SOURCE: "Life in a Chinese Opera," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 20, 1994, pp. 3, 7.

[Eder is an American critic who has won a citation for excellence in reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle as well as a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In the following excerpt, he provides a favorable review of Red Azalea.]

At home, Anchee Min's family was squeezed into two rooms shared with two other Shanghai families. From the age of 5, Min writes, she had to be an adult, tending her three younger siblings, Blooming, Coral and Space Conqueror—her father combined a private passion for astronomy with a public regard for Maoist oratory—until her parents got home late at night. Min's mother would arrive in a near-faint from her grueling factory job, and the four little children had to revive her with wet cloths and back rubs.

It was the early 1960s. Min's...