Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (19 page)

“He now is one of the masses,” the official said, “and he can enjoy all the rights and duties of other citizens” The former rightist made a short speech politely thanking the Party and the people for being so patient and giving him a way to redemption. “In the last half of my life that remains, I will dedicate myself to serving the people,” he said. And that was that. Everyone considered him lucky to be pardoned.

At another meeting, a five-woman team from Beijing lectured us on the need for population control. As the team began reciting Mao quotations, my bored classmates chatted and giggled. Suddenly, the women whipped out charts with full-color illustrations of the female reproductive organs and began talking about vaginas and wombs. Then they flipped to a huge drawing of a penis and testicles. The male students stared at the ground. The female students buried their burning faces in their laps. Only Fragrance kept her head high. “I looked at everything,” she told me proudly.

In early May, Party Secretary Pan called a meeting to sum up the ideological fruits of our first two months of hard labor. He scheduled me to speak for the first time. “Everyone warned me how terrible the conditions would be,” I said. “They said I would never
xi guari
. After I got here, I began to understand who I really was. I have been able to have a university education, music lessons and the leisure time to read partly because my father exploits the workers at his restaurant in Montreal.” At that point, I was overcome with guilt. My eyes welled up with tears. Mortified, I tried to collect myself, but forgot most of my speech.

The next day, a PLA classmate asked in a kindly tone, “Why did you cry last night?” I told him I felt terrible about my good life.

“The most important thing is to remember that slaves create history,” he said, quoting Marx. “The working class created the
university where you study” He clucked sympathetically when I said I hated being part of the capitalist class. Neither of us had any idea that in less than five years everyone in China would be dying to get
into
the capitalist class.

My favorite classmate Future Gu, the philatelist
.
Photo: Jan Wong

My geisha classmates at the Great Wall, Center (in straw hat) and Pearl
.

T
hat summer, Chairman Mao summoned to his side two of my classmates from Big Joy Farm. Ying Shuizhu (Pearl Ying) and Feng Jizhong (Center Feng) were southern beauties from Hangzhou, a place Marco Polo described as “the greatest city which may be found in the world, where so many pleasures may be found that one fancies himself to be in Paradise.”

Pearl was a contralto with a golden voice and a curvaceous figure. Center was a petite, fragile beauty who played the
guzheng
, or Chinese zither. They were conspicuous among my classmates because they were a decade older and married. I didn’t know that Mao had personally intervened to get them into Beijing University. In the summer of 1975, when Pearl and Center disappeared from Big Joy, Mao was eighty-two years old. He had just been operated on for a cataract, and his health was declining rapidly. In a year, he would be dead.

The Great Helmsman had been seeing them secretly for years. They were his geishas in the classical Japanese sense, accomplished professional entertainers. Center, for instance, was a graduate of the prestigious Zhejiang Provincial Music Academy. Were sexual favors part of the equation? As China’s last emperor, Mao could have had
anyone he wanted. But as far as people knew, the chairman’s private life was above reproach. Not even Pearl and Center knew that relations with his third wife, Jiang Qing, had been deteriorating for years. Mao already had a mistress, Zhang Yufeng (Jade Phoenix Zhang), fifty-one years his junior. The masses would learn of her existence only after Mao’s funeral, when a list of his personal staff was published.

A primary-school drop-out, Jade Phoenix was fourteen when she began working on the railroad in her hometown of Peony River, a small city less than a hundred miles from the Soviet border. At sixteen, she became an attendant on Mao’s private railcar. Nine years later, in 1969, when she was already married and the mother of a baby girl, she joined Mao’s personal staff in Zhongnanhai, the vermilion-walled former imperial palace in Beijing. In 1974, Mao asked the Central Committee to appoint Jade Phoenix his confidential secretary, in charge of his personal documents.

By then Mao had Lou Gehrig’s disease, a fatal motor-neuron condition. Could he have remained sexually potent into his seventies and eighties? In 1973, when Mao was eighty and Jade Phoenix gave birth to a second daughter, people whispered that it was Mao’s. “By some accounts,” Harrison Salisbury wrote in his book
The New Emperors
, Mao liked to fill his indoor pool with “bevies of unclad young women.” In
The Private Life of Chairman Mao
, Mao’s doctor described orgies and harems. But if these accounts were true, where are all the kiss-and-tell stories? And where are all the illegitimate Mao babies? In the 1990s, Jade Phoenix was the only one petitioning to get her two daughters recognized as Mao’s children, and that’s if you believe a certain Hong Kong magazine. Mao’s doctor asserted that he was sterile in later life. To get a sperm sample, however, Dr. Li Zhisui conducted a rectal examination and based his diagnosis on a single test from that. “His prostate was small and soft. I massaged it to extract the secretion for laboratory tests,” he wrote.

Although Dr. Li wrote about Jade Phoenix, nowhere in his 682-page biography did he mention Pearl or Center, even though they both saw Mao regularly over a period of nine years. More than a decade after the chairman’s death, when rumors surfaced about his wild sex life, Pearl and Center denied to other classmates that they
ever slept with Mao. Everyone believed them, and so did I. But, then, I always believed everyone.

Pearl and Center always struck me as prim young women who loved Mao in the same worshipful way that millions of other Chinese adored the Great Helmsman. They first met him in 1967 in Hangzhou, the lakeside capital of Zhejiang province in the south. At least once a year, the Chairman would arrive at his private retreat, Liu Manor, the former lakefront residence of a wealthy tea merchant. At this Chinese Camp David, Mao composed poetry, gazed at the mist, held meetings and plotted strategy When he wanted to relax, the Zhejiang Provincial Army Cultural Troupe staged private concerts. After one command performance, the seventy-four-year-old chairman sent word that he wanted to see the contralto and the zither player in his quarters. Still clad in their baggy green army uniforms, Pearl and Center poured tea and chatted shyly with the Chairman. Pearl had a lovely smile. Center had a fine bone structure, dewy skin and hair like black silk. After that meeting, they often performed for Mao. When the Great Helmsman held dance parties, they were his favored partners. Nor were they the only young women to catch his eye. One evening when another regular failed to appear, Mao asked after her.

“She’s gotten into trouble,” said an aide hastily, stepping forward.

“What do you mean?” Mao asked with concern.

“She was criticized and punished,” the aide said.

“What happened?” said Mao.

The aide hesitated. “She got pregnant before marriage. So she was forced to go to a village for hard labor.”

Mao exploded. “Hw
nao!”
(“Bullshit!”) he yelled, as Pearl and Center listened, more fascinated than frightened. “She’s pregnant so you make her do hard labor? Get her back at once. Say that I said so.”

The terrified aide apologized, but Mao was not mollified. “Are you that clean yourself? Confucius –
he
was an illegitimate child,” he raged, referring to lore that the ancient Chinese sage was the fruit of his father’s roll in the hay with a servant girl.

Pearl and Center became Mao’s frequent companions whenever he was in Hangzhou. They often sat quietly with him while
he worked. As supreme leader, Mao thought nothing of overriding central government decisions. He was perusing a stack of documents when a Chinese proposal to build a railroad from Tanzania to Zambia caught his eye one day. He scanned it and looked up at Pearl.

“Shouldn’t we give more to our African brothers?”

Pearl was startled. “How should I know?” she blurted out.

Mao stared at the ceiling for a moment, then crossed out the amount. He scribbled a note in the margin, doubling the size of the aid.

In 1973, Pearl and Center were demobilized and assigned to dull factory jobs. Both yearned to go to college, but they were already married with children. The next time Mao visited Hangzhou, he asked how they liked being workers.

Pearl, a Party member, took a deep breath. “We love being workers and taking part in production, but we would really like to go to university,” she said.

“Studying is a good thing,” Mao said approvingly in his thick Hunan accent. “Let me see if I can’t open a back door for you. I’ll talk to Comrade Dongxing.” Mao’s former bodyguard, General Wang Dongxing, was director of the Central Committee General Office, a powerful position akin to chief of staff. Among his many responsibilities, which included summoning Center and Pearl whenever Mao wanted to see them, he also headed 8341, the elite PLA palace guard that Mao had sent into Beijing University to run it during the Cultural Revolution.

“What you say might not count later. Put it in writing,” Pearl said boldly.

The Chairman laughed, but did as she asked. “It’s good to study at Beijing University for three years,” Mao scrawled. “Arts. I’ll send you there. If you don’t go now, it will be too late. Go see Deputy Chief Zhang today. I will pay your tuition.” The handwritten note is now in the Communist Party Central Archives.

The summer of 1975 was a time of growing tension in China. As Mao’s health declined, the power struggle intensified. He had become incoherent to everyone except Jade Phoenix and two female aides, Nancy Tang, his English-language interpreter, and
Wang Hairong, his grandniece. Knowing time was short, Deng Xiaoping frantically reorganized the PLA, restructured basic industries and sped up the political rehabilitation of thousands of Party officials purged during the Cultural Revolution. Madame Mao retaliated by launching a thinly veiled attack on Deng’s main backer, Premier Zhou Enlai.

One evening, Mao asked General Wang Dongxing to summon Pearl and Center from Big Joy Farm. Mao wanted to listen to music after a particularly grueling meeting. When my classmates arrived at Zhongnanhai, they found Jade Phoenix, Deng Xiaoping and several Chinese leaders still there. Center performed the zither. Then she and Pearl posed with Mao and Deng for photographs in color, a rarity in those days. Although Mao could no longer stand without aid, his mind was still alert. He was curious to hear about the Revolution in Education.

“How’s it going at Big Joy?” Mao asked.

“We eat
wo tou
there,” said Pearl. Mao laughed. Only prisoners and poor peasants ate those baseball-sized cones of cornmeal.

Mao wanted my classmates to stay on, so Director Wang installed them in a guest house run by the Central Committee General Office. Back at Big Joy, all we knew was that Pearl and Center had left for “health reasons.” Pearl soon went back to Hangzhou because she really was ailing. Center stayed on alone, spending most of June and July waiting for summonses to Mao’s side.

“What is work?” Mao said. “Work is struggle.” We took this quotation to heart. The school canceled our summer vacation as our teachers drove us to do more and more hard labor. On June 10, we started our Three Struggles of the Summer: harvesting wheat, rebuilding our land into paddy fields and transplanting rice. Time was of the essence. The later we planted the rice seedlings, the lower the yield. That first morning, we rose when the sky was still dusted with stars and marched to our fields. We were armed with primitive sickles, and it seemed frighteningly easy to lop off a finger in the dark. But by noon we had finished harvesting forty
mu
of wheat, about the area of six football fields, without serious injury. After a quick lunch, we hauled the wheat to our basketball court. One
group fed the wheat into an electric thresher while another flung the grain into the air with shovels to separate the wheat from the chaff. I joined a third group crawling across the fields on our hands and knees, gleaning the last bits of precious grain.