and our ancestors. I know of Maoism in China through historical, cultural, and philosophical writing, but never from these perspectives did I understand this time period and this place as acutely as I did while reading this book. Anchee Min’s creative memoir of her life during the Cultural Revolution in China is a perfect history of Communist China; perfect because I never imagined I could come as close to feeling the oppression of a despotic and cruel government as I did while reading this book. It is not a book that explains why Mao did what he did, (though the reader does learn this in the end); rather, it’s a first hand account of the effects of Maoist China on a single person and her family. In experiencing the toll that Mao’s regime exacts on this single individual, we feel by extension the horrors endured by an entire society.
This book was recommended to me by my sister (in-law) Mariah. This was the first recommendation of the book project because Mariah told me to read it eight years ago when we first met and she was reading it for a class. Finally, I’ve read it, and of course, like every other book she’s told me to read, she was right – I think it’s excellent and extremely important. (more…)
