The Chinese American Miracle: An Interview with Anchee Min

Anchee Min made her literary debut in 1994 with a memoir titled Red Azalea, which told the story of her growing up in China during the violent trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Her new memoir, The Cooked Seed, released on 7 May 2013, picks up her story of leaving the shocking deprivations of her homeland to arrive in Chicago without language, money, or a clear path. During the last thirty years in the United States, as she painstakingly taught herself English, Min found her literary voice and established herself as a best-selling writer. In addition to her two memoirs, she has published six novels, many about important women and key events in Chinese history.

Anchee Min was born in Shanghai on 14 January 1957. The oldest of four children, she grew up during Chairman Mao Zedong’s rule over Communist China, which began in 1949 and lasted until his death in 1976. Her parents were teachers who, as Min writes in Red Azalea, “believed in Mao and the Communist Party, just like everybody else in the neighborhood.” Min describes herself in her first memoir as “an adult since the age of five” (3). She was in charge of her younger siblings and had no options other than to do well at school and distinguish herself as a young Communist, which she did, even publicly shaming one of her favorite schoolteachers. As a result of this revolutionary act, at seventeen Min was sent to work at the Red Fire Farm labor camp near the East China Sea. After three years, she was cast in a propaganda film produced by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who was known as Madame Mao. Chairman Mao died before the film was completed, and Min was labeled a political outcast by association and forced to work menially for the film studio. She was determined to flee China for the United States, which she did successfully on 31 August 1984 with the help of a Chinese friend, actress Joan Chen, who was already in the country.

The story of what Min experienced as a non-English speaker on her arrival in Chicago is chronicled in her second memoir, The Cooked Seed. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, married a Chinese immigrant like herself (in February 1991), and had a baby, Lauryann, that fall. After her marriage ended in divorce two years later, she moved to California where, while raising her young daughter, Min began writing about Chinese history. Collectively, her work has allowed her to probe her native country’s political unrest and repression of women. In Katherine (1995), her first novel, Min gives readers a taste of both worlds she has become familiar with through the perspective of an American teacher in China, the twenty-nine-year-old title character, Katherine. Her next novel, Becoming Madame Mao (2000), her first work of historical fiction, chronicles the life of Jiang Qing. Wild Ginger (2002) revisits Min’s past by revealing the cost of the love that a model Maoist, the title character, has for a man. Empress Orchid (2004) provides a first-person account of the life of Empress Dowager Cixi (or Tzu-Hsi) from her humble beginnings to her rise as the Empress. The Last Empress (2007) follows up with the second part of Empress Orchid’s story and offers a revisionist portrait of the woman now known as the “Dragon Lady.” In her most recent novel, Pearl of China (2010), Min brings to life the childhood of “Pearl,” the brilliant young girl who became the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck.

In this interview, Min articulates how all of her work shares a common purpose: to help Americans know and understand China. She does this in language that is straightforward and raw, simple and poetic, and accessible to all. As A. O. Scott explains in The New York Times Magazine, Min’s prose is “crude and powerful, with some of the sharp lyric compression of an Emily Dickinson poem.” Min chooses to write in English because, she tells me during our...