The Cooked Seed: A Memoir

In 1994, Anchee Min made her literary debut with a memoir of growing up in China during the violent trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Red Azalea became an international bestseller and propelled her career as a successful, critically acclaimed author. 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. It is a hard and lonely road. She teaches herself English by watching Sesame Street, keeps herself afloat working five jobs at once, lives in unheated rooms, suffers rape, collapses from exhaustion, marries poorly and divorces.But she also gives birth to her daughter, Lauryann, who will inspire her and finally root her in her new country. Min's eventual successes-her writing career, a daughter at Stanford, a second husband she loves-are remarkable, but it is her struggle throughout toward genuine selfhood that elevates this dramatic, classic immigrant story to something powerfully universal.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
"A wild, passionate, and fearless American writer."-New York Times "The book sings. It is a small masterpiece."-Vogue on Red Azalea "Soothing in its beauty, mesmerizing in its variations, startling, delightful, and ultimately transformative in a way that only the best works of art can aspire to be ... An astonishing journey into China's recent past."-Los Angeles Times on Becoming Madame Mao Min echoes Buck's talent for showing compassion and empathy toward her characters, and like her, reveals the power and dignity contained in the lives of ordinary people. The power of this book is that Min ultimately did gain the courage to offer her honest self…this is Min's reckoning with the past, in the way she could manage, and it is certainly brave. [Min] writes with the mix of blunt candor and high drama that distinguishes both her memoirs. It's a prose style inspired by the didactic operas and films of Madame Mao - the only permissible art in China during Min's youth - and she has developed it into an instrument with remarkable range, full of sorrow and humor, sometimes appealingly coarse and sometimes nuanced...America gave Min the change to transport the seeds of her extraordinary story across the oceans, and urged them into bloom. The Cooked Seed is a brave piece of writing...Though it might strike some with delicate sensibilities as very blunt and open, that is the purpose of this memoir that she dedicated to her daughter. One would expect nothing less.