She grabbed my hand and pressed it to her chest. She asked me to feel her heart. In the hammering of her heartbeat, the rising and falling of her chest, I saw a city of chaos. A mythical force drew me toward her. I felt the blazing of a fire rise inside me. Yan was wearing a thin shirt with a bra under it. The shirt was the color of roots. The bra was plain white. As she lazily stretched her body, my heart raged....Lips slightly parted. I could not bear it, the way she looked at me, like water penetrating rocks. Passion overflowed in her eyes...She held me closer. Her breasts pressed against my shoulder...she was a rice shoot in a summer of drought.

And so though Yan is politically and socially more mature than Min (Yan was a communist party secretary), Min is more mature sensually, and provides a much-needed sexual education for Yan; and in the meantime, each helps the other through the trying times of the madness of the brutal revolution and brainwashing. The relationship is a humanizing bond for both of them, and their passionate relationship juxtaposed with the world outside is very tender and poignant for the reader. "She pulled my fingers to unbutton her bra," Min writes (129), in her style of short, understated sentences. "The moment I touched her breasts, I felt a sweet shock. My heart beat disorderly. A wild horse broke off its reins...there was a gale mixed with thunder inside of me."

Her use of metaphors and similes, in the erotic parts of her book and in the brutal "reality side," are highly effective: "I was a shell with its pearl missing," she wrote (159); "Four young women stepped out one after another like snowflakes dancing in the air" (165); "The clock in the living room sounded like a slow heartbeat" (216); "We went into the shadow of the trees where the lights were like the eyes of ghosts" (258). "His lips were tender. Tender like naked lichee fruit. My heart drank its sticky...

And stories contain sub-plots about relationships. Teachers who present literature to students in a thorough and didactic form always stress that there is much to learn about how individuals interact within the structure of a novel.
There is great value in a reader understanding why an author creates certain dynamics within the book's human interactions. If a reader does not wonder why certain relationships happen the way they do, that reader is missing out on an opportunity to see life through the plot of a book. Stories are always based on real life situations, and this one in particular has so many fascinating twists and turns because it is based on the life of Anchee Min.

Meanwhile, the most important relationship in this book is between Min and Yan; and their relationship is not just based on altruistic love, but on a shared need, a utility that each finds in the bonding. In a way they are hiding from the harshness of the communist life they both lead; in another way, they have formed a companionship that is based not just on lust, but on trust, and they also are locked closer together through their mutual distrust and loathing of their shared enemy, Lu.

They, after all, are two political animals, who have learned a lot through their combined brainpower and cunning; Yan invests her political clout, and Min invests her knowledge of love, sex, and of how to write a letter. Both make investments, and both get rewards. And that, in hindsight, is a more powerful outcome than anything about the communist "revolution" which so soaked in blood and cruelty.

Reference

Min, Anchee. Red Azalea. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.