American writer Anchee Min draws on her experiences as a young Chinese girl growing up in Mao Zedong?s China both for her subject material and to help her face the challenges of everyday life. Her story today on New American Voices.
Anchee Min, a slender woman with feathery, shoulder-length black hair and a face that lights up when she talks, says twenty years in America have changed her.
But Anchee Min says she got her most essential characteristic -- her toughness -- from her early experiences in China. As a young girl she lived through the upheaval of Chairman Mao?s Cultural Revolution. At 17 she was sent to a labor camp, where the work was hard, food scarce, and every word, thought and action rigorously policed. After Mao?s death Anchee Min became, essentially, a pariah, classified as ?political debris? for having been selected by Madam Mao?s talent scouts for a role in a government propaganda film. In 1984 she applied for a visa to come to the United States to study art. Without knowing a word of English, she learned, phonetically, a short biographical sketch a friend had written for her to deliver at the requisite meeting with the American consul.
Unfortunately, at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she went to enroll, it immediately became clear that Anchee Min didn?t speak any English. She was given six months to learn the language, or be deported. So, while working at odd jobs to support herself, she spent every free moment watching children?s television shows and talk shows, and taking English language courses at night. Her experience in China stood her in good stead.
The only jobs she could qualify for were menial ones that required little knowledge of English.
It was her desire for a better job that led Anchee Min to writing. Her ultimate dream was to become a secretary.
The memoir ?Red Azalea?, which ends with Anchee Min?s arrival in America, became a bestseller when it was published in 1994. Since then, Ms. Min has written four well-received novels set in China. Her most recent book, ?Empress Orchid?, is a vivid depiction of life in the imperial court ? and, by extension, in China itself - at the end of the 19th century.
In her own life, Anchee Min?s Chinese background and American experience have come together in sometimes unexpected ways. As a young girl, she says, Chairman Mao?s propaganda prompted her to dream of being sent to Vietnam, where the Americans were then fighting, so that she could tie grenades to her body and blow herself up along with many American soldiers, and die a heroine. Today she is married to an English teacher who is a former U.S. Marine and a Vietnam veteran. Anchee Min says their respective pasts did pose a potential problem.
Now, however, Anchee Min says she is totally at peace with herself and her life in America. She lives in California with her husband and 11-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, concentrating on her next book, a sequel to ?Empress Orchid?.