"Anchee Min’s exquisite new novel unfolds like a ribbon
of gleaming, luminous silk—soothing in its beauty, mesmerizing
in its variations, startling, delightful and ultimately transformative
in a way that only the best works of art can aspire to be . .
. An astonishing journey into China’s recent past and the
lives of its most noted leaders." —Los Angeles Times
"Sheer poetry." —Wall Street Journal
"Extraordinary . . . with operatic grace, Min portrays Madame
Mao as a vindictive power monger whose apparent heartlessness
is countered by a craving for love . . . Min lets her be seen
as never before. Bottom line: Riveting novel." —People Magazine
"Anchee Min has rendered the White-Boned Demon human—Madame
Mao is finally given her own voice. A remarkable accomplishment."
—Ha Jin, author of Waiting
Anchee Min’s novel Becoming Madame Mao "is a magnificent
book: consequential; significant; beautiful. The story is gripping.
The style is simple and graceful. The themes—love, war, conquest,
domination, violence, feminism, communism, individualism and power—are
sweeping. The true heroine is writer Anchee Min," writes the
San Diego Union Tribune. In Min’s skillful hands, the
"white-boned demon," as Madame Mao is known, is given
flesh and blood. The myths surrounding her are systematically unraveled
to reveal a woman motivated by ambition, fueled by revenge, and
tortured by her unrequited love for Mao Tse-tung.
To millions Madame Mao Jiang Ching is evil personified; she has
been erased from China’s history books. In Becoming Madame
Mao, Anchee Min resurrects her in a sweeping story that moves
gracefully from the intimately personal to the great stage of world
history. Every character existed in real life and Mao’s letters
and poems have been translated from original documents. These facts
and Min’s personal experiences with Jiang Ching and her closest
advisors help to create a story that redefines forever Mao’s
fourth wife—one of the most interesting women of the twentieth
century.
The novel begins in 1919 with Yunhe, a four-year-old girl born to
a rural concubine who defiantly refuses to have her feet bound.
Again and again the mother tells the girl that "females are
like grass, born to be stepped on," but the girl doesn’t
listen and throughout her life clings to the belief that she is
"a peacock among hens." After abandoning an arranged marriage
and being abandoned in another marriage, Yunhe runs away to Shanghai
to become an actress and renames herself Lan Ping. In her new identity
she pursues roles on stage and screen but never gets out of B-movies
or second-tier operas. Another failed marriage leads her to the
role of patriot and she joins the Red Army. She is sent to the mountainous
region of Yenan where, in 1934, she meets and seduces the charismatic
war hero Mao. She wins him for a time in an erotically charged and
passionate affair. They marry and he renames her Jiang Chiang, but
soon after their marriage her jealousy, the machinations of Mao’s
trusted aides, and Mao’s own loss of interest cast her into
limbo. By then a veteran of the inner circle betrayals that Mao
encouraged, Jiang Ching attempts to wrest personal power, but it
becomes her undoing.
"In brief, urgent vignettes moving loosely between the first
and third person, Min has written what might be called an imaginary
memoir, an evocation of a woman who was by turns larger than life
and viciously small-minded," writes the San Francisco Chronicle.
"’For those who are fascinated by me you owe me applause,
and for those who are disgusted you may spit,’ Madame Mao announces
as the curtain is about to fall. Anchee Min has clearly felt both
urges, and, through her imagination, so do we."
Jiang Ching was beloved by the Chinese people as the driving force
behind the proletarian operas and films that inspired millions.
As an architect of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and supposed
murderer of Mao, she was despised and sentenced to death. Despite
being a victim herself of the Cultural Revolution, Anchee Min felt
is was her job as a writer to understand Jiang Ching as a human
being. "In truth," says Min, "she was an early feminist
who was caught up in the whirlpool of Mao’s political and personal
life." In Becoming Madame Mao she opens Jiang Ching’s
soul for all to see—the good and the bad—and gives voice
to a conflicted, impassioned woman who has been pitifully rubbed
out of history.
Born in Shanghai in 1957, Anchee Min was seventeen when she was sent
to a Communist labor farm so poorly managed that the workers had to
steal food from the fields just to survive. After three years on the
farm, her working class looks led talent scouts to recruit her for
the lead role in Madame Mao’s future propaganda films. It was
at the Shanghai Film Studio that Anchee Min met members of Jiang Ching’s
circle who later provided Min with stories and insight. When Madame
Mao was denounced for murdering her husband—a crime she did not
commit—and sentenced to death shortly after Mao’s funeral,
Min was declared one of her followers by the new regime. As punishment
she was ordered back to the labor farm and then to work as a set clerk
at the Shanghai Film Studio, a sentence that lasted for eight years.
She came to the United States in 1984 with the help of actress Joan Chen.
Her memoir, Red Azalea, was named a New York Times Notable
Book of 1994 and was an international bestseller, with rights sold
in twenty countries. Her first novel, Katherine, was published
in 1997. Becoming Madame Mao, a national bestseller, was written
after three years of research done in China and the United States.
Min’s next novel, Wild Ginger, will be published by Houghton
Mifflin in Spring 2002. She is currently researching another work
of historical fiction about the last Empress Dowager.
Anchee Min lives in Los Angeles, California.
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