This was a great historical fiction book. I don’t always like historical fiction but enjoyed this one. Thanks for the review copy.

An as-yet unwritten part of history about the woman who served by Mao's side, explored with depth, brilliance, and empathy.

My Kirkus Review posted 3/15/22; in print 4/1/22
Hua’s ambitious second novel explores China’s Cultural Revolution through the eyes of an idealistic teenage girl.l.

On the day of Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Mei Xiang, a waitress in a San Francisco Chinatown restaurant, recalls the incredible journey that took her from a remote, impoverished village to the heart of political power in Communist China. When Secretary Sun, a Party official, arrives in the summer of 1965 to recruit young girls for mysterious duties in the capital, the patriotic 15-year-old Mei is so eager to become a model revolutionary that she subtly blackmails the village headman into guaranteeing her selection. Arriving at Beijing’s walled Lake Palaces, once home to emperors and now the Chairman’s residence, Mei soon learns from Teacher Fan that her job will be to dance with the Party elites. That first evening she attracts the Chairman’s attention, earning the enmity of another ambitious girl, Midnight Chang. The quick-witted Mei soon becomes the Chairman’s lover and confidante; when he recruits her to trick and undermine his political rival, she seizes the opportunity for revolutionary action with fervor. But her doubts grow as Mei observes the harrowing violence and brutality sweeping the country. Inspired by documentary footage of Mao surrounded by adoring young women and drawing on the life of his personal secretary, Zhang Yufeng, Hua vividly captures the cult of personality that enabled the manipulation of girls like Mei. But her narrative pace is surprisingly slow; most of the action takes place within the isolated confines of the Lake Palaces, where Mei obsesses over her rivalries with Midnight Chang and Madame, the Chairman’s wife. Mei’s narrow viewpoint also limits the novel’s emotional impact, as she remains detached from the traumatic events of the Cultural Revolution until the contrived climax.

Though disappointing in its execution, this well-researched book addresses a momentous period rarely covered in fiction.

I did not finish this book. It felt like an overwrought speculative drama with limited historical research backing it.

3.4 stars rounded down to 3 stars.*

I am finally making my way through the titles that had fallen off my main TBR page and were lost to my attention. Forbidden City is the story of a young girl raised in rural communist China in the 1950s and 1960s. She manages to get herself aligned with a troupe of young girls hand selected to entertain the Chairman and his soldiers, guards, and cronies.

As the girls compete to be the most committed to the party, the most selfless, the most communist, they go from being dancers to Mao's selected special few. Mei finds herself Mao's constant companion, among the trusted few and though he is old and ailing, she commits to going undercover to help the cause.

The story is fascinating and very sad.

I enjoyed the book and will look for more from this author.

[3.5/5 stars]

On the eve of China's Cultural Revolution and her sixteenth birthday, Mei Xiang dreams of becoming a model revolutionary. When the Communist Party recruits girls for a mysterious duty in the capital, she sees an opportunity but learns that her job is to dance with the Party elites. Mei is ambitious and desires more.

The story narrates plenty of the old stereotype about Chinese women in 1960s China- submissive, often quiet/passive and have no voice. Stricken by famine during Great Leap Forward, Mei is a peasant girl swept into the patriotism, who challenges "being a means to an end" and suffers the consequences. I thought that her characterization is fleshed out and realistic. Her journey is, at the same time, depressing and hopeful.

Hua exposes an intimate portrayal of one of the world's most powerful and least understood leaders - Chairman Mao. A peasant turned revolutionary, the story paints him as authoritarian as he should be, but with a touch of humanity and flaws. One is allowed to dive deeper into the Cultural Revolution - the patriotism, blind devotion and purpose; and the extent of the student involvement. It takes one third for something to effectively happen and the story drags in certain parts, yet it is interesting to see how Mei and others would take part in the course of Cultural Revolution, and her role was the main driving force for me to keep reading.

The author raises interesting questions about power, manipulation and memory left behind in a provocative way. I thought that this book was disturbing/heavy in some scenes and one might be bothered by the sexual content.

Epitome of slow burn, FORBIDDEN CITY is an insightful read that I overall found satisfaction (towards the end). I recommend if you'd like to learn more about Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong.

I have a wonderful conversation with Vanessa Hua about this fascinating book. Unfortunately the audio recording failed and we were unable to produce a podcast of the interview. No links to share.

I was a big fan of A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua, so I was delighted to receive a copy of Forbidden City.

Reading about Communist China under the Mao regime is an interesting concept. I am going to look forward to reading more from this author.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me. All thoughts are my own.

4 stars for an excellent historical fiction book, set during the Cultural Revolution in 1966 China. The narrator is a 16 year old girl who is chosen to join a Beijing dance troupe. Chairman Mao dances with the girls and beds many of them. Mei Xiang, Third Daughter,comes from a rural village. She helps Mao start the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, all to demonstrate his power. She realizes that Mao Zedong has started a terrible movement.
Recommended to historical fiction fans. The author is a journalist who has traveled to China and interviewed survivors of the Cultural Revolution.
#ForbiddenCity #NetGalley.
Thanks to Ballantine Books for sending me this eARC through NetGalley.

Mei Xiang leaves her poor village to become part of Chairman Mao’s dance troupe. With her patriotism, she becomes his lover, confidante, and protégée. It is the beginning of a life that will test her beliefs and personal strength. Mei quickly becomes victim to not only Mao’s sexual predilection for underage virgins but also his political schemes. Later when Mai grows disillusioned and runs from the capitol after publicly betraying Mao, she learns of just how much women revolutionaries have to endure. They have their stories rewritten. She learns ever more about what happens to these women. She reflects that even more insidious than having one’s life rewritten, perhaps, is complete erasure. When one woman abruptly disappears who was a national hero, the Chairman doesn’t speak of her again. What happened to that woman? Has she been erased?

The author has written the story of women whose lives were essentially erased by the Cultural Revolution in China. This story made me think that America is not so far from being like China’s revolution “due to our hate crimes and political division” as mentioned in the author’s note. This is a story that makes one think about our present lives. This is a well-researched book that addresses a momentous period seldom covered in fiction.

This is another example of me requesting a book solely on the cover- that cover is AMAZING.

Luckily, the book is also great! The author interviewed survivors of the Cultural Revolution, and this historical fiction novel shows that the material was in great hands. There is some disturbing content, so please research content warnings- but this is a book that I learned a lot from and will absolutely recommend.

Thanks so much for the review copy!

When Mei is selected to go to the capital to serve the Party, she doesn't imagine that it will lead her to the bed of the Chairman himself and bring her closer to her goal of becoming a revolutionary hero - if she can manage to not become disillusioned.

The only book I'd read set in this period of Chinese history before was Jung Chang's Wild Swans. I loved that book, but I was curious to see the perspective that fiction could bring to both the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong.

The best part of this book was the character of Mei. The author wrote that she wanted to tell the story of the inner circle of the Communist Party at this time through the eyes of someone on the sidelines, and I thought she succeeded. It was interesting to get this up close and personal view of these historical figures, especially as Mei progressed from being fully indoctrinated to becoming disillusioned about the Chairman. She was a character I didn't always like, but you couldn't help but root for her to better her lot in life.

However, I found the plot sort of dragged, especially once Mei and Mao left the capital. I also never became too invested in the political plot, as I felt that Mei gave undue weight to her fairly minimal involvement in the things that were happening. I didn't really feel the intensity of her rivalry with Midnight Chang or the Chairman's wife either. And I felt that the ending kind of just petered out without a real sense of resolution.

Ultimately, I liked the first half of the book better than the second. But it was still an interesting read in how it gave me an insight into the world of China in the 1960s.

Loosely based on Chairman Mao's proclivity for young women, Forbidden City tells the fictional story of a young peasant girl who becomes a prominent figure in the life of one of the most powerful rulers of all time. Mei joins a dance troupe, a group of young women who are responsible for entertaining the highest governing officials and acquiescing to the desires of the Chairman.

We follow the lives of these women who have very little and want to do what they can to make a name and a life for themselves. We witness the development of group mentalities and denunciations, which became a huge part of the terror promulgated during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Although it was fascinating to get an in-depth (albeit fictionalized) account of Mao's personal life, the book started to lose me as the story went on.

DNF @ 50%

Forbidden City is set in China in the mid -1960's right before the start of the Cultural Revolution.
We follow Mei, a fifteen year old girl living in rural China who becomes Mao's lover and trusted confidant.

I was captivated by the story from the onset. The story is well researched and addresses a period in history that is rarely covered in historical fiction. I can't help but to see the parallels between what's going on in our country today and the depiction of China during this time - narcissistic leader, indoctrination, and the way women are treated.

Historical fiction that takes place during China's cultural revolution about a teenage girl recruited into a dance troupe for the VIPs in the capital. Knowing it will help her starving family if they have one less mouth to feed, she jumps at the chance and uses the opportunity to meet the Chairman. She is at first honored by his attention and anxious to show her loyalty and help ignite the spark with young people but as the revolution becomes more and more violent, she begins to see things as they really are. This was interesting look at the Chairman and the revolution through the eyes of an innocent girl--however, it read very YA-ish with mostly one-dimensional characters.

There wasn’t anything I particularly disliked about this book, but I just didn’t connect to it. The characters were missing something, and the plot was fine but seemed to drag in places. Not a bad book by any means, I think it just wasn’t for me.

Vanessa Hua did an excellent job of creating a story that could have happened during a real time in history. Before reading this, I knew little to no real details about Mao and his rise to power in Communist China. From chapter 1 forward, my stomach clenched because based on the little bit that I did know, I was guessing what the trajectory would be for Mei. Though this story is absolutely heartbreaking, it also is an important one yo read so that we remember what people had to endure. I had to stop and research quotes few times, but that just made the book that more interesting.

https://localnewsmatters.org/2022/06/29/vanessa-hua-ponders-the-power-of-teenage-girls-amid-chinas-cultural-revolution-in-forbidden-city/

Something true: San Francisco is a place of reinvention. Breaching the peninsula comes with the ability to abandon who you were across the bay, across the ocean, across the world. For Mei Xiang, the protagonist of Bay Area author and journalist Vanessa Hua’s second novel, “Forbidden City,” a waitressing job in San Francisco’s Chinatown provides her the physical and emotional distance to recount her adolescent life in China amidst the Cultural Revolution in the final years of Chairman Mao Zedong’s life. Here, in Hua’s alternative universe, he’s called only “The Chairman,” and the close relationship Mei had not only to him, but also to his ideals for a modern China, molds her future.

But while San Francisco is Mei’s present, the book is almost entirely her past. She is the youngest of three daughters in a peasant family of starving farmers, and because of the timing of her birth in 1949 and Mao’s Great Leap Forward, she is the only one in her family who can read. She is also, at least initially, a believer in The Chairman and the progress he’s forced onto the country; while she knows many of the stories that trickle down to the villages are outdated and embellished, she nonetheless repeats the rumors that said “he no longer needed to s—, that he ate and drank nothing, that he was pure as jade and could grant our wishes.” On the cusp of 16, she is already poised to blackmail her neighbors for defying cultural norms.

Momentum begins when the Chinese government picks her for an opportunity to join a dance troupe in the “Forbidden City” aka Beijing’s Imperial Palace complex, now repurposed for the revolution. While the lure of proximity to The Chairman and veneration for her family sparkles, it also means she gets to eat.

But upon arriving at her new home at the repurposed Lake Palaces, she must learn the dynamics of this community of fellow poor girls plucked from obscurity to serve the whims of Party officials, including strategizing the best way to lose their virginities. Within this new ecosystem are Midnight Chang, Busy Shan and Dolly Yu, fellow teenagers grappling with defining their personhood in a time where women were “not even a footnote,” Hua says.

“From the beginning, I imagined there to be a retrospective narrator, 10 years after the events of the Cultural Revolution; she’s in San Francisco Chinatown by then,” she continues. “I felt that was really important, because I wanted to have a novel that, on one hand, took us into her youthful idealism, but also to be able to show her dawning disillusionment, and … you can only really get that with a retrospective narrator.”

Mei and her story have lived with Hua for more than a decade; it was the first novel she wrote — she began writing and researching it in 2007 — but she would not be able to bring it to print until after her publishing debut, the 2016 short story collection “Deceit and Other Possibilities,” begot a two-book deal. Her bestselling debut novel, “A River of Stars,” set in a relatively modern San Francisco Chinatown, was published in 2018. Life inevitably bleeds onto the page.

“Fourteen years is almost a third of my life. In that time, I went through huge transformations, personally,” Hua says. “But we also saw the rise of demagoguery, the #MeToo movement, the effects of isolation from the pandemic, the breakdown of social connections. What I came to realize about historical fiction is, not only does it give us a window into another time and place, but it helps us understand our own present in a new way, and that the past is never as distant as it seems.”

It all started with a photograph, which Hua saw back in 2007, of an aging Mao surrounded by girls at the height of their beauty and ingenuity. These girls were his concubines, his cheerleaders and clerks: But who were they, really? How had they served Mao and his cause in invisible ways? Hua interviewed women in China who were migrating to big cities from obscure villages, as well as older women who might have witnessed tribulations like Mei’s at the time. She was struck by how the most innocuous characters living under the radar in Chinatown had entire worlds buried inside them.

What Mei uses to demarcate herself from the pack quickly is not her dancing, but a shrewd eye for behavior and opportunities for ascension. Holding The Chairman’s attention is not enough; she must keep him endeared to her, if not by her beauty and intellectual prowess, then her strategy and affinity for deception. As she weathers what readers in 2022 call rape and a slanted political education from The Chairman, a new role emerges for her: as an instrument to humiliate “The President,” Chiang Kai-shek.

Soon Mei becomes, as Hua says another journalist pointed out, an Eliza Doolittle for The Chairman and one of his proteges, the young and opaque Secretary Sun. But she learns far more under their tutelage than refining her handwriting and rural accent. What she comes to realize, among the hours of drinking and studying and plotting with a man succumbing to the yet unnamed Parkinson’s disease, is that The Chairman is still just a man, and she will never be more than her usefulness to him.

Hua’s choice to refer to The Chairman by title only, and to depict his aging body sweating and trembling while he has sex with Mei, was a form of mortalization, of the vulnerability of the body.

“For Mei, and for me, it’s the fact of his body,” Hua says. “The visceral is how you raise that 2D character into 3D; to go beyond the replicable, recognizable image is to really consider him as a body moving through space, whether that’s swimming at the pool or out on the dance floor. It was really through writing that his character came about, through the same way that Mei understands him, through the five senses.”

Mei is also hyperaware of her own body: how it feels to be touched by the most important man in China, the strain of learning dances for the entertainment of others, the pangs of childhood malnutrition, the threat of pregnancy as an unwed teenager. She has learned how her body may be used, by her parents as a worker, by the government as a dancer and concubine, and as a mother. But it isn’t until she decides to escape that her body gets to be hers, though that will come with its own grief.

Like hundreds of millions across China, Hua’s protagonist deferred to the man whose portrait looked down on them as they ate as the embodiment of goodness and progress. But even though she was born into propaganda, it can be hard at times to root for Mei. She becomes excellent at lying, succumbs to groupthink and maneuvers among her peers motivated by jealousy and a desire to prove her superiority. While she’s not without instincts, her naivety is the point: It can be shaped, by the “Little Red Book,” by speeches, by subterfuge. She is technically the same age as the People’s Republic, and Hua hopes that readers see that they’re “both going through their adolescence in a way.”

The most compelling dynamic throughout Mei’s brief but roiling time at The Chairman’s side is with Secretary Sun. Through him, both the Party’s darkest methods and highest aspirations wash over Mei, and in return, he listens to her. What occurs between them, in a rare moment of vulnerability, effectively seals Mei’s yearslong journey to the Bay Area. What happens to Secretary Sun, as what became of Mei’s family, is lost to the consequences of history.

Teenagers are so sure of their realities, of their abilities to see what the older generations won’t or simply can’t. After a couple hundred pages and two charged scenes with both The Chairman and Secretary Sun, Mei finally makes a choice, a dangerous one, but one with which she finally gets to embrace her own opinions and follow her own ethics. In San Francisco, she is not yet 30, yet her narration bears the resignation of someone uninterested in further reinvention. It’s this looming span of life left to her that begs the question: What now?

“To her, I don’t think any happy ending is guaranteed,” Hua says. “She is a survivor; survival comes at a cost. What does it mean for someone to have survived this as a teenager, but still only be in her 20s? And how will that shape the rest of her life? I want the best for her, but I also know that nothing is going to get wrapped up neatly for her.”

The author did such a great job on this book. It was captivating and riveting the whole time. I can't wait to to read more of their work. The characters were well developed and it was a great plot.

We know from the start that Mei is more than just a country girl when she uses her knowledge of the village headman's assignation to get him to choose her for a special folk dance troupe for Communist Party elites. She's starry-eyed and flirty, and she soon draws the notice of Mao himself and becomes his lover. Mei sees herself as a revolutionary heroine, but she also soon sees the holes in the system, the luxury enjoyed by elites while people in the country starve.

This novel reminded me a great deal of Anchee Min's "Red Azalea," except that Anchee was chosen to train as an actress. "Forbidden City" is a slower, tougher, read, and the view of Mao-era abuses of young girls is bleak in both books.