This is an intense story about a young girl growing up in the cultural revolution during Maoist China. It shows her struggles, her passions, her convictions, and how she made decisions in tandem with the passions of youth. These experiences were likely similar to ones many people experienced in this place and time. At times, the story feels a little slow, but it picks up towards the end. ( )

Wild Ginger, by Anchee Min, depicts the fanaticism and cruelty that swept China during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). In the story, Hot Pepper, a teenage girl who leads Red Guards in Shanghai, bullies two other teenage girls, Wild Ginger and Maple (the narrator), for their non-proletarian backgrounds: Maple is a daughter of teachers. Her father “whispered once in a while that” Communist leader Mao Zedong did not singlehandedly liberate China. “The Japanese surrender in 1945 had a lot to do with their defeat in World War II. . . . Mao happened to harvest other people’s crops while working on his own.” (29) For views like that, Maple’s father spent 17 years in a forced labor camp.

Wild Ginger is even more suspect: her late father was a French diplomat. But Wild Ginger is determined to prove she is an ardent Maoist, even after her mother’s house is ransacked, her dog is killed and eaten, and her mother commits suicide.

As the story develops, Wild Ginger and Maple find themselves in a love triangle with a teenage boy named Evergreen. Wild Ginger and Evergreen compete in a Quotations of Chairman Mao contest, and prepare for the next contest in a friendly rivalry memorizing Mao’s writings. Min presents several pages of the sayings in translation. They seem balanced and wise, useful for resolving thorny issues, yet the real Chairman Mao in his old age was anything but balanced, wise and understanding. He violated his own precepts daily.

At a couple of points the narrative is puzzling. Wild Ginger reports corruption at a fish market to the police. The conspirators are arrested and Wild Ginger enjoys celebrity wildly disproportionate to the pettiness of the crimes she uncovered. She is even introduced to Chairman Mao. Then toward the end of the novel, Evergreen is sentenced to death for blacking out the lights in Shanghai’s main stadium, impossible for someone sitting in the upper deck with a pair of plyers and a screwdriver. The only plausible explanations for these developments: opportunism and coverups by Chinese Communist Party officials.

Wild Ginger reveals peculiarities of the Chinese language that Westerners who have studied Chinese will appreciate. Because identical or virtually identical sounds can have differing meanings, Wild Ginger must explain the characters that stand for her name. “Wild Ginger” is “Wu Jiang.” “Wu as ‘wild,’ a luxuriant growth of weeds. . . . Jiang is ‘Ginger’.” (6) But “Wu Jiang” can also mean “a wasteland,” (7) as Wild Ginger’s tormentor Hot Pepper points out. Similarly, Maple explains how her name is made up of “the character Wind with a Wood on the left-hand side.” (18). Ironically, Hot Pepper (“Là Jiāo”) has a name virtually the same as “xião làjiāo,” little hot pepper, which means an oversexed girl or woman.

Min is also the author of Becoming Madame Mao (Mariner Books, 2000). A fictional narrative, it accurately portrays the life of Mao Zedong’s wife, the radical Jiang Qing, as well as Mao’s ruthless, idiosyncratic rule culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Min lived through those times, joining the Red Guards, being sent to a labor camp, and eventually working for Jiang Qing as a film actress. ( )

This was so messed up! Honestly, a generation lost, no thanks to Mao and his Army. Ugh! His 'philosophies' and 'army' (aka bullies) leave a distaste in my mouth! He's not so much of a leader than a dictator who crams his ideas down people's throats and has everyone waste their days doing nothing but propaganda stuff and starve.

The author was just that good at stirring up my fury against the early days of communist China...or maybe I am not a fan of communist China to begin with....anyways back to the actual review.

This book certainly makes you think and gives you a slightly different perspective of what it was to grow up during the Cultural Revolution as a teenager, especially from "classes" that weren't favoured by the Red Army.

Wild Ginger and Maple, are two outcasts in school, who are constantly picked on for not being Maoist enough...especially Wild Ginger due to her foreign background. As the two girls grow up, one tries very hard to shed her foreign roots and embrace the Maoist ideas wholeheartedly even though she is probably not that into it and pushed Evergreen and Maple to go along with it.

I didn't connect with any of the characters at all. I know we are suppose to sympathize with them, especially given how tough this time period was for this generation. But there wasn't really anything redeeming about them. Wild Ginger was too headstrong and manipulative into trying to be the model Maoist girl, whereas Maple was too passive and allowed Wild Ginger to keep a hold on her. ( )

I really liked the epigraph to this novel: "During a certain period of our lives, we possess youth. The rest we spend living in the memories of it."

The story itself was a look at young people in Communist China dealing with Chairman Mao's cultural revolution. This is a sad book. The power of a totalitarian regime to indoctrinate their youth is frightening. Considering that the author lived through this time in China there is probably a fair amount of truth to this. The Red Menace from China and Russia was the boogeyman when I was young. It is no wonder that the American government was so virulently anti-communist. That is my takeaway from this book. Teenage angst and the need to conform and rebel in youth is hard enough without brainwashing to this extreme.

Despite being a short novel the story unfortunately seemed to lose its drive and became repetitive. I feel it also lost energy towards the end and the climax wasn't handled well in my opinion.

Reading this I learned something about some unfortunate years in China's history. 2 1/2 stars ( )

This book was disappointing; however, it was entertaining enough and short enough that I didn’t feel as though I wasted my time. There were several problems – an undistinguished prose style, characters that were too simplistic, multiple unbelievable plot twists and too much heavy-handed justification of the main character’s actions.

The prose was by no means horrible, and it could be due to a poor translation. There were some awkward parts, but nothing too bad. It was very simple though – this may have been a conscious choice of the author, but I think it would have worked better had the story been told by the narrator when she was a child – instead, it is her remembering the events of her childhood. So the writing wasn't bad, it just didn't really add anything to the book. I'll tolerate nonexistent/melodramatic/somewhat stupid plots if the writing is strong enough, but that isn't the case here.

The narrator becomes friends with a girl named Wild Ginger, who is suspect because of her French father (this takes place during the Cultural Revolution). Later, Wild Ginger becomes a revolutionary heroine and she turns on her former friend. The plot moves along quickly, which does keep you reading because you want to know what happens next, but leaves some things quite undeveloped. Characters drop in when they are needed, then are never heard of again. For example, the incident that canonizes Wild Ginger comes when she defends a poor woman from a group that is cheating her out of her earnings. The woman is described as close to Wild Ginger in a few sentences, then after the incident she never reappears again. Other characters also exist only to fulfill plot functions and therefore come across as stereotypical. One of the men that Wild Ginger exposes is throughout only portrayed as greedy and evil – he was previously the character who destroyed her mother and for a simplistic reason – he was rejected by her in favor of Wild Ginger’s father. The other bad character is Hot Pepper, a schoolyard bully who also slavishly sucks up to Wild Ginger after her fortunes change. Again, the character is just bad and nothing else.

Wild Ginger herself does some things that are clearly unsympathetic, but the author provides overt justification. It was tiring after a while. Initially, she talks about how she rejects her father, but it has already been made clear that she loved him – was just accepting all the propaganda about Western = evil. Some of the worst things that she does are conveniently blamed on other characters, and most of her issues are just due to the repression and her excessive desire to be a true Maoist, Communist etc. The ending also clearly shows that she was good, despite all her actions.

There are some good parts in the book when it doesn’t focus on the plot twists and Wild Ginger justification. The narrator’s father cheerfully buys cheap books – to use as toilet paper, he says – then takes them home to read them. Her mother is shown using a communal dance practice, to which she is quite indifferent, to exchange gossip and recipes – incidents not of massive drama, but just people going about and coping as best they can. ( )