From the labor camps of Mao's China to the streets of Chicago and California, Anchee Min's The Cooked Seed offers readers a rare, honest account of being a poor, non-English-speaking immigrant in the U.S. Constantly fearing deportation, Min worked five jobs to pay for her schooling, rent and food. She learned English by watching Sesame Street and reading Gone with the Wind, lived in run-down storage spaces and cold apartments for the cheap rent and suffered a rape in silence, all the while struggling to grasp the American dream and the longed-for green card. She "envied the [American] homeless," she writes; "they spoke English and had the right to work." Min lived with a man for years, forced him to marry her and eventually gave birth to a daughter, the one person who finally helped her connect to her new country.
Min's story is one of overwhelming personal strength amidst extreme adversity as well as self-induced deprivations and numbing self-doubt. Graphic, lyric and candid prose illuminates her struggles as she battles exhaustion and racism as a landlord of dilapidated apartment buildings in bad neighborhoods. However, love, both parental and spousal, recognition as an acclaimed author (Red Azalea) and the simple knowledge that she could make her own decisions, in her own house, eventually bring fulfillment and satisfaction. Her vivid, behind-the-scenes descriptions of Communist China and her life in the U.S. as a foreigner offer a gripping story of persistence and determination. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer