The Cooked Seed

Starred review from February 25, 2013
In her excoriating examination of the legacy of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, novelist Min (Pearl of China, etc.) offers a sharp, moving contrast between American and Chinese attitudes about human worth and dignity. Raised in Shanghai in a hardscrabble family of four children and educated parents who were denounced as “bourgeois,” Min was plucked as a teenager from a labor camp in 1974 by Madame Mao’s henchmen to appear in propaganda films. Min was thought to have “proletarian looks” (weather-beaten face, muscular body). However, with the swift change in the political wind, Min and her family were publicly shamed and thrown into years of poverty and ill health, sharing one room and a bathroom with 20 neighbors. Min, a hard worker, natural caretaker, and loyal to friends, managed to convince the Art Institute of Chicago that she was an artist and spoke English, though she nearly got deported once she arrived in Chicago at age 27 in 1984 because she spoke no English at all. Her memoir methodically reconstructs those painstaking first years in Chicago, living on a pittance, scrounging for work, amazed at what she considered luxurious dorm living, and guilt-ridden at her inability to rescue her family back home. Along the way, she offers candid observations on American naiveté, casual waste, and lack of Chinese stick-to-itness, yet writes poignantly of being treated with decency and warmth, inspiring her to work harder. Watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and reading Jane Eyre helped pave her yellow brick road to literary success, as she delineates captivatingly in this work.

March 1, 2013
A truly rags-to-riches story from Shanghai to Chicago. Novelist Min (Pearl of China, 2010, etc.) came through the Cultural Revolution scarred, sickened and with a resolve to survive. While her first book and memoir, Red Azalea (1994), delineated her early, fervent embrace of Mao's communism, her ordeal working in a labor camp and being "handpicked" (though there was no choice in the matter) by Madame Mao's film scouts in 1974 to represent the coarsened proletarian worker in her propaganda films, this work reveals the enormous physical and emotional toll those early struggles took on Min, propelling her to reinvent herself in America. Eventually disgraced as "a cooked seed" (no chance to sprout), Min was considered "guilty" along with her entire family; she was left with a "stained dossier" and a pervasive personal sense of humiliation and worthlessness. Thanks to tips from the actress Joan Chen, whom the author had befriended during their time at the Shanghai Film Studio, Min was able to convince the Art Institute of Chicago that she was an artist and fluent speaker of English; her "crazy determination" to get past U.S. immigration officials landed her in Chicago as a student in 1984. Min's rather dry, grim descriptions of living on visa tenterhooks for years, enduring cruel loneliness, flagrant exploitation at job after job, and appalling living situations, even involving rape, prove moving reading. Always gnawed by her duty to repay her family and send money home to give her mother the toilet of her own she never had, Min felt nonetheless tenderized by being treated as a human being in America rather than a "bug." An uplifting work of incredible grit and fortitude.

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September 15, 2013
Here Min ("Pearl of China") continues her memoir, which began in "Red Azalea". Because she had no job prospects in China and was even called Madame Mao's Trash, in 1984 at age 27 Min moved to Chicago to attend college though she knew no English. She describes her struggles with a new culture and language and the constant demands of working several jobs for very low pay just to survive. She describes being raped and nearly strangled to death while sharing a dump with an emotionally disturbed man. She marries a rather lazy artist, has a child with him, and divorces him. Her break comes when the first volume of her memoir is published and her literary career is launched. The latter part of this work discusses her interactions with her daughter and meeting and marrying her second husband, a Vietnam vet. Actress Angela Lin reads this second memoir with interesting accents. VERDICT Recommended for Min fans, memoir fans, and those with an interest in China and the immigrant experience. ["After spending her formative years in a labor collective in Mao's China, Min is unable to see failure as an option for either her or her daughter. Her declarative prose slowly reveals the enduring bravery of an immigrant who refused to dwell on hardship," read the review of the Bloomsbury hc, "LJ" Xpress Reviews, 4/12/13.--Ed.]--David Faucheux, Louisiana Audio Information & Reading Svc., Lafayette

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