Becoming Madame Mao (16 page)

The angry woman bites off the end of a thread with her teeth. The Chairman and Zi-zhen are separating only temporarily. Temporarily, do you hear me, Lan Ping?

Yes, I hear you.

With a strange light in her eyes the tailor's voice suddenly softens. She will, I am sure ... Zi-zhen will get better and the couple will unite. No one gives up on Zi-zhen. Chairman Mao is a miracle maker. The victory of the Long March is a good example. The expansion of the red base is another and Zi-zhen will be the next.

The tailor's wrinkled lips fumble like a fish mouth. Words bubble out one after another. The candle begins to flicker. The room is suddenly brightened with a golden-orange ring. And then, a moment later, the candle goes out.

***

You have a scale and I have a weight, Mao says. There is a match.

Lan Ping nods, studying the face in front of her.

What are you looking at? An ancient skull? Am I a piece of salted dry pork that you are trying to buy?

I come to shake hands with you, she says. I come to wish you health and happiness.

He grabs her hands and tells her that his very soul demands her. It needs to be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.

She is silent, but leaves her hand in his palm.

I expected you, he whispers.

What have I done?

Come to me.

She hesitates.

He begins to lose ground. His eyes see what they want to see. I have something to add to our talk by the riverbank. Would you care to hear it?

She moves to sit on the edge of his bed.

In the ditches of my hometown grew my favorite plant. It was a red plant called
beema.
Its leaf was larger than a lotus leaf, round in shape. Its fruit was the size of a fist, and its seed the size of a fig. You can crush it—the seed contains quite a large amount of oil. It's tasty, but you can't eat it. It causes diarrhea. What I liked about it was that I could use it as a light. It's brighter than candles and produces a nice scent. My folks all use it. When I was a kid I spent my afternoons shelling the
beema
seeds. I connected the seeds together with a long string, tied it on one end of my bamboo stick and stuck it in places where I did my reading. Sometimes I took it to the ponds to help me locate fish and turtles ...

He continues talking and pulls her toward his chest, presses her hands.

She remembers the room had a high ceiling. The wall mud-colored. The floor was packed rock. It looked like the back of a giant turtle.

I like this face, a face with a full forehead. A marvelous head. A head that is worth millions in gold and silver to Chiang Kai-shek. I look into the eyes. The dark brown pupils. The shapes and lines resemble those of the Buddha. It reminds me of a distant landscape. The surface of a planet with gray rocks, emerald ponds. On this face, I detect an unconquerable will.

I see invisible guards behind the mask. The guards whose duty is to block anyone from entering the path that leads to the master chamber of the mind. The chamber where he is completely naked, vulnerable and defenseless.

He comes to hold me, pressing me against his ribs.

Bolts of silk spread in the air of my mind's picture.

It is in this room, on this bed, that she gives the performance of her life. She feels light filtering through her body.

The sky comes to devour the earth. Her pain from the past escapes.

Later on when he becomes the modern emperor of China, when she has learned everything there is to learn about him, when all the doors in his universe have been opened, walked through and shut behind, thirty-eight years later, on his deathbed in the Forbidden City, she sees the same pair of eyes and realizes that she had invented them.

He caresses her and whispers in her ear another story of his fatal survival. Tells her how he escaped from the mouth of death. It was September 1927. He was captured by Chiang Kai-shek's agents right after the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan. He was traveling, recruiting members of Communist groups and enlisting soldiers from the workers and peasants. Chiang Kai-shek's terror was at its peak. Hundreds of suspects were killed every day. He was taken to the militia headquarters to be shot.

The listener wears a white cotton shirt she has made herself. Her hair is ear-short. Her slender body is ripe. She feels his massiveness. She feels that he picks her up from the dust. She takes time the way she would on stage.

Borrowing a few yuan from a comrade, I attempted to bribe the escort to free me. The ordinary soldiers were mercenaries, with no special interest in seeing me killed, and they agreed to release me, but the subaltern in charge refused to permit it. I therefore decided to escape. I had no opportunity to do so until I was within about two hundred yards of the militia headquarters. At that point I broke loose and ran into the fields.

Later on when Madame Mao becomes the executive producer of all China's stage productions, she orders an episode dedicated to the scene she hears today. The hero escapes on his way to execution. He breaks loose and runs into the fields, hides in a tiny island in the middle of a lake with tall grass surrounding it. The title is
The Sha Family Pond.

I reached a high place, above a pond with tall grass covering me. I hid until sunset. The soldiers pursued me. They forced some peasants to help them search. Many times they came near, twice so close that I could have almost touched them. Somehow by fate I escaped discovery. I was almost certain that I would be captured.

Madame Mao's opera singer playing the leader of the guerrillas carries his voice to the highest note and stylishly pitches the final line:

The victory will fall into your hands
If you hold on to your faith
Even when the situation seems
Utterly out of hope and impossible to reverse

At last, when it was dusk, they abandoned the search. At once I set off across the mountains. I traveled all night. I had no shoes and my feet were badly bruised. On the road I met a peasant who befriended me, gave me shelter and later guided me to the next district. I had only two yuan with me and I used the money to buy a pair of shoes, an umbrella and six buns. When at last I reached safety, I had only one copper in my pocket.

He makes her see heaven's grace in his valor. In bed he is impatient, like a tomb robber grabbing gold. She presents herself, the gift of seduction. In the future the couple will do the same to the minds of a billion.

At daybreak when he asks her to repeat the pleasure she refuses. She has been awake and has been thinking about Zi-zhen. Her body is caught in the mind's struggle.

You have arms thin like a thirteen-year-old's. He comes to touch her gently. It's amazing that a woman with such thin limbs bears such full breasts.

Her tears well up.

He asks to be given a chance to understand her sadness.

She says that it would be impossible.

No one can take away my right to be educated. He wipes her tears.

It is me who needs education. She turns away. You are a married man with a family. I should not have made a mess of—

You are not leaving me, Lan Ping.

But Zi-zhen is alive!

He looks at her and smiles almost vindictively.

I can't do this to Zi-zhen, she continues. She has never harmed me.

Strangely she realizes that the line is from a forgotten play except that she has replaced the character's name with Zi-zhen. She starts to put on her clothes and moves out of his bed. He has difficulty looking at her ivory skin. It sets his mind burning. Suddenly he believes that she is going to be the bride of one of his young generals or she is going back to Shanghai.

He reaches for her. In silence she lets him fill her.

After a while he gives up. He rolls over, his face toward the ceiling. Desert me now. Be gone.

Buttoning up her clothes her tears flow. I just don't see a way. I don't want to be a concubine.

He watches her and she can hear the sound of his teeth grinding in his jaw.

A mouse appears on the floor near the wall. It advances, cautiously crosses the floor, then scampers around the foot of the bed and stops. Raising its head, the beanlike eyes stare at the couple.

The sun's rays jump over the floor.

If I can survive the Long March, I can survive losing anything, he murmurs. Like any war there will be casualties. Haven't I seen enough blood?...Do as you please, but please promise that you'll never come back.

She begins to sob uncontrollably.

Let's get over with this mess. You say that I am a married man, but what you mean is that I am a doomed man. Why don't you fire? He puts a hand on her shoulder. Kill me with your coldness.

The best illusionist is one who can explain to you how the trick works and then still make you believe there is magic ... She lifts her chin to look at him. This is where I stand at the moment—I still believe that you are meant for me!

Then say you won't leave.

But I must. Oh heaven, I must leave you.

He gets into his shoes and walks away from the bed.

She tries to move but her legs feel heavy.

What's wrong with you? he shouts. Are you a coward? I hate cowards! Don't you hear me? I hate, hate and hate cowards! Go now. Obey my order. Go! Go! Abandon me, abandon Yenan! Out!

She walks toward the door. Her hand feels the knob. She hears him wailing behind her: The war has taken everything away from me, my wives and my children ... My heart has been shot through and through. So many times, so many holes, it is beyond repair. Lan Ping, why do you offer a man ginseng soup while making him a coffin!

***

I am back with my unit. The next day I am assigned to a
saomangban
—a team that works to "brush away" Yenan's illiteracy. I teach Chinese and math. My students are from the advanced women's platoon. Among them are the wives of the Party's high-ranking officers. It doesn't take me long to learn that Zi-zhen had been their shooting coach.

An older woman comes and grabs me by the wrist. This is how Zi-zhen likes to practice, she says. By the way, Comrade Lan Ping, Zi-zhen is a crack shot. Zi-zhen used to take me to watch her practice. She loves to do it at night. Especially moonless nights. She would light ten torches at about a hundred yards away, then shoot with two pistols. Tatatatata, tatatatata ... Ten bullets out, ten torches down. Then she would have me set up another set of torches, then another set ... Tatatatata, tatatatata...

The students observe the girl from Shanghai as if watching a peasant skin a snake. The girl refuses to be played. What a woman! What a heroine! Lan Ping fills her voice with admiration.

He sends out Little Dragon to invite me for tea. We are awkward. The invisible Zi-zhen stands between us. While I choose to be silent, he begins to mock. Later on I discover that mocking is his style. He mocks, especially when he intends to punish. He chats warmly. One can never know what is coming.

I was thinking about what you told me the other day about your experience in Beijing. He sips his tea. I'd like to share some of mine with you. It also took place in Beijing. 1918, I was twenty-five years old. I was a part-time student at Beijing Normal University. I worked in the mailroom and the library. My position was so low that people avoided me. I knew then that there was something wrong. For hundreds of years the scholars had moved away from the people, and I began to dream of a time when the scholars would teach the coolies, for surely the coolies deserve being educated as much as the rest.

The truth is that Mao failed to gain any attention in Beijing. The country bumpkin felt humiliated. He was unable to forget the disappointing encounter. Later on it becomes one of his reasons to call for a great rebellion—the Cultural Revolution. It is to punish scholars nationwide for his early suffering. But at the moment, the girl from Shanghai lacks understanding. It will take forty years for her to grasp the story's true meaning. Then she will become his battle horse.

She thinks that he has a way to cheer her up. So she listens.

My own living conditions in Beijing were quite miserable, in contrast to the beauty of the old capital. I stayed in a place called Three-Eyes Well. I was sharing a tiny room with seven people. At night we all packed into the large bed made of earth heated from underneath. There was scarcely room for any of us to turn. I had to warn people on each side of me when I needed to do so.

The girl doesn't care if the man in front of her is describing their future home. Her concern is to make the man remove the woman between them.

Yesterday I felt the warmth of the early northern spring, Mao says. His eyes brighten. The white plums bloom while the ice seals over the Pei Lake. It reminds me of the poem by a Tang poet, Tsen Tsan.
Ten thousand peach trees blossoming overnight.

The girl can't understand the charm of the poem, but she senses his feeling from the lines.

The women squat on their heels eating breakfast. Lan Ping stares at her bowl. Her thoughts are on Mao. She watches the women marching and exercising until class time. The women come and sit in rows in front of her. She tries to be vivid and illustrative. The students pay no attention. They begin to discuss among themselves how to weave fancy-patterned baskets.

Listen, I am here to teach you math! I need some respect.

The students turn to her and begin to complain that her voice is too soft. Our hearing has been damaged by Chiang Kai-shek's air raids. You are from the city, you don't know war ... One woman suddenly calls the teacher a hypocrite.

This is rude, says Lan Ping.

Rude? The woman spits on the ground. Hypocrite!

The class echoes the woman.

Lan Ping throws the chalk and stops teaching.

The women cheer happily.

Suddenly comes the sound of gunshots.

It's Zi-zhen. The older woman makes a curling gesture with her finger, like pulling a trigger. It's her pistol. Do you know, Miss Lan Ping, that once Zi-zhen almost shot the Chairman?

When? the teacher asks, panicking.

It was when he came to visit her.