UNLIKE MAO, WHO HAS LITTLE TASTE for art and architecture, Madame Mao Jiang Ching finds herself touched by the Forbidden City, especially its Summer Palace. Her favorite spot is the Sea of Magnolia Fragrance, its forest of flowers behind the Hall of Happiness in Longevity. The plants were transplanted from southern China two centuries ago. During its blooming season Madame Mao spends hours wandering in what she calls "the pink clouds." The other spot is the Peony Terrace, built in 1903 by the old empress dowager. The flower beds are made of terraced carved rock.
In the winter, "Strolling through a picture scroll" becomes her favorite activity. She orders the guards and servants to make themselves "disappear" before she enters the "scene." The complex of buildings stands on the hillside west of the Tower of the Scent of Buddha. She loves the view: three towers, two pavilions, a gallery and an arched gateway. She listens to the wind and finds herself calmed. The third day of the snow she comes again to look at a magnificent building that has a large octagonal two-story open pavilion with a double-eave roof of green and yellow glazed tiles. It is now blanketed by snow. She weeps freely and feels understood-a great actress's disappearance.
The whiteness, the sorrow. Alone in the picture world.
I order servants to bring me cloth-bound picture books. I have begun studying the personalities of the Forbidden City. I share an interest in opera with the empress dowager. On splendid days I come to visit her glories. I walk directly toward the Hall of Health and Happiness. The hall stands opposite the stage at a distance of less than twenty meters. It was here that the empress enjoyed theatrical performances. I sit down on her throne. It is a gold-lacquered chair with a design of a hundred birds paying homage to the phoenix. It is comfortable. The chair is kept like new. The spirit of the woman is touchable.
I come to adjust my mood. I come to dream, and to feel what it is like to be the empress dowager and to have true power. I don't need a troupe to play for me. I see myself as the protagonist in an imagined opera. The scenes are vivid as I leaf through the empress's opera manual. They are the classic pieces I grew up with, the ones I learned from my grandfather. The Diary of the Imperial Existence. I can hear the tunes and arias. It was said that the empress didn't sit on the throne to watch the performances but reclined in bed in her wing and observed from the window. She had seen the opera so many times that she had memorized every detail.
I get on that bed too. I imagine her watching Emperor Guangxu sitting on the front porch to the left of the entrance accompanied by princes, dukes, ministers and other high officials, who sat along the east and west verandahs. What kind of mood was she in? A woman born to a terrible time, who lost her territories each day to foreign and domestic enemies. Was the opera her only escape?
I find it soothing when facing the Great Stage, which was constructed in 1891. The largest stage of the Ching dynasty, it is a three-story structure, twenty-one meters high and seventeen meters wide on the lowest floor. There are chambers above and below it, with trapdoors for angels to descend from the sky and devils to rise up from the earth. There is also a deep well and five square pools under the stage for water scenes. In connection with the stage is the Makeup Tower, a magnificent two-story backstage building.
I miss my role. I miss my stage.
For a while the beauty of the place occupies her. Then she becomes bored. She retreats. Visits less. Soon she stops coming. She shuts herself in the Garden of Stillness and grows depressed. She is desperate for an audience. She talks to whoever is around. The servants, the chef, the new pet-a monkey she was recently presented as a gift from the National Zoo, or the mirror, the wall, sink, chair and toilet. Gradually, it becomes an act in which she takes pleasure. It is to deal with herself, to find things to do, to forget the pressing unhappiness.
It is not that I am an expert, but Mao is definitely a science illiterate. I respect doctors, especially dentists. But Mao doesn't. He hates them. Poor Mr. Lin-po. Every time he came to clean the Chairman's teeth he would tremble. It's like he was asked to peel the skin off a dragon. The Chairman can be frightening to an ordinary person. The dentist was shaking so hard that the Chairman thought his jaw was going to fall apart. So the Chairman asked him to fix his own jaw first.
The man couldn't take the Chairman's jokes. So he was fired. The next one was recommended by Premier Zhou. He came and behaved the same way. His jaw was all right but his facial muscles twisted as if his nerves were wired with an electric cord. And there was the hairdresser too, Mr. Wei. The Chairman cracked some jokes with him and commented that his shaver was sharp. The man dropped his tool and fainted on his knees.
The Chairman calls me "Miss Bourgeois" because I refuse to eat pork. He believes that he is immortal. He believes he possesses supernatural power. No bug will attack him and no fat will clog his arteries. Well, I'd like to bet on his teeth. His periodontal disease is so severe that his teeth are green and his breath stinks. I bet he will wake up one morning and find all his teeth gone.
She forgets that her listeners are not supposed to respond, not to mention offering comments or opinions. She forgets that they are on duty. Soon she loses interest in her monologue and finds herself developing a habit of peeping and spying.
I have been following the Chairman's footprints. I want to find out what he does as the head of state. I find that he basically does two things: travel and entertain. At the beginning nobody wants to talk to me for fear of Mao. I change my strategy. I play what I call the game of confusion. I locate Mao's destination and phone the governor after his visit. I say, the Chairman asks me to send his warmest regards to you. Then I ask what the Chairman did during his stay. I learn that the Chairman was led to visit the workplaces of distinction. A steel factory in the north and a coal mill in the west, a hen farm in the south and a seafood plantation in the east. Wherever Mao goes he is told they have the greatest harvest. The governors are in competition to please Mao. They are desperate to get Mao to issue state loans. But then I ask, Why didn't you report the truth? If there has been a drought why say harvest was on its way?
Isn't the answer obvious, Madame? the governor sighs. I would rather make false reports than look foolish in front of the Chairman.
So everyone ends up raising his gun only to shoot his own foot. To such complaints my method is to change the subject. It is not that I don't care. It is my own survival I have to worry about first. My life has experienced drought after drought and flood after flood. I am sick of the bad news.
In her spying she has come to focus on two women. The two whom she secretly compares herself to and envies. The two who stand no chance of being her friends. One is talented and plain-looking. She is Premier Zhou En-lai's wife, Deng Yin-chao. The other is Wang Guang-mei, the wife of Vice Chairman Liu. Talented and beautiful, she disturbs Madame Mao Jiang Ching the most. The fact that both women are adored by their husbands troubles her. She finds it unbearable when Premier Zhou kisses Deng Yin-chao when leaving for trips, and when Vice Chairman Liu glues his eyes on Wang Guang-mei at parties. She takes it personally as a humiliation to herself.
The eyes of the public suck it all in, she painfully observes. The affection is caught on camera, printed in papers and deposited in the minds of the billion-she is being compared.
How do these women keep their husbands? One can almost pity Deng Yin-chao for her yam-shaped face. She has turtle eyes, a frog mouth, a hunched back, gray hair and a soy-sauce-bottle body draped in gray suits. There is no color in her speech. Nor in her expression. Yet her husband Premier Zhou is the most handsome and charming man in China.
I am pleased with Deng Yin-chao. I am pleased with her wisdom. The knowledge of knowing herself, knowing that she can't fight me, is not my rival, thus doesn't try to be one. She is a lady who knows when to shut up, when to disappear, and she treats me like a queen. She gets what she wants in the end. She understands the benefits of being humble. During my husband's twenty-seven years of ruling, the ups and downs that turn one from hero to villain and back overnight, the Zhous' boat never sinks. Deng Yin-chao doesn't come to dance parties held in the Grand Hall of the People. Once in a while she shows up to just say hello. She hunches her back and tells me that I am the best. All the nice words. I don't know what she says about me to her husband. She doesn't talk about me behind my back to anyone else, because she knows that Kang Sheng is my ear, and he is everywhere. Deng Yin-chao speaks good of me and lets her compliments travel back to me.
Wang Guang-mei is not so wise. Wang Guang-mei is the opposite of Deng Yin-chao.
Madame Mao Jiang Ching can hardly stand Wang Guang-mei. Wang Guang-mei is a New Year's lantern that shines the way to warmth. Her grace offers delight and her words bring closeness. From a prestigious and Western-influenced family, Wang Guang-mei is highly educated and self-confident. She doesn't intend to outshine Madame Mao Jiang Ching, but because Mao never publicly introduces his wife, visitors from foreign countries all regard Wang Guang-mei as the first lady of China.
Although Wang Guang-mei pays attention to Jiang Ching, mentions her name constantly, consults her on all manner of things, from dress codes to what presents to bring when accompanying her husband abroad, she is unable to please Jiang Ching. Unlike Deng Yin-chao, who makes sure that she appears as no rival to Jiang Ching, Wang Guang-mei sets limits on how much she will sacrifice her own taste. Wang Guang-mei refuses to keep Jiang Ching in her mind all the time. Furthermore, she has no guilt over her popularity.
I think of Wang Guang-mei as a thief. As a thief later on I punish her. She stole my role and I can't view her any other way. Like a bird to a worm, she is my natural enemy. Her very existence demands my sacrifice.
Wang Guang-mei tries to be a good performer, though. The problem is that she doesn't think that she's being harmful to me. She thinks the opposite. She thinks that there is nothing wrong with my not meeting foreign guests, with my not visiting the countries of my dreams. Nothing wrong that her face gets to be printed all over the papers and magazines. Nothing wrong that I am forgotten.
Because of her there is no need of me.
I can't stand looking at her waltz on the floor. The way she and her husband Liu admire each other. Their passion spills. The world is forgotten. I can't help thinking how unlucky I am. I have done everything I can to try to keep Mao. I have gathered all his children once a month to create a family environment. But it is no use. Mao is busy traveling and practicing longevity. He doesn't want me around. At those moments I am the little girl from Zhu again. In dirt and in rags, running away and begging for affection.
The history of China recognizes another great man besides Mao. It is Liu Shao-qi, the vice chairman of the republic. Vice Chairman Liu has a donkey's long face. His skin is the surface of the moon. He has bad teeth and a big garlic nose. It is his wife, Wang Guang-mei, whose beauty and elegance bring to light his quality. Vice Chairman Liu is a stubborn fellow. A man who doesn't understand politics but is a politician. In Madame Mao Jiang Ching's eyes he misjudges Mao. His tragedy is his blind faith in Mao. He is a victim of his own assumptions. Right after the establishment of the republic in 1949, Liu wants to establish law. He wants no emperor. He wants China to copy the American model and set up a voting system. Although he has never suggested that Mao copy George Washington, everyone gets the message. Later on Liu becomes number one on Mao's elimination list. He forgets that China is Mao's China. To Mao, the suggestions are equal to having him murdered under the bright sun. It is because of this that Liu and Mao become enemies. However, Liu doesn't see things this way. Liu believes that for the future of China he and Mao can achieve harmony.
It is not that I feel good about Vice Chairman Liu's death in 1969. But it is he who made Mao pull the trigger. Mao simply feels threatened by him. Liu has the power of a politician child. Unlike Premier Zhou, Marshal Ye Jian-ying and Deng Xiao-ping who pretend to be "innocently" making "mistakes" when Mao criticizes them, Liu stands by his belief. Like a shooting star, he fuels on his own life.
Compared to Vice Chairman Liu, Premier Zhou lives to please Mao. I don't understand why he behaves that way. He was educated in France. He doesn't like the dancing floor being spread with powder to protect Mao from slipping during movements, but he never complains. I myself hate the floor too, but Mao and the others love it. Premier Zhou is an excellent dancer, yet he forces himself to breathe the powder dust. He worships Mao. He sincerely believes that Mao's is the hand that sculpts China. He models himself after the famous Premier Zhu Ge-liang of the Han dynasty, the ancient premier who spent his life serving the family of Emperor Liu.
Premier Zhou is a man of genius, but he is incapable of saying no to Mao. He is a janitor who fixes what Mao has broken. He sends warm letters, and food coupons in Mao's name, to Mao's victims. He speaks only to provoke forgiveness. After his death in January 1976 Mao signs an order and forbids the man to be publicly mourned. Yet millions of people risk their lives to fill the streets to mourn him. Personally I admire him and feel sorry for him.
Premier Zhou has chances, but he chooses to ignore the calling of his conscience and lets them slip away. At moments of crises, he closes his eyes to Mao's problems. He fakes his emotion and follows the crowd and shouts, Long live the proletarian dictatorship! During the Cultural Revolution he echoes Mao. He waves Mao's little red book of quotations and praises the Red Guards' destructive behavior. He endures beyond reason. He endures at the expense of the nation. One can't help but question: Is it because he needs the job as the premier? Or is it that he lives to be another kind of immortal, the one who brings himself to the altar?
When Mao finally turns his back on him and persuades the nation to attack him, Zhou removes his services quietly. He is sent to the hospital with cancer of the pancreas in its final stage. During his last moment he begs his wife to recite Mao's new poem "No Need to Fart." It is during the reciting that he permanently shuts his eyes. Does he hope that Mao will be touched by such a performance of loyalty? Does he hope that Mao will be finally satisfied that he is now gone forever? Chinese people wonder about Premier Zhou's performance. Chinese people wonder if it was in peace that Premier Zhou left the world. Or did he realize that he had helped Mao to carry out the Cultural Revolution and buried China's chance of prosperity?
I have reached my limit. I can't stay out of my husband's affairs anymore. This isn't an option and I won't consider divorce. Kang Sheng has promised to help me. But how can I trust the double agent? He says Mao sleeps only with virgins-I am not sure if this is not the message Mao wants him to send me.
One day in February Kang Sheng comes to show his loyalty toward me. There has been a threat, he tells me. There is a unique virgin with a magnificent brain. Worse, Mao has fallen in love with her. A golden bird who sings at the emperor's window every night. Mao is so attached that he is in the mood for divorcing.
Her name is Shang-guan Yun-zhu-Pearl Born from the Clouds. She is a film actress in her early thirties. An actress! Her movies are The Qing Family on the Water-city, In Your Voice I Sing, Lady of the Wei Kingdom, The Sisters of the Stage.
I am talking about a woman who makes my life a joke. A joke at which I am unable to laugh.
I imagine them. My husband and Shang-guan Yun-zhu. I watch them move on my stage. The lust which I used to experience myself. I project them on the screen of my mind.
I say to Kang Sheng that it is time. It is time that I stop weeping for my misfortune. It is time I stop taking morphine to dull my senses. It is time to switch plates and bottles and make others take the drugs that have paralyzed me.
Kang Sheng says it's a good idea. I'll work with you. Let's renew our Yenan contract, let's get down to business. My advice? Start developing your own network of loyalists. Start your business of political management. Go to Shanghai and invest in people whom you know and make them your battle horses.
The secret news begins to spread. The first lady has arrived in Shanghai and invites her old friends. She throws parties in Mao's name. The gathering floor is the city hall. Special guests include the famous actor Dan, her partner in A Doll's House, and Junli, the most-in-demand film director. The two men in her wedding picture at the Pagoda of Six Harmonies. She thinks that they will be flattered and commit to her in no time. She is Madame Mao. She expects eagerness.
But there is no applause when the curtain descends. The parties and the reunions generate little energy. No respect and no friendship. Later on Madame Mao Jiang Ching learns from Kang Sheng that the actor and the director, the men who couldn't get over their friend Tang Nah's sadness, sent a message to Premier Zhou reporting her ambition.
I am back in Beijing, back to the life of stillness. I didn't want to come back. I was ordered back by the Politburo. I have been ridiculed in Shanghai. People gossiped about Shang-guan Yun-zhu and Mao's seriousness in taking her as a future wife. I tried to ignore the rumor. I tried to focus on what I set out to achieve. I met interesting young people, the graduates of the Music Conservatory and the School of Opera of Shanghai. I was looking for new talent and they made perfect candidates. They complained about the lack of opportunities to perform. I understand how frightening it can be for actors to grow old on the sidelines. I told them that I would love to work with them. I promised to give them a chance to shine. I am in a mood to smash chains, I said. I want to renew my dream of a truly revolutionary theater, a weapon and a form of liberation. But the young people were not enthusiastic. They were unsure of my position. They wanted to check out my power first.
This morning I asked my driver to drop me in a place where there are woods to cover me from the rest of the world. I want to stop my mind from spinning. A half-hour later I find myself in the imperial hunting ground. I ask the driver to come back in three hours.
I walk toward a hill. The air feels like warm water pouring over my face. The scene is bleak. Plants have begun to die everywhere in the heat. The grass and bushes are all yellow. Even the most heat-bearing plant-the umbrella-shaped three-leaf goya-has lost its spirit. The leaves dangle down in three different directions.
There is a rotten smell in the air. It is the dead animals. Falcons circle above my head. I suppose the rotten smell rises fast in the heat. The birds smell their food in the air. Besides falcons, there are shit-lovers, cousins of cockroaches, crawling in and out of dead plants. I didn't know that they could fly. The heat must have made them change habits, for the ground is a baking pan.
The sky is a giant rice bowl and I am walking in its bottom-unable to climb and unable to get out.
Helplessness sucks the air out of my chest.
You need the figurehead. You need Mao, Kang Sheng says to me. Your role is to play Mao's most trusted comrade. It is the only way to empower yourself. You have to fake it. No, you don't feel. Go and kiss the corpses of the backyard concubines. They will tell you what feeling means. Get up on the giant's shoulders. So no one can overlook you.
I suppose I have to get over Mao.
Whatever you have to do.
She dreams about Mao. Night after night. The curse-that she wishes him dead-has come to bury her. Yet there is this inborn stubbornness. The way her feeling operates. It is its own cage. It blocks her. She is at a harbor, waving behind a crowd. Turn your head away, she cries to herself. Her heart refuses to let Mao go.
I tell him never to come to me, but I wait for him every day. I send him invitations using all kinds of excuses. When he does come, I show apathy. I either get servants to clean the room or pick up the camera and shoot roses in the garden. I long for him to stay yet I make his visits miserable.
I want him to finish us, I say to Nah. These days I have been spending more time with Nah. She is happy living in the boarding school but she makes sure to spend the weekends with me. She knows the fact that she is with me will give her father a good reason to visit. But I know it won't happen. I never look out the window and never respond to any of Nah's guesses regarding her father's arrival.
One evening my staff views a documentary film as a form of entertainment. The title is Chairman Mao Inspects the Country. I decline to go. When it's on, I hear the sound track from the portable projector over the kitchen. I am struck by a sudden sadness. I can't help but walk over to the screening. When it is finished I clap with the crowd with tears in my eyes.
Long live Chairman Mao and great health to Comrade Jiang Ching! everyone cheers.
In my dream I hear the whistle of a steam engine from a distance. I see wavelike crowds move in blurry dawn light. The ship begins to slowly take off. Thousands of colorful paper ribbons break in passengers' farewell cries. The ribbons dance in the air. It feels like the harbor is being pushed away by the ship. Then the noise quiets down. The crowd watches the ship draw away. It becomes smaller and smaller. The ribbons stop dancing. The sound of waves takes over. The smell of stinking fish is in the air once again.
The vast ocean, glittering under the sunlight.
My heart's harbor vacant.