SOURCE: "Growing Up amid the Conflicts of Ideology and Life," in The New York Times, January 26, 1994, p. C19.

[In the following review, Jefferson provides a positive assessment of Red Azalea.]

In a movie theater recently, when Farewell My Concubine ended, the man behind me turned to his companion and announced, "Well, it might not be the most sophisticated film I've ever seen, but what it shows us about life in China…."

I found it a very sophisticated film, and one that showed much more than a social realist view of repression in imperial nationalist and Communist China. Farewell My Concubine also explored questions dear to postmodern Westerners: questions of sexual impulse and identity, of the treacherous balance of power between lovers, or friends, or teachers and students, and of the process by which a soul is patched together then broken apart by public ideology and private longing.

Red...