Mao: The Unknown Story

He wrote me many letters, expressing his love. Still I did not dare to believe I had such luck. If it had not been for a friend who knew his [Mao’s] feelings and told me about them — saying that he was very miserable because of me — I believe I would have remained single all my life. Ever since I came to know his true feelings towards me completely, from that day on, I had a new sense. I felt that apart from living for my mother, I was also living for him … I was imagining that if there were a day when he died, and when my mother was also no longer with me, I would definitely follow him and die with him!

When Mao returned to Changsha later that year, they became lovers. Mao was living in the school where he was the headmaster, and Kai-hui would visit him there. But she would not stay the night. They were not married, and the year was 1920, when living together outside marriage was unthinkable for a lady. Nor did Mao want to be tied down. In a letter to a friend on 26 November, he inveighed: “I think that all men and women in the marriage system are in nothing but a ‘rape league’ … I refuse to join this rape league.” He broached the idea of forming a “Resisting Marriage Alliance,” saying: “Even if no one else agrees with me, I am my own ‘one-man alliance.’ ”

One night, after she was gone, Mao was unable to sleep, and wrote a poem that opened with these lines:

Sorrow, piled on my pillow, what is your shape?

Like waves in rivers and seas, you endlessly churn.

How long the night, how dark the sky, when will it be light?

Restless, I sat up, gown thrown over my shoulders, in the cold.

When dawn came at last, only ashes remained of my hundred thoughts …

Helped by this poem, Mao managed to persuade Kai-hui to stay overnight. The walls were just thin boards, and some of the residents complained when the pair made passionate love. One neighbor cited a rule saying that teachers’ wives were forbidden to sleep in the school, but Mao was the headmaster: he changed the rule, and started a precedent that teachers’ wives could stay in schools.

For Kai-hui, staying the night meant giving the whole of herself. “My willpower had long given way,” she was to write, “and I had allowed myself to live in romance. I had come to the conclusion: ‘Let Heaven collapse and Earth sink down! Let this be the end!’ What meaning would my life have if I didn’t live for my mother and for him? So I lived in a life of love …”

Mao’s feelings were no match for Kai-hui’s, and he continued to see other girlfriends, in particular a widowed teacher called Si-yung, who was three years his junior. She helped a lot with raising funds for the bookshop, as some of her pupils came from rich families. She and Mao traveled as a couple.

When Kai-hui found out, she was shattered: “Then suddenly one day, a bomb fell on my head. My feeble life was devastatingly hit, and was almost destroyed by this blow!” But she forgave Mao. “However, this was only how I felt when I first heard the news. After all, he is not an ordinary man. She [Si-yung] loved him so passionately she would give everything for him. He also loved her, but he would not betray me, and he did not betray me in the end.” Mao seems to have explained away his affair by claiming he felt unsure of Kai-hui’s love. She chose to believe him:

… now the lid on his heart, and on my heart, were both lifted. I saw his heart, and he saw mine completely. (We both have proud temperaments, me more so at the time. I was doing everything to stop him from seeing my heart — my heart of love for him — so that he came to doubt me, and thought I didn’t love him. And because of his pride, he wouldn’t let any feelings show. Only now did we truly understand each other.) As a result, we were closer than ever.

Kai-hui moved in with Mao, and they got married at the end of 1920. At the time, radicals shunned the old family rituals that cemented marriage, and a new registration system had yet to be adopted, so there was not even a formal certificate.

On account of her marriage, Kai-hui was expelled from her missionary school. Mao’s affairs continued, and he actually started two new relationships soon after his marriage. A close friend of his at the time told us this, writing the characters bu-zhen, “unfaithful,” on the table with his finger. One of these liaisons was with a cousin of Kai-hui’s. When Kai-hui found out, she was so distraught that she hit her cousin, but she rarely made scenes, and stayed faithful to Mao. She was later to write with resignation: