Mao’s elegy for his wife Kaihui first came to me in a Suzhou opera in the early sixties. I was a kid, but I saw my aunt’s eyes brimming with teas, so touched by the “masterpiece of revolutionary romanticism.”

After the Cultural Revolution, in the trial of the Gang of Four headed by Madam Mao, it was said that she had seduced Mao onto the nuptial bed with his wife Zizhen (after Kaihui) being away, who was then locked up in a Moscow mental house. It was not difficult to deduce in whispers that Mao committed bigamy. With all the blame laid on Madam Mao, the “white bone devil” who wreaked havoc with China, my uncle defended Mao as being only human, having surrendered to one moment of weakness.

Articles and books about Mao were studied in school, as before, as part of the Communist education. Then I noticed some dates in two separate articles. In one, Mao went to Jingjiang Mountains as a guerrilla fighter in 1927, leaving Kaihui behind in Changsha, and in another, Mao married Zizhen in the mountains in less than one year. No official publication records that Mao divorced Kaihui, or that Kaihui, still waiting in Changsha, was aware of his marriage with Zizhen. So Mao committed bigamy at least on two occasions, not including his first wife Luo through arranged marriage, which he annulled after having lived with her, not counting all the known and unknown affairs.
 
The discovery regarding Mao and Kaihui particularly saddened and shocked me. Since that Suzhou opera night, I had read the poem for hundreds of times, ever so reverently in my middle school years.  

Further reading produced a more stunning revelation. In 1930, when Mao led a siege against Changsha, putting Kaihui who remained there in danger, he could have moved her out of the city. No effort was made. After the siege failed, as anticipated, the Nationalist authorities retaliated and executed her. But why Mao did nothing for her? For a possible answer, he got rid of her that way because he could not afford to let the two women confront each other.

Mao was cold-blooded—not merely to his women. With his approval, Liu Shaoqi, Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, was killed like a naked, nameless rat in secret prison without trial or medical treatment. Liu was one of millions and millions of victims in the Party struggles and political movements launched by Mao.  

 In my renewed research of Mao’s poetry, I read a Tang dynasty line, After all, things said or unsaid of a great emperor. In the light of Wigensteinian paradigm, “What cannot be said has to pass over in silence.” Little wonder in “Ode to Snow,” after listing the famous emperors in Chinese history with their shortcoming, Mao declared, “To look for the really heroic, you have to count on today!” projecting himself as a greater emperor in a new age.

Thirty years passed after Mao’s death, like a “snap of fingers” in his poem. During my recent trips back to China, I have been witnessing a revival of interests in Mao, will souvenirs or knick-knack mass-manufactured in his ever-shining image. In Beijing, another Mao restaurant opens with its honorary manager being no other than Mao’s personal secretary in his last years, then a knockout with hardly any education, yet with such power that the politburo members groveled before her.  Outside the Mao’s Memorial Hall, tourists stand in a long line, waiting to catch a glimpse of his mummy in the crystal coffin. All this may not be simply explained as nostalgia or commercialization in the socialism of China’s characteristics.

I may not be in a position to judge a historic figure like Mao, not by something in his personal life, but the personal can be really separated from a person who is said to be embodying the greatness of the Party, and of the system, with his huge portrait still hung above the Tiananmen Gate at present?

My friend Yan sent me a biography of an actress’ daughter. While the fate of the actress was more tragic, being persecuted to death by Madam Mao for having “danced” with Mao, Yan chose to leave it in the background. I understand why. But if tragedies in connection with Mao are never to be written, what happened to the actress’ daughter can happen to the daughter’s daughter too.

So I put Inspector Chen to work again, in an investigation about what’s happening to such a daughter’s daughter, in China today. Like me, Chen makes no claim to being a historian, but for his job, he has to look into something sealed in official Chinese history archives—into the closet of horror: Mao.   


AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:

Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai, China. He published prize-winning poetry, translation and criticism in Chinese in the eighties, and became a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association. In 1988, he came to the United States as a Ford Foundation Fellow, started writing in English, and obtained a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Washington University. He is the author of Death of a Red Heroine (2000), A Loyal Character Dancer (2002), When Red Is Black (2004), A Case of Two Cities (2006), and Red Mandarin Dress (2007) in the critically acclaimed, award-winning Inspector Chen series; two poetry translations, Treasury of Chinese Love Poems (2003) and Evoking T'ang (2007); and his own poetry collection, Lines Around China  (2003). He lives in St. Louis with his wife and daughter.