Anchee min

Anchee Min (2014)

Anchee Min (born January 14, 1957 in Shanghai as Mín Ānqí, Chinese 閔 安琪) is a Chinese-American writer who writes in English .

life and work

Min was born as the daughter of a teacher couple in Shanghai. In 1974 she was sent to work in an agricultural collective on the edge of the East China Sea ( Red Fire Farm ). She left the camp after being discovered as a film actress by talent scouts in 1976. Min was supposed to take part in a film adaptation of a political opera by ( Mao Zedong's wife) Jiang Qing , Red Azalea . However, after Mao's death in September 1976, his widow fell from grace and the film product was dropped. Min stayed in the studio as a typist for six years.

With the help of Joan Chen , whom she met in drama school, Min came to the United States in 1984 , where she made her way through odd jobs, began learning English, and enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago . She graduated in 1991. A short story about the Red Fire Farm , which she wrote for her writing class, was published in the spring of 1992 in the well-known British literary magazine Granta . This narrative became the starting point for Min's autobiography Red Azalea (1994), which was a reckoning with the Cultural Revolution and was enthusiastically received by critics.

In 1995 Min's first novel, Katherine ( Land of My Heart ), followed, the story of an American teacher who teaches English in China and is working on her dissertation; successful at first, spectacularly failing last. Cultures collide in this story, and Min uses this confrontation to portray modern China. In her second novel, Becoming Madame Mao ( Madame Mao ), published in 1999 , Min traces the personality and life of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, who, as a member of the Gang of Four, was a driving force behind the Cultural Revolution and one of the most hated personalities in the country. Wild Ginger ( Wilder Ginger ), 2002, tells the story of a young woman who desperately struggled for social recognition during the time of the Cultural Revolution and who therefore gradually made the repressive party line her own. In her next novels Empress Orchid and the sequel The Last Empress ( The Empress on the Dragon Throne 2004; The Last Empress 2007), Min turns to a previous chapter in Chinese history and tells the story of the influential and often slandered Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908 ). At the center of Min's most recent novel, Pearl of China (2010), is the writer Pearl S. Buck .

Min was married to the painter Qigu Jiang for three years and has a daughter by him. She is currently married to the writer Lloyd Lofthouse and lives in San Francisco.

Work

Autobiography

• 1994: Red Azalea ( Red Azalea ), autobiography

Novels

• 1995: Land of My Heart ( Katherine )
• 2001: Madame Mao ( Becoming Madame Mao )
• 2002: Wild Ginger ( Wild Ginger )
• 2004: The Empress on the Dragon Throne ( Empress Orchid )
• 2007: The last empress ( The Last Empress )
• 2010: Pearl of China
• 2013: The Cooked Seed

Awards

• 1993: Carl Sandburg Literary Award, for Red Azalea
• 1994: New York Times: Notable Book of the Year, for Red Azalea

literature

• Shunzu Wang: Anchee Min . In Emmanuel Sampath Nelson (Ed.): Asian American Novelists: a Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook . Greenwood Publishing Group 2000, ISBN 9780313309113 , pp. 214-218 ( excerpt (Google) )

Web links

• Anchee Mins website
• interview
• Interview with the Asia Society about their book Pearl of China (Flash video, 62 min)