Becoming Madame Mao (38 page)

This is a robbery. I speak to Wang and demand his loyalty. But Wang is a man of no honor. He goes for the bigger breast. I ask Chun-qiao to tell Wang that if he continues to be disloyal to me, I shall "leak" the information of his true background—he is not a man of any talent. He was a high school dropout and his is a made-up story.

After that Wang repositions himself. Soon Mao finds out that it is in my voice Wang speaks. The old man begins to doubt his arrangements. He calls us "the Gang of Four," meaning Wang, Chun-qiao, his disciple Yiao and me.

January 10, 1972. At Marshal Chen Yi's funeral Mao acts sentimental. He had originally declined to attend but changed his mind at the last minute. To the nation it is a clear sign that Mao is picking up the old boys.

By the time Mao arrives, the funeral has already begun. Getting out of the car Mao rushes toward the casket. His appearance surprises everyone. The detail is immediately caught by the cameras: Mao is in his black coat with the tail of his white pajamas showing underneath. It suggests Mao came here in such a hurry that he didn't have the time to change. It hints that Mao couldn't make himself not come. To the host, Premier Zhou, Mao's arrival has not only honored the old buddies, but also denounced Jiang Ching and her gang.

Following the ceremony Mao conducts a closed-door conversation with Premier Zhou. Days later a document entitled "Putting Things Back in Order" is issued from Premier Zhou's office.

What can I do but wash my face with tears? If Mao places his trust in the old boys, I simply have no future. Although Premier Zhou has recently been diagnosed with cancer, he won't rest until he sees his comrade Deng Xiao-ping secure the premier's seat. Even on his hospital bed Zhou conducts a media show. He asks people to pass their affection for him on to Deng. It is quite a moving show. Deng is now grabbing the headlines.
Rely on Comrade Deng to revive the nation's economy
has become a household slogan.

She resists diminishment. She believes in her network and in her loyalists in the media, who in the past months have printed the manuscripts of all her operas. For a decade, she has worked to create a perfect image of herself through the operas and ballets. A heroine with a touch of masculinity. The woman who came from poverty and rises to lead the poor to victory. She believes that the minds of the Chinese have been influenced. It's time to test the water—the audience should be ready to embrace a heroine in real life.

I have it all planned out, she phones Kang Sheng. I am in the middle of a grand project. I am preparing myself to enter a real scene.

Whatever you do, Kang Sheng whispers, put poison in Zhou's rice bowl before he puts it in yours. Mao is losing his mind and you'd better hurry.

I can't breathe. My worst nightmare has come to seize me. I am stuck in a classic story of the Forbidden City. The setting is called the Forgotten Yard. The characters are limbless imperial concubines. They visit my dreams and won't leave me in the morning.

I see no chance to turn back Mao's clock.

***

I am going apple-picking at Coal Hill, Jiang Ching says to Mao. Would you like to join me?

I am hopping on my last leg, the seventy-nine-year-old man coughs. I can feel my bones decay by seconds.

Why don't you call your doctor?

No! Put the phone down! A cockroach can be an assassin these days.

She stares at him.

He perspires heavily and then moves slowly back to his bed.

He is more than tired, she thinks to herself. The man is fading. Although he has an appetite, he has been starving. He is toothless but refuses to install plastic teeth. He is so weak that he sank in the pool.

He calls her in for no particular reason. He did the same yesterday. When she arrived he had nothing to say. She waited patiently. But he couldn't get his point across. He mumbles about high blood pressure and minor cuts that don't heal. The doctor says that I have ulcers. They are everywhere. In my mouth, down my throat, on my stomach, intestines and anus. Look here. He opened his jaw. See the ulcer? Here, under my tongue, the sores. They come regularly and stay around the clock.

She smells death on his breath.

It's about time. The words accidentally slip out of her mouth. He turns toward her in a quick motion.

Sorry, what I mean is that it's never too late to take good care of one's health.

I try to get up and walk nowadays, Mao gasps. I just keep walking. I am afraid that if I stop walking, I'll never walk again. I love the way my feet touch the ground. I love to feel its solidness. The smell of earth comforts me. Only while I am walking am I able to experience my day and know that I am living and my organs are functioning. Oh, how wonderful the way my lungs pump. A healthy body walking on a healthy ground! It's the connection between me and the ground. It's the only thing I can trust and depend upon. And it's what I am breathing for. You see, when I stretch out my legs, the ground receives me. It greets, supports and praises me, no matter how terrible I am. I stand, the ground lies beneath me, sincerely and silently. It extends all the way from my feet to infinity ...

She pictures a makeup artist polishing the nails of the dying.

As if fascinated by his own thoughts Mao takes hold of her arm, then goes on. I haven't been doing much because I dream of walking all night long and I wonder if I have been sleepwalking ... I don't remember whether there were stars last night. It was ... as if someone had kicked me to the road. I was tired but I couldn't stop. Because I don't want to die. There have been bad signs. Another murder has been plotted against me—do you know anything about it? Do you? I have sensed it. I trust my instinct. It is by someone who calls him- or herself my comrade in arms, someone who knows my habits and secrets, someone who sees what I am doing now. Do you know that person?

He lets go of her arm and crashes back into his rattan chair.

She takes off her glasses, wipes the oozing sweat from her forehead. Then she puts the glasses back on. But they don't stay. They keep sliding down—there is moisture on her nose. She tries to hold the glasses with her fingers. Still they won't stay. Finally she decides to take them off.

You know,
Jia-zei-nan-fang—The house thief is the hardest to guard against.
I am sure you know what I am talking about, don't you?

Her eyes widen. Clearing her throat she responds, Dear Chairman, you have everyone's love in this nation. You have accomplished more than any human being on earth. You've captured and redefined our nation's rage and longing. You have given us the best example of the true spirit of a patriot. Your fellow countrymen idolize you the way they have never before—

Shut up! Mao springs up. Make sure
Huang-mu-niang-niang
—the Mother of Heaven—empties no chamber pot of her majesty's on my funeral day!

***

The night leaves smell like the breath of a child's mouth. Jiang Ching's mind goes back to the scene of the morning. She wonders if all is but a sleepwalking. As she passes the courtyard, she hears cats wail outside the deep walls and a loud sneeze comes out of a bush.

Leaning on his bed Mao doubts the safety of his pool. He calls the chief of the security force and asks if the pool is missile-proof. When the answer is uncertain, Mao orders the entire pool torn down. Turn it into an underground bomb shelter!

A team of doctors are summoned for Mao's sleeping disorder. Yet nothing they prescribe works. It worsens after the summer. Mao refuses to get out of bed, let alone brush, wash or dress. He is in his pajamas twenty-four hours a day. He grows more restless. He mistakes his secretary for an assassin and throws an ink bottle at him when he comes to deliver the news of American president Richard Nixon's visit.

Mao describes his symptom to a doctor. I hear drizzle. Day and night this ceaseless rain inside my head. It sweeps me away.

She can no longer wait. She wants to get Mao to write a will. She is sure that a stroke or a coma is on its way. She visualizes its coming. The flood that bursts the brain.

Mao doesn't want to see her. But she keeps presenting herself, making excuses to break into his bedroom.

He fires a guard who fails to stop her by the gate.

As the acting head of state she hosts and escorts the Nixons to her operas and ballets. It makes her feels proud and finally compensated. But in the meantime she feels danger approaching. She talks nervously and the translator has a hard time following her.

I don't feel my age although I am sixty years old. My strength gets exercised every day. Mao has failed to hide his ill health from the public's eye. In the hands of the best cameraman and film editor Mao's saliva drools helplessly in a documentary called
Greeting Imelda Marcos.
His eyelids drop low, his chin sags, and his mouth and jaw are out of place. Eighty-two years old. The sun can't help setting. What frustrates me is that he won't acknowledge his fate. He refuses to quit. He is not passing me the business. I tell myself that he is too old to think of me.

It's been too long a battle to give up now. A few years ago I asked Chun-qiao to draw up a proposal in the name of the Party's Committee of Shanghai and send it to Mao. Brilliantly, Chun-qiao described me as "the initiator of the Cultural Revolution" and "the key contributor of the Communist Party."
At the moment of crisis, Comrade Jiang Ching puts her personal welfare on the line. She leads the Party and the Revolution single-handedly. She fights against the toughest enemies such as Liu Shao-qi and Deng Xiao-ping. There isn't a better person than Comrade Jiang Ching to lead the nation and carry on the Mao Tse-tung flag.

To my great disappointment, after three years of collecting dust on Mao's desk, the proposal is turned down. Not only that, Mao writes a nasty comment on its cover:
Discard.

***

I am lying on the ground breathless. I don't even have the strength to kill myself. If Mao had proven to me that he was the king of Shang, I would copy Lady Yuji and knife myself gladly. And there would have been dignity. But it is too late. Everything is a mess.

Dawn is coming and I have not slept. I recall my youth. The first moment we laid eyes on each other. It still amazes me. The moment of pure magic. The happiness. The way he and I stood in front of the Yenan cave, unable to part.

Now I am a cornered and beaten-up dog. I bite in order to escape. The irony is that my character refuses to give up its idealism. My character tries to save my soul. It pushes me to live, to survive and to create light in hell. Every time I sit in the theater I see a fleeting ghost of myself. I hear my voice in the heroine. The way she conquers fear. I pray for the spirit to stay with me. And I am fine. Hope once again fills me. It keeps telling me that there will be life after Mao. When love exhales there will still be something for me to live for. It is myself. The image of Madame Mao. Mao's death will help define my role.

But the moment she walks out of the theater she is weak again. She feels strange about the way she talks and moves. The underdog is coming through her. She breathes the dirty air and smells the trash. The feeling is like discovering a rotting body with a swarm of flies on it at five o'clock in the morning by the shore of a beautiful spring river. There is nothing she can do to change the course of her fate. She is led.

The voice in which she speaks is not familiar. She presses on nevertheless. There is no map, and she doesn't know if she will ever find her way. She keeps walking. She has to tell Yu. I have survived rapids and now simply moving on has become the journey itself. She no longer makes requests to see Mao. She misses Nah, but leaves her alone. It's better not to be reminded of her failure as a mother. She is too fragile to bear any more loss. Every day she changes hotels, every day she wears the uniform and conducts battles of propaganda promoting herself. In November she launches a campaign for Chun-qiao as the premier. She waits for Mao's response. There is no move. She assumes that Mao is considering. She prays. She goes around the country and praises Chun-qiao like a cheerleader.

Personally she is not a fan of Chun-qiao. A man full of hatred. But she needs him. She needs a strong head. A man who is as powerful and determined as Mao. Chun-qiao is good at plotting. His character mirrors Kang Sheng's. Chun-qiao is an eloquent Communist theorist by trade. His works have greatly added to the flames of the Cultural Revolution. His ability to convince is incomparable. He and his disciple Yiao work well together. Like musicians, Chun-qiao sells melodies and Yiao sells arrangements. They have been working on
The Great Quotations of Comrade Jiang Ching.

She can't say that she hasn't expected Mao's mind to change on her. But when the moment arrives, she finds herself unprepared.

July 17, 1974. Mao orders a meeting of the congress held at the Purple Light Pavilion.

Without warning he pronounces Deng Xiao-ping the new premier. Mao looks tired and uninterested. His cigarette drops from his fingers several times. He dismisses the meeting while tea is being served.

Before Jiang Ching has time to adjust to the first shock a second hits her. The day following Deng's promotion, Mao issues a public document criticizing Jiang Ching as the head of the Gang of Four. The press in Beijing immediately follows. Rumors turn into official news. Jiang Ching thought she had been in control of the media, thought that she had loyalists, but she is now proven foolish. She has no instinct for politics. She has been in it for the wrong reasons. It has always been the case. It was the way when she was with Yu Qiwei and Tang Nah. She was in it to get close to the man she loved but ended up losing herself. She doesn't know when Mao's joke about her being the head of the Gang of Four became an official criminal title.

O
N OCTOBER
1, 1975, the National Independence Day, the Shanghai press led by
The Liberation News
releases a series of stories on Empress-turned-Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty, around
A.D.
200. The reviews praise Wu's wisdom and strength and her success ruling China for half a century. Next to the stories are pictures of Madame Mao Jiang Ching. The pictures document her visits to factories, communes, schools and the military. She appears among the rugged-faced masses. Her expression is firm and her eyes look into the future with a glow. In Beijing the criticism of her continues. The following week the news of Premier Zhou's deteriorating condition in the hospital blankets the pages. A week later, Madame Mao Jiang Ching disappears from the papers and Deng Xiao-ping takes up the scene.