A man is tortured and hanged. A woman turns maniacal and kills herself. The decade-long Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China that began in September 1965 was turbulent and terrifying.

Red Azalea is Anchee Min’s personal account of living through those years, toiling long days in leech-filled paddy fields when she was only 17 and then witnessing all that she did before she turns 27.

What is most interesting about her memoir is the lack of anger or recrimination, which is replaced by her experiences of passionate love at a time when "personal desires were politically dangerous" and she was "forbidden to speak, dress, read, write, or love as she pleased".

She falls in love, first, with her female commander Yan at the Red Fire Farm, and, two years later, with an elusive man who supervises the production of Red Azalea – a film based on Madame Mao’s operas, for which Min is surprisingly selected for the title role.

According to critics the memoir ends quite abruptly. Mao dies suddenly and Madame Mao and her followers are imprisoned. The film production is halted and those who were a part of it for six years are shamed. And Min? She decides to migrate to America. But how she plans to do it is not clear.

Perhaps no ending would have satisfied the reader, as by the last page one is so deeply intimate with Min and her life story that everything just seems pointless.

Newsweek described the book as being "as delicate and evocative as a traditional Chinese brush painting"; but it is brutal, the effects of which last on the reader well after it is over.

Published in 1994.