Anchee MIN

choi

Donna Rifkind, Transplant; Anchee Min's memoir charts her arduous path from a labor camp in China to art school in Chicago. New York Times Book Review, June 30, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/3 ... -by-anchee-min.html
(book review on Anchee Min, The Cooked Seed; A memoir. Bloomsbury, 2013)

Excerpt in the window of print: Min juggled as many as five menial jobs at a time and housed herself, at one point, in a storage space.

My comment:
(a) "Anchee Min" is how she spelled and placed in order her name.
(b) The review quotes her last sentence of the book: "I arrived in America on Sept 1, 1984."

Well, I arrived about ten days later. And we shared the same dormitory and dorm mates. (She was a student of School of Art Institute of Chicago, but somehow lived in a dormitory of University of Illinois at Chicago. I did not think it was odd. However, come to think about it, nobody else did as far as I can tell.) She had no difficulty communicating in English. There was no sign that she was in financial stress; at the end of that school year, she lost her camera and I volunteered to buy the balance of her meal card at face value. (The dorm fee includes a meal card, with which we paid for meals in the dorm cafeteria (to ensure dorm residents ate there; otherwise dorm cafeterias might have to shut down because Americans do not like cafeteria fare. The balance would evaporate at the end of a school year, so they were sold at fire-sale rates as the end approached.)
(c) She did not talk much. (Certainly she never mentioned her past in China--except she met Ms Joan Chen at Shanghai Film Studio.) When she did, she complained not about politics, but about her American classmates' (incorrect, in her mind, because she asserted American classmates thought Chinese artists were incapable of something) views on art expressions by Americans and Chinese (at her School).
(d) I chanced upon her in a party two or three years later. She looked gaunt. Later I learned she had contracted tuberculosis.
(e) So imagine my shock when she published Red Azalea, which was political. Still I could not say it was a fantasy, because I was not there when the events she said happened, happened.
(f) However, this review, commenting on the memoir, says something that contradicts the fact I am aware of:

In her application to the School, she "had lied about her English proficiency, of which she had none. * * * Min, who was learning English by watching 'Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.'"