Becoming Madame Mao
Many writers have engaged in the project of rescuing female figures from  history, but few have tackled such an unsympathetic character as Anchee Min does  in her historical novelBecoming Madame Mao. Known as the White Boned  Demon during her reign of terror in China, Madame Mao was blamed for countless  bloody and vengeful executions; she sought out those who had wronged her in the  past and wiped them off the face of the earth. Eventually she was reviled in  China and executed, even as her husband was revered as a hero.Before her stint as Mao's first lady, Jiang Ching, as she was then known, was an  actress, a singer, and a star in Communist films. Anchee Min grew up in Red  China and watched Jiang Ching from afar; she was fascinated by her for many  years, by tales of her independence and strength, and by images of her beauty.  In a way, the great villain and demon was a role model for Anchee Min, and her  teenage devotion is the engine of her remarkable novel. Moving back and forth  between stories of the actress and the evil dictator, Min complicates the Madame  Mao of history.As a girl, Madame Mao narrowly escaped having her feet bound. The book opens  with graphic descriptions of this process and of the ensuing infection that  freed her. But if her feet were not bound, her spirit was. Reared by a mother  who was the last concubine of a rich man, and a father who liked to hit his  girls with shovels, Madame Mao as a young girl felt herself doomed: "I see my  father hit Mother with a shovel. It happened suddenly. Without warning. I can  hardly believe my eyes. He is mad. He calls Mother a slut. Mother's body curls  up. My chest swells. He hits her back, front, shouting that he will break her  bones." The father then goes on to treat his daughter the same way. Decades  later, when Madame Mao manifests deep brutality, Min seems to be saying that  what goes around comes around. Flawed by a clumsy structure that vacillates  between third and first person arbitrarily,Becoming Madame Maois  nevertheless an immensely interesting work--defiant, morally ambiguous, and  difficult to put down.--Emily White