She need not worry. A few years ago, a Shanghai publisher rejected “Red Azalea” as “too controversial,” and this work probably won’t be published in China either. Min, now back in Shanghai with her 8-year-old American daughter, is delving once again into controversial history. She’s researching a book about the empress dowager, who was blamed for letting foreign powers grab pieces of China in the late 19th century–another woman Min thinks is unjustly maligned. To Min, history is the key to understanding the present. She is stunned by her Chinese friends’ unwillingness to look back at the political upheaval that has scarred all of their lives. “The whole nation is in self-denial,” says Min. The government’s pat explanation for the Cultural Revolution, that Jiang and a group of Maoist sycophants known as the Gang of Four spun it out of control, doesn’t explain why all of China went virtually mad. In Min’s opinion, “self-censorship” will exacerbate the cynicism among China’s youth. “If the people don’t block the story, there’s hope,” she says. Otherwise young Chinese, already a “me generation,” won’t learn to face up to their mistakes. Most of them reject ideology and see the Cultural Revolution as some kind of surreal aberration. They “have no guilt [about] being unethical or immoral,” says Min.
As a young girl, Min was caught in the eye of an ideological typhoon. She was picked at the age of 19 to play Madame Mao in a film called “Red Azalea.” When the First Lady was arrested in 1976, Min fell, too–and plunged from starlet to janitor at the Shanghai Film Studio. Still, Min, 43, empathizes with Jiang. Her book, which jumps from Jiang’s imaginary thoughts to a third-person voice, describes a concubine’s daughter who by the age of 24 had recast herself as a B-grade Shanghai actress, changed husbands several times and wed Mao. According to Min, Mao shut Jiang out of his bedroom and political meetings after 1949 and started sleeping with a parade of young women. Then Jiang choreographed the Cultural Revolution propaganda to win back Mao’s love and respect. “She was human,” says Min. Unloved and ambitious, Jiang morphed “into a monster.”
Min understands how humans can turn evil. As head of her school’s Little Red Guards, she denounced her favorite teacher before a mob of 2,000. At 17, Min volunteered to work on a remote farm, where she participated in a nighttime manhunt in the fields to nail a friend having sex with her boyfriend. The man was executed for alleged rape; Min’s friend committed suicide. On the farm, she tumbled into an illicit homosexual affair with her team leader, Yan. In such cruel surroundings, says Min, “love surpassed gender.” She says many people had homosexual love affairs: “You will screw a camel in the desert.”
In her old Shanghai neighborhood, Min is a celebrity, even though nobody has read her books. People know her for the fact that she is a friend of Joan Chen, the Shanghai-born American movie star. Chen, who was one of Min’s friends in acting class, helped her leave China. Landing in Chicago in 1984, Min learned English from “Sesame Street.” Inspired by the confessions she saw on “Oprah,” Min started writing. She got married, divorced and remarried, and now lives near Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. She still searches for her former lover, Yan, who now has a son. Two years ago Yan visited Min’s parents and left a Shanghai address. Min wrote but never got a response. “It breaks my heart,” she says. “She doesn’t want to see me. Maybe it’s too painful.”
In the worn, French-built house that held four families during Min’s childhood, Min and her father, a retired teacher, tease a neighbor for once leading the morning chant–“The sun is red in the East!”–during the Cultural Revolution. The neighbor gives an embarrassed smile. Nobody talks much about the past. Min’s 82-year-old uncle, a former Kuomintang official, doesn’t tell his college-age granddaughter about his 25-year exile in Qinghai province. “If she gets angry, or political, she may get herself into trouble,” he says. “This is a way to protect her.” For fear of jealousy, Min doesn’t visit her old film studio. She doesn’t go back to the farm, either; local officials want her to invest.
While in Shanghai, Min grabs the opportunity to relive her past and takes her daughter to see a rare performance of a revolutionary opera she grew up singing. “Sha Jia Pond,” about the communist guerrillas fighting the Japanese in the 1930s, is one of the only eight operas Mao’s wife permitted during the Cultural Revolution. “The red sun will break through the clouds!” the commander cries onstage. From the audience, Min chimes in: “Hold on to Chairman Mao’s teachings, and we’ll see victory tomorrow!” The Chinese fiddle’s sandpapery whine quickens. “The heroes always find courage in Mao’s quotations,” Min whispers to her daughter.
An elderly man sitting nearby, tapping his foot to the beat, admits that he feels guilty for never daring to challenge the government, even when he knew officials were lying. “Everybody knows about [these things] inside,” he says. “We just don’t want to speak about it.” That’s exactly what Min worries about. As the opera draws to a close, her daughter leans over and asks, “Is this a true story?” “Yes,” says Min. At the end, a soldier waves a huge red flag. The audience jumps up, applauding. Later, no doubt, Min will tell her daughter about the uglier side of the revolution, too.
