Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. During the Cultural Revolution, she was ordered by Communist officials to denounce Pearl Buck as an American imperialist. At seventeen, she was sent to a labor collective, where a talent scout for Madame Mao's Shanghai Film Studio recruited her to work as a movie actress. Min moved to the United States in 1984. Her first book, the memoir Red Azalea, became an international bestseller and was published in twenty countries.