SOURCE: A review of Red Azalea, in New York Magazine, Vol. 27, No. 5, January 31, 1994, p. 63.

[Below, Koenig favorably reviews Red Azalea.]

An agricultural worker who was selected from the rice fields for movie stardom, Anchee Min has a marvelous story to tell, but her account of her own career is less fantastic than her portrait of everyday life in China during the Cultural Revolution. The Maoists did all they could to promote cooperation, and produced a society riven with envy and hatred; they tried to drive out such inefficient emotions as lust and love, and created a country of perverts and hysterics. In 1967, when Min was 10 years old, the neighbors, angry because her family had a bigger apartment than theirs, poured the contents of their chamber pots over the Mins' furnishings and threatened them with an ax. ("There were no police. The police station was called a revisionist mechanism...