The Cooked Seed: A Memoir

The Cooked Seed, the second memoir by best-selling Chinese-American author Anchee Min, comes almost 20 years after the publication of Red Azalea, Min's powerful first memoir, and follows six historical novels that feature historically significant Chinese women.

Red Azalea, a hard-edged coming-of-age story, is a tough act to follow. In it, Min tells the story of her childhood in Shanghai and her early womanhood, when she was "sent down" to a work camp in the country. She describes her affair with a female fellow laborer and later events at Madame Mao's propaganda film studio in Shanghai with a raw urgency. One cannot help but admire both her strength and the bluntness of her recounting.