Excellent historical fiction.

Jeg har læst en del om Kulturrevolutionen, men altid fra "massernes" synsvinkel. Det er ret vildt at læse en bog, der så at sige fokuserer på skurken ... og så er det oven i købet en velskrevet bog, der på elegant vis udnytter forskellen på jegfortæller og tredjepersonsfortæller. Det giver en ret fed effekt.

I had found this book on my bookshelf having purchased it shortly after it hit the bookstores.
After returning from a trip to China last spring,
I had become intrigued with the personality of Madame Mao and the part she played in China's Cultural revolution.
Well, I pulled the book from its shelf and immediately was absorbed in its pages. I learned Madam Mao was a beautiful, intelligent, and talented actress who was also an ambitious, cunning, cruel and backstabbing personality. This book paints her picture beautifully. It also shows the self-absorbed, narcissistic, power hungry, neurotic personality of Mao himself. I do believe Madame Mao had a deep love for her husband and played that card to ascend to the position of leadership in China after Mao's death. Much of this information was learned through this historical novel. So why did I give it three stars when I learned what I set out to learn reading this book? The book was too long and as a result, the pace was too slow.
Also, the author would flip back and forth from present time to past. And it doing that it became hard to follow. All in all I did like the book and would recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about the life of Mao Dzong's final wife.

A book that has been sitting around my house for a long time which I finally picked up and read. It is absorbing, interestingly written and sobering. The last because if this "biography" is grounded in reality the Chinese people were put through hell principally because Mao was an ego maniac whose mind me came increasingly scrambled in later years and Madame Mao craved Mao's love, and power, to the extend that she was completely ruthless. Of course, this makes you wonder how many other politicians, dictators etc. this same scenario applies to.

An interesting look into the life of Madame Mao Zedong, one of the most powerful women of the 20th Century, and wife of the Chairman to the Communist Party of China Mao Zedong. I found the writing style to be poetic and enjoyable to read. The main character's story was intriguing and it inspired me to learn more about the modern history of China. However, around the second half of the book, Madame Mao's character began to fall flat. The author chose to have more historical context information, such as dates and names and meeting information, rather than continuing to build the character. I was left confused about who Madame Mao is and what her motivations are. Overall a great read, and very different from other historical fiction books I have read.

While the first two-thirds of the book were riveting and extremely well-written, I was disappointed with the last third, which deals with Madame Mao's role in the Cultural Revolution and beyond. At this point, the story gets bogged down in politics and historical facts, including a lot of name-dropping of figures in Chinese politics, which have no resonance for your average Western reader. I loved the emotional insights and vivid, convincing descriptions of Jiang Ching's (Madame Mao) interior world, and I missed this in the last part of the book. I wanted more about Jiang Ching's (lack of) relationship with her daughter, and her feelings about it. Somehow, while Jiang Ching was an extremely believable, real, human, and even likeable character in the first part of the book--describing her early life and early years of her marriage to Mao--the latter part seems to move away from her voice and describe her from more of a distance, from a third-person historical perspective.

I read Anchee Min's Red Azalea before reading this one and I enjoyed Red Azalea SO much more than Madame Mao. In fact, I disliked her writing style in Madame Mao so much that I didn't even finish it. I felt bad because I liked Azalea so much that I really wanted to like this one, but I just couldn't do it. It bugged me that she went back and forth from first person to third person and I just found myself not really caring... :(

Anchee Min writes beautifully!

I just really can't give this more than 2 stars. It took me AGES to finish this book. First off, it's very weird to read a book that vacillates between third and first person every other paragraph. It's very odd and not a particularly engaging way to read because you constantly have the feeling that you've misread something. Second, though I give the book credit for informing me a little better on the history of communism in China, I don't feel like I understand Madame Mao any better than I did before I read the book. I never felt like we really got inside the character. Madame Mao constantly referring to herself in first person as though she were acting in a 'role' - this is an assumption the author makes that somehow doesn't quite explain most of her actions in the end. The truth is that somehow Madame Mao is more mean and terrible than the book really wants to examine. I felt like from a psychological stand-point, there was much missing from the narrative. And honestly, it took me 150 pages before I wasn't bored to death - when she finally meets Mao things get interesting, but it's nearly half way through the book before she gets to that point, and up until then the story is a terrific bore.

Hasil tuker guling dari Sil
Lah............ kok serasa bukan si Tante Anchee Min yang bikin *heran banget deh*
Bedan banget sama buku2 yang lain.
Bahasanya kaku, alurnya maju mundur dengan aneh
Mustinya bisa tuntas cepat tp karena kurang nyaman sama bahasanya jadi baru pagi ini selesai
Tp berhub si tante ini yang bikin, pesonanya sih masih adalah...

*Upsss... lupa pengalaman buruk dengan kalimat "Kurang nyaman sama bahasanya"

I thought this book was very interesting and unique. The point of view went back and forth between first and third person, and once I got used to it I thought it was neat. I enjoyed the story because the main character was not glamorized, she was cunning, ambitious and sometimes heartless but you still root for her because you know where she came from and how she grew up. She was a strong woman in a time when women were not respected at all, they were expected to do whatever men told them to do and they had no voice. Definately something different and original. I would recommend it.

Talk about your drama queens! In this biography of Madame Mao Jiang Ching, Anchee Min tells the story of Mao Tse-tung’s third and last wife. He was her fourth husband (although it seems that she was not actually married to at least one of the men she considered a husband and mention is made of her divorcing only one of the others.

Born the daughter of a concubine, she rebelled at the age of four against having her feet bound and evidently kept rebelling for the rest of her life. After she and her mother left her mother’s master and wandered a while in poverty, they, at last, returned to live with her mother’s parents. Her grandfather taught her to love Chinese opera, and at a young age, she ran away to join a local opera troupe. Later she moved to Shanghai, where she performed in operas and theaters and attempted to break into films. After some initial success, her acting career stagnated. About the only success she really had after that was in revolutionary films.

A couple of her boyfriends were communist revolutionaries. After stormy relationships with them, she finally left Shanghai to join the communist revolutionaries in Yenan. It is there that she catches the eye of Mao. They become lovers, and after Mao gets rid of his second wife, they are married. For a while, things go well, despite the hardships of the Revolution and the fact that they are living in a cave.

But when the Communists win, and they move to Beijing, to the Forbidden City, Jiang Ching is not allowed a political role of any kind, even though she begs for one, for a very long time. She is also jealous of his many lovers. From then on, it is a complicated political struggle. When Mao finally allows her a political role again, she launches the Cultural Revolution. It is an operation designed to give her a personal power base, to allow her to control the theater and film industry that had come to ignore her before she went to Yenan, and to get revenge on as many as possible of her rivals and Mao’s. Despite the charges later leveled against her, it appears that she was mostly loyal to Mao throughout his life in spite of their differences, and despite the fact that she was actively positioning herself to assume the role of his successor, which she seemed to think should have been hers by right.

An actress to the end, Madame Mao seems to have regarded her whole life as the role of a tragic heroine of the revolution as if she were living a play or an opera.

Anchee Min does a good job of telling Jiang Ching’s story, alternating between first person renditions of the lady’s own views and third person comments that often expand on the futures of the people involved or items from the historical record. She made it very easy to understand both the story and the characters, except maybe for Chairman Mao, who seems to have always liked to be a little enigmatic.