Red Azalea

Part 3 narrates Anchee’s move to Shanghai, describes her failed attempts at acting, and foreshadows the collapse of the Cultural Revolution that will occur with the death of Mao in 1976. In these pages, Anchee completes her long process of spiritual and mental separation from the Party, as the end of her acting career represents her failure to act like the perfect Party member. Anchee’s Pursuit of Freedom therefore continues to exact a high cost, as her individual character can no longer be suppressed by the oppressive ideological structures and ill treatment that occurs at the studio.

Foreshadowing her escape both from Party principles and from China, her red scarf flies off as the truck carries her to Shanghai, and just as she “fail[s] to catch it” (159), she also fails to hold onto her long loyalty to a political party that has done nothing but fail her over and over again. Serving as a hint of the eventual loss of her job and her family when she eventually loses her position at the studio and leaves for America in the early 1980s, this red scarf symbolizes both the Communist rule in China and the personal pain she feels in connection with her former political convictions. As Anchee makes clear, even her own deliverance from the harshness of farm life is no blessing, for she knows that her sister must suffer farm detail in her place, in accordance with Party policy. While Coral had been hoping for a placement at a factory in Shanghai, official policy requires one person from each family to play the role of a peasant. Returning to Shanghai, Anchee asks her mother “what happened to those youths who did not go with the policy. Mother reported that none of these people met a good end” (160). While Anchee’s mother does not enumerate any official punishments, the implication is clear that shame follows those families who deny Mao’s revolutionary principles, for their very denial becomes proof that they still value bourgeois ideals.

As Anchee discovers that the film studio lacks any individual qualities and experiences the same dysfunctional dynamics that lurk within Red Fire Farm, she develops more resistance to Party principles and dares to develop her individual character further. Surrounded by hostile actors and by the toxic vigilance of Soviet Wong, who favors Anchee’s rival, Cheering Spear, Anchee grows disillusioned with these revolutionary activities as she comes to pursue not Party ideals, but only her personal interests while participating in their film project, Red Azalea. While each of Anchee’s companions at the film studio clearly yearns to star in “Comrade Jiang Ching’s ideal, her creation” (174), Anchee can only view it through the lens of her own life experiences. For Anchee, the film becomes more than “past wartime” and instead comes to represent “the essence of a true heroine, the essence of Yan, the essence of how I must continue to live my life (174). With these words, it is clear that Anchee doesn’t identify with Madam Mao’s film or with Party history in and of itself; instead, she focuses on her own personal attachments. Wanting to star in a film that extols revolutionary ideals, Anchee ironically denies them by looking for herself in the story.

Having reduced The Pervasive Reach of Mao’s Propaganda upon her own attachments, Anchee demonstrates how poorly she can act the part of a dutiful revolutionary both in the movie and at the studio. Ironically, her best performance occurs when she effects a temporary escape from the studio, for she must tell a convincing enough lie about her mother’s illness in order to engineer a secret visit to Yan at Red Fire Farm. Upon finding Yan distant and the farm a desolate wasteland, Anchee returns to Shanghai and visits her parents’ home just as Sound of Rain and Soviet Wong have left. Distanced too from her parents, she realizes that they cannot balance her own freedom with the cost they will have to pay in her place, thus further illustrating the price exacted from The Pursuit of Freedom. Her father even entreats her to toe the Party line, saying, “[A]ccept your lot and stay in your place” (191), because Coral has been assigned to take Anchee’s former role at the farm. Unwilling to become a family who must live with shame, her mother and father try to convince Anchee not to resist the will of the Party.

However, the acting school proves to be more difficult than Anchee can navigate. Unwilling to play the social tricks necessary to survive, Anchee grows isolated. As Soviet Wong’s antagonistic treatment grows and Anchee finds herself unable to flatter Soviet Wong as Cheering Spear does, she suddenly recognizes that Soviet Wong does not view the actors “as [a] teacher [does] her students, but as an old concubine [does] newcomers” (178). Faced with the existential threat of being replaced by these new actors, Soviet Wong can only depend on the tactics of the Party to make herself useful, attacking those who show individual character the triple weapons of isolation, rumor, and innuendo. Thus, Anchee finally meets in Soviet Wong the true villain she denounced so many years before in Autumn Leaves. Once upon a time, Anchee had been successful within the Party, parroting the propaganda of Mao and participating fully in his cult of personality. The slogans she recited for years were lines she memorized, and the speeches she made against Autumn Leaves were merely a script that she followed. As the first half of Part 3 makes clear, however, Anchee finally ceases to be a good actor when she stops believing in the Party line.