Life in a Chinese Opera : RED AZALEA, <i> By Anchee Min (Pantheon: $22; 306 pp.)</i>

At home, Anchee Min’s family was squeezed into two rooms shared with two other Shanghai families. From the age of 5, Min writes, she had to be an adult, tending her three younger siblings, Blooming, Coral and Space Conqueror--her father combined a private passion for astronomy with a public regard for Maoist oratory--until her parents got home late at night. Min’s mother would arrive in a near faint from her grueling factory job, and the four little children had to revive her with wet cloths and back rubs.

It was the early 1960s. Min’s formerly middle-class family struggled in poverty and the din and watchfulness of the Cultural Revolution. Her mother tended to misstep. As a teacher she was had up by her colleagues for using the wrong ideogram in a poster and turning its message from “Long Long Life to Mao” to “No No Life for Mao.” Her apology was accepted but she was banished to factory work when one of the squares of newspaper she used at stool was vigilantly found to contain a photograph of the leader.

As for Min, like many bright and nervy children she flew like the sparks, upward. If you were a brilliant student, assiduously applied yourself to the slogans and parables of Maoism, and were anxious to shine, you would. “I was raised on the teachings of Mao and on the operas of Madam Mao, Comrade Jiang Ching,” Min writes at the start of her memoir.

Opera--Jiang Ching’s were ideological epics--is the key to Min’s memory of growing up, as well as to the distinctive style and tone of her book. “We were sure that we were making red dots on the world’s map,” she writes in a phrase comically reminiscent of George Bush’s points of light. “Not for a day did I not feel heroic. I was the opera.” Her part was to be a little Red Guard and a polished apple to her political teachers.

As with operatic arias, the important thing was to sing well. Then Min discovered that the arias contained real words and that words could kill. Her most-loved teacher--she recited classical poetry and demonstrated the meaning of infinity by holding out her arms, cross-like--was denounced as a spy. Min was named to take part in the public denunciation. Her description of the persuasion and pressures put on a 13-year-old girl is agonizing. When the teacher is kicked and abused, refuses to confess and gently questions Min, the distraught child screams: “Mama, Papa, where are you?” A moment later, hysterical, she shrieks out her assigned accusation. Years afterward, she apologizes to the old woman, who denies remembering her.

Min’s book is in three parts. The first, brief and stunning, tells of her life until she is 17. The second, written more roughly but with great effect, describes her arduous assignment to work on a collective farm on the southeast coast. In the third, she is taken from the farm to compete as one of five finalists for a film role tailored to fit new ideological lines set out by Jiang Ching. Mao’s wife, herself a former actress, was at the head of a hard-line faction jockeying for power, and the film was to be one of her weapons.

Here, Min lets her writing puff up into the operatic style that serves as her image of China in the ‘70s. The book’s last part is by far its weakest. At the film school, Min is soon relegated to menial chores by officials who favor another candidate. Sitting in a dark stairwell after mopping the stage, she is approached by a sinuously beautiful man who comforts her and gives her egg rolls. He turns out to be a supremely powerful figure--known only as the Supervisor--who is Jiang Ching’s right-hand man for the arts, and perhaps her lover.

He treats Min with alternating tenderness and coldness, makes love to her, has her brought to his magnificent mansion in Peking and gives her the coveted role of Red Azalea in a film that is intended to represent Jiang Ching’s life. However, Mao dies, Jiang Ching and the Supervisor fall, and Min is back to mopping floors. The book ends there; years later she will emigrate to the United States.

Presumably the story is true but the telling is garishly unconvincing, an uneasy mix of “Cinderella” and “The Story of O.” “Pleasure swept over our flesh,” Min writes steamily. The Supervisor stares into her eyes and demands to see in them “1,000,000 bulls rushing downhill with their tails on fire.”

Min has written the book in English, and even in the first two parts the style can be awkward. Mostly she writes long strings of short declarative sentences--a rhythm, perhaps, brought over from Chinese--and this produces a cumulative small hammering. Yet time and again she makes a stranger’s discovery, a glowing image or phrase that no native English-speaker would think of.

Such phrases light up the strangely affecting world of the Red Fire Farm, where 200,000 workers brought from the cities work 16-hour days, undergo constant haranguing by the cadres and sleep packed together in earth-floored huts, their only privacy the space under their mosquito netting: “a grave with a little spoiled air.”

Min conveys the hardship and claustrophobia, but also the passions. She charts the unpredictable workings of exhilaration, exhaustion and despair. There is a splendid portrait of Yan, the section leader: big, fierce and vulnerable. Min and she become lovers; later Yan timidly confesses her liking for a male cadre, and Min helps her write steamy love-letters that end up arousing them both. There is the fanatical, humorless Lu who covets Yan’s job, yet Min writes of her in a way that captures our understanding if not sympathy. Through the horror of Maoism she is able to suggest the awful previous hopelessness that made so many Chinese welcome and administer it. She can give fanaticism a human face, which is not the same as embellishing it.

Despite her unworkable final section, Min’s is a distinct and moving voice speaking out of a caldron of history. When, full of zeal, she goes to cancel her Shanghai residency prior to being trucked off to the farm, she has a premonition of the chill abstraction that lies beyond the fervor: “That afternoon I felt like a bare egg laid on a rock.” Her family come down to see her off; she sits in the truck with the other conscripts. The cadres organize a sing-along, trying for exultation.

“My family stood in front of me, as if taking a dull picture,” Min writes. “It was a picture of sadness, a picture of never the same. I was out of the picture. . . . We began to sing with Lu. Our voices were dry and weak like old sick farm cows. Lu waved her arms hard, trying to speed up the singing. People paid no attention to her. It was a moment when memory takes root. The moment youth began to fade. I stared at my parents who stood like frosted eggplants--with heads hanging weakly in front of their chests. My tears welled up. I sang loudly.”