The Cooked Seed A Memoir

In 1994, Anchee Min made her literary debut with a memoir of growing up during the violent trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Red Azaleabecame an international bestseller, translated into twenty-three languages, and propelled her career as a successful, critically acclaimed novelist. Twenty years later, Min returns to the story of her own life to give us the next chapter, an immigrant story that takes her from the shocking deprivations of her homeland to the sudden bounty of the promised land of America, without language, money, or a clear path. Joan Chen, the not yet famous actress, played a critical role in helping her friend negotiate the immigration process and an application to the Art Institute of Chicago, but once in America, Anchee was on her own, forced to survive by her wits and indomitable spirit. She teaches herself English watching Sesame Streetand Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, and is bemused by the unfamiliar riches of her new country: the food, warm showers, free toilet paper. She handles the head-spinning cultural dislocation at school-and later, her interactions with other groups of Americans-with her characteristic self-deprecating humor. But it is a hard road, too, as it is for all immigrants: Anchee works five jobs at once, lives in unheated rooms, suffers rape, collapses from exhaustion, marries poorly and divorces. She also gives birth to her daughter, Lauryann, who, more than anything, will save her and root her, finally, in America.As a child, Anchee had always understood herself as a mere "bolt on the great machine that was Communism"; in America she is shocked learn, as Mr. Rogers says in a phrase she memorizes early on, "the best gift you can offer is your honest self." Telling her story, Anchee is at her rawest, most intimate, vulnerable, and honest. Hers is the unforgettable journey of one woman moving between two radically different cultures: a homeland that left her brutalized, but which she will always love, and America, with its freedom and possibility-perhaps best appreciated by those who have struggled to attain it.

Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. At seventeen she was sent to a labor collective, where a talent scout for Madame Mao's Shanghai Film Studio recruited her to work as a movie actress. She moved to the United States in 1984. Her first memoir, Red Azalea, was an international bestseller, published in twenty countries. She has since published six novels, most recently Pearl of China.