Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (2 page)

Chairman Mao’s grandson, Mao Xinyu (New World Mao), in his private room at 307 Military Hospital
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Photo: Jan Wong

C
hairman Mao’s grandson was the fattest Chinese person I had ever met. At twenty-three years old, Mao Xinyu (New World Mao) had the same moon-shaped face, the same jowls, the same Buddha-like bulk as his famous grandfather. But his features were coarser, and he lacked Mao’s elongated Mona Lisa eyes and inscrutably pursed lips. And instead of slicking back his hair, he had a bristling brush cut.

In 1993, the one-hundredth anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birthday was just seven weeks away when I slipped into a military hospital in Beijing to see New World Mao. I had tried for months, without success, to interview someone from Mao’s family. Then I heard that New World was here. Brandishing a bouquet of yellow roses, I talked my way past an armed sentry and three checkpoints.

New World was watching television in his private room. I introduced myself as a reporter for Canada’s
Globe and Mail.
“Come in,” he said, with a cheery smile, as if we had known each other for years. “It’s a Chinese opera. Mind if I keep watching?”

His hospital room reeked of unwashed socks. Rumpled and unshaven, he sat, his belly bulging, in a striped hospital-issue pajama top, which he wore like a jacket over a full set of street clothes. His fly was half unzipped. His brown nylon socks, visible under blue
plastic shower flip-flops, had gaping holes. New World had inherited the family disdain for bourgeois hygiene. His grandfather Mao Zedong had been a crotch-scratcher, once dropping his pants to search for lice during an interview in the 1930s with the American reporter Edgar Snow. After Mao took supreme power and moved into a golden-roofed imperial palace in Beijing, he never bathed; attendants rubbed him down nightly with hot towels.

New World was born in 1970, at the height of Mao’s personality cult. He grew up thinking it perfectly normal that people sang ditties glorifying his grandfather as “the red, red sun in our hearts.” Or that everyone wore a Mao badge, and that some of the more fervent believers even pinned them to the flesh of their bare chests. Although Mao was no model grandfather, he had taken time out from the revolution to choose a name for the only son of his only surviving son. The Great Helmsman understood the Orwellian importance of names. The choice of “New World” was a reminder to all that Mao was creating a Brave New World.

There were three other grandchildren, but they were the offspring of Mao’s daughters and by Chinese tradition didn’t count. New World was the only grandson with the magic surname. He grew up in a hillside villa on the western edge of Beijing, with a dozen nannies, chauffeurs, cooks, maids, private secretaries and aides catering to his every whim. No adult or playmate dared cross him. That world fell apart in 1976, when his grandfather died. New World was still a little boy when Deng Xiaoping began dismantling Mao’s personality cult. New World’s father, already mentally incapacitated, sank into depression. His mother quickly toed the new Party line.

When New World was a toddler, his mother both indulged and disciplined him. She sometimes hit him so hard she broke sticks on his back. At other times, she stuffed him with sugar, pork and fried foods, hoping he would gain weight. Still fretting that New World was too thin, his mother ordered compliant doctors to dose him with hormones.

Mao Zedong never cuddled him, never held him, never played with him. Instead, New World worshipped his god-like grandfather from afar and tried his best to emulate him in the only way he knew
how. New Worlds favorite dish became the one the Great Helmsman loved best – Red-Cooked Pork, chunks of glistening pork fat, gelatinous skin still attached, stewed in a lip-smacking sauce of soy, anise, rice wine and brown sugar.

Over the years, New World ballooned to three hundred pounds. To lose weight, he tried everything from diet teas to herbal medicines to slimming creams. By the time I met him, thirty-seven days of enforced crash dieting in Military Hospital Number 307 in the western suburbs of Beijing had cut his weight to 250 pounds. At five foot nine inches tall, he wasn’t off the scale by Western standards of obesity. But in a land where his grandfather’s Utopian policies had sparked widespread hunger and even famine, New World’s ham-like thighs stuck out in China like Roseanne’s at the Boston Marathon.

He lived in his own dream world. When a college classmate once asked what he’d like to be one day, New World replied, “A leader,” as if that were a job category, like electrician. He harbored secret hopes that someone, someday, might see fit to anoint him general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. In 1989, he had been a student at People’s University. When the Tiananmen protests started and his classmates flooded the square, his mother had her chauffeur drive her to the campus. She bundled her son home for safety until everything was over. The tragedy hadn’t touched him at all. He seemed scarcely aware that the People’s Liberation Army had shot thousands of ordinary Chinese in cold blood.

When I met him, New World had graduated, just barely, and was now studying for a master’s degree in Mao Zedong Thought at Beijing’s Communist Party School. He dreamed of going abroad. “My mom wants me to go to the United States because they do a lot of research into Mao Zedong Thought there. I’ve heard that in the U.S. Chairman Mao is held in higher regard than George Washington. Is that right?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

New World didn’t seem to notice. He sighed, his belly heaving. A school in Mississippi — he couldn’t remember the name — had offered him a scholarship, but the Central Committee had nixed it. “The government won’t let New World Mao out of the country,”
he said. “They’re afraid I’ll go out and my thinking will change. Or I won’t come back.”

He turned back to the cacophonous opera on TV. I asked him how long he planned to stay in the hospital. “I don’t want to go home,” he confessed. “I don’t want Mama to tell me what to do. I’m afraid of her. The time passes quickly in here. I can watch television day and night.”

Mao’s grandson a couch potato? Mao’s grandson dreaming of studying Maoism in the States? Mao’s grandson a prisoner of communism? My head was reeling. So the dynasty of Mao Zedong had come to this.

And to think that I originally came to China as a Maoist.

F
OOL’S
P
ARADISE

A normal upbringing: president of the Canadian Girls In Training, a church version of the Girl Guides
.

The only brunette among five “freshette princesses”
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“W
hat am I going to do in China at night?” I wailed. It was 1972.

I was nineteen, on my college summer vacation, and I had a coveted visa to the People’s Republic of China. It was a silly question, but I really had no idea what Communists did at night. I already had lopped off my waist-length hair because my mother warned there would be no hot showers. I had reviewed the few hundred words of Mandarin I had learned in Chinese 101 at McGill University. And I had filled my suitcase with toilet paper, color slide film and blank notebooks for keeping a journal. Now the night before I was supposed to leave Montreal, I had a panic attack. Irrationally, I felt I could face the days alone, but what about the nights?

My father, who owned several Chinese restaurants, was sitting on our basement floor playing solitaire. He had been to China on a visit with my mother nine months earlier. He looked up at me, took a puff on his Cuban cigar and frowned, mentally calculating how much he was going to have to shell out for my air fare, hotels and meals for a summer in China. “Don’t go,” he growled.

That did it. As a teenager, I was duty-bound to do whatever my parents didn’t want me to do. The next day, I boarded a plane for Hong Kong, then virtually the only gateway to China. At a fluorescent-lit emporium that sold only mainland goods, I spent $15
on two pairs of black cloth shoes, two pairs of baggy gray trousers and three plaid blouses. I gazed at my authentic revolutionary self in the hotel mirror, and was pleased. The best way to see China was as a Chinese.

In 1972, China was radical-chic. Beijing was a beacon of hope. Maoism was mesmerizing. Growing up in the rebellious sixties at the height of the Vietnam War protests, I had scant faith in the West. Friends my age in the States were being drafted and sent to die in a Southeast Asian jungle in the name of national security. Draft dodgers streamed into Canada, proclaiming their opposition to the war. Millions joined peace marches. For me, the turning point came in 1970 when I was a seventeen-year-old college freshman in Montreal. That year the Ohio National Guard opened fire at Kent State University, killing four student protesters and wounding nine others.

For my generation, the credibility of the U.S. government — and, by extension, my own – was at an all-time low. Washington had lied about virtually everything to do with the Vietnam War, from the secret bombing of Cambodia to the Pentagon Papers to the My Lai Massacre. State Department types cited the domino theory. If Saigon fell, all of Asia would go Communist, and somehow our own way of life would be threatened. For his part, Mao had called on “the people of the world” to “unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs.” In Canada, many in my generation thought our own country was one of those running dogs of U.S. imperialism.

Knowing nothing about the world, I thought Western society was a hopeless mess of racism, exploitation and shopping malls. The natural human impulse was to hope, to believe, that somewhere there were answers. I reasoned, with the naive logic of the young, that if our own governments were lying to us, their enemies must be telling the truth. That China was the biggest domino only enhanced its credibility. I imagined only harmony and perfection in China.

Growing up in Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s, I had a comfortable middle-class life. (Translation: I was pretty damned spoiled.) I went to church and summer camp, figure-skated and skied, and
took ballet, piano and flute lessons. My parents took my siblings and me on vacations all over the States, Europe and Asia. On rainy days at the summer cottage we rented in Magog, Quebec, I embroidered pillowcases and ate jelly donuts, a national pastime. (For some unknown reason, Canadians consume more donuts per capita than anyone else in the world, five times more even than our American junk-food-eating cousins.)