Without Mao : KATHERINE, <i> By Anchee Min (Riverhead Books: $22.95; 256 pp.)</i>

In the world of hard fact and actual event, there is nothing to compare with the first-person account. Reading history or press reports, watching televised horror stories, we make our choice of news transmission and then just sit there, listening, watching, scanning statistics, studying charts and maps. But in the end the heart yearns for more, to know what it was like to be there, how the people looked, what the weather was. We want somebody to come back and tell us, “This is how it was. I was there and I saw and I know.”

When Anchee Min’s first book, the autobiographical “Red Azalea” was published last year, the desire to know the personal side of one period of cataclysmic and mostly unknown history was more than satisfied for many of us. Having been born in China in 1957, Min told us what it was like to grow up during the time of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. The book brought us news and--the hard part--touched our hearts. Like Anne Frank, Anchee Min has the amazing ability to see her own life within the framework of history and still provide meticulous emotional and sensory details. Like Maya Angelou and Lucy Grealey, she understands that an autobiographical narrator is a creation, the same as a fictional one, with the same requirements of tone, style, trustworthiness and controlled emotion.

Now, Anchee Min has set out to create a character of the imagination to narrate her second book, a novel entitled “Katherine.” Set in 1982 Shanghai, the story is told by a 29-year-old assembly-line worker whose name translates into English as Zebra.

At the novel’s opening, Zebra Wong has been given a chance to take off from her job at the electronics factory to attend the Foreign Language Institute and learn English. On even days she goes to school. Odd ones, she’s back on the assembly line, where she works with chemicals so toxic the government gives her milk coupons as compensation. Still, she feels lucky to be there, having been sent to Shanghai on loan from her regular job, setting off dynamite in a hellish rocky place called Elephant Fields.

1982, Zebra tells us, “was a year depression ran through the veins” of China. People are in a state of Mao hangover nobody has any idea how to cure. When she was 7 years old, Zebra won a school award, the certificate of which was made out to “Zebra Wong--Mao’s Good Child.” As a teen-ager, her greatest wish was to die for Mao--in Vietnam fighting Americans, on the Soviet border, anywhere. “We were,” she says, speaking of all Chinese school children of that time, “willing to do anything to honor Mao.” But by 1982, Mao has been dead for 13 years, taking what Zebra calls “every explanation” with him. People feel cheated and confused. With nobody to die for, and no concept of individual consciousness, how are they to live?

“Sixteen years after the revolution we had to ask ourselves why, when we had worked so hard, so happily, were we now so miserable? . . . We resented what Communism had done to our lives, but we couldn’t escape Mao. . . . The only truth we knew was that he had created us. . . . Although we were furious with our inheritance, we couldn’t change the fact that we would always be his children.”

Into this state of cultural confusion and malaise steps Katherine, a 36-year-old wild-headed American who has come to China to teach English and do research on her doctoral dissertation about Chinese women in the ‘80s. Katherine’s students--Zebra among them--are enthralled by their teacher: her loose, long auburn hair, her perfume and jewelry and bright red lipstick, the cartwheels she performs for them on a day trip to the mountains, her Walkman and Beatles tapes, her open sexuality and easy laugh. From Day 1, when she asks what it was like to grow up during the Cultural Revolution, Katherine sets off a small firestorm in the minds of her students:

“She said the words emotionally. It made us feel strange because we were taught to despise emotion.” That night, Zebra Wong lies in her bed and thinks about “Katherine and her red lipstick. The auburn-haired, lynx-eyed, snake-bodied, beautiful foreign devil. . . . “One of those imperialists I was taught to shoot.”

East meets West in a big way. By our standards, however, the visiting professor is a mess. A child of the sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n’ roll ‘60s, she’s been through a marriage, a divorce and a number of affairs. She’s brassy, warm, forthright. And she behaves as if she’s teaching in Santa Cruz instead of Shanghai. Mercilessly uninhibited, blind to the reasons for her students’ restraint, she proceeds to seduce them all, sexually and otherwise, male and female, brazenly and seemingly without a glance in the direction of cultural difference, not to mention manners.

Katherine is, of course, the exact opposite of Zebra Wong; all feeling, self-help expertise and spontaneity. She makes love outdoors with a student. She gets drunk with her class. There are other love affairs, betrayals, political machinations. Katherine wants to adopt a Chinese baby, which the totally smitten Zebra helps her do. When Katherine makes a shocking public appearance half-naked, her body painted front and back with peonies, she manages to get herself kicked out of China--without the baby.

Zebra’s a dandy, if formal, narrator, whom Min has given many fine utterances, but too many of them are repetitive. Through her narrator, Min keeps explaining to us what it was like to be Chinese, what it was like to grow up under Mao. And then she tells us again. Obviously, this is vital information, to establish the push-pull between cultures, but there’s too much of it. And Katherine’s just too off-the-wall in a very familiar way to garner much sympathy. If parody was Min’s intent, she hasn’t made that clear.

There’s much to be admired about “Katherine.” The story of Zebra’s life brings us news, just as the life of Anchee Min did in “Red Azalea.” But in the end, Min was her own best narrator, a creature of the imagination who happened to be herself.

“Katherine” is also available (abridged) read by Nancy Kwan on two audiocassettes from Dove Audio ($17.95).