Mao: The Unknown Story

One such sacrifice was blood. Always on the lookout for methods to improve her health and looks, she learned about an unusual technique: blood transfusions from healthy young men. So scores of Praetorian Guards were put through a rigorous health check, and from a short list of four, blood was taken from two of them for her. Afterwards, she gave the two a dinner, telling them what a “glorious” deed they had done to “donate” their blood to her. “When you know your blood is circulating inside me … you must feel very proud,” she added — before warning them to keep their mouths shut. The transfusions did not become a routine, as she got so excited that she told Mao about them, and he advised against them on health grounds.

In spite of her constant complaining, Mme Mao was in fact in very good health. But she was a nervous wreck. She had to down three lots of sleeping pills before she could drop off, which was usually about 4:00 AM, and she also took tranquillizers twice a day. When she was indoors in daytime, she had natural light shut out, just as Mao did, by three layers of curtains, and read by a lamp, with a black cloth draped over the shade, producing an atmosphere her secretary described as spooky.

Noise bothered her to an absurd degree. In her main residence in Peking, the Imperial Fishing Villa, staff were ordered to drive away birds and cicadas — and even, at times, not to wear shoes, and to walk with their arms aloft and legs apart, to prevent their clothes from rustling. Even though her villa sat in a garden of 420,000 square meters, she ordered the park next door, Yuyuantan, one of the few public parks left in the capital, closed down. A similar thing happened in Canton, where her villa lay beside the Pearl River, so traffic on this commercially important thoroughfare was suspended during her stays, and even a distant shipyard had to stop work.

Heat and drafts also obsessed her. Her rooms had to be kept at exactly 21.5 degrees centigrade in winter, and 26 degrees in summer. But even when the thermostat showed that the temperature was exactly what she demanded, she would accuse her attendants: “You falsify temperature! You conspire to harm me!” Once she threw a big pair of scissors at a nurse, missing her by inches, because the nurse could not locate the source of a draft.

“To serve me is to serve the people” was her constant refrain to her staff.

AFTER LIN BIAO crashed to his death, and the assassination plot against Mao — and herself — surfaced in late 1971, Mme Mao became plagued by nightmares about the Lins’ ghosts pursuing her. She confided to her secretary: “I have been feeling as if I am about to die any minute … as if some catastrophe is about to happen tomorrow. I feel full of terror all the time.”

Her paranoia had been flipped into overdrive by an incident that occurred just before the Lins fled. She had gone to Qingdao to photograph warships (she had ordered six of them to roam about at sea to pick the best angle), and found the lavatory in the local villa wanting. So she used a spittoon instead, which, she complained, was too hard for her bottom. So her staff rigged up a seat for it, using a rubber ring from the swimming pool. She had to be supported by her nurses while she relieved herself, but she was accustomed to this. One night, however, she used the spittoon-toilet without assistance after taking three lots of sleeping pills, and fell and broke her collarbone. After the Lins fled, she insisted that this accident had been part of the assassination plot, and that her sleeping pills had been poisoned. This caused a huge commotion, with all her medicines sealed up and carted away to be tested, and her entire medical staff detained and interrogated in front of Chou En-lai and the Politburo. Chou had to talk to her for a whole night, from 9:00 PM to 7:00 AM, trying to calm her down.

The Nixons’ visit in February 1972 came as an enormous tonic. With them and with the subsequent stream of international visitors, she could indulge her craving to play the First Lady. There was also the chance to publicize herself to the world by having her biography written. In August that year, an American woman academic, Roxane Witke, was invited to write about her and hopefully turn her into a global celebrity, as Edgar Snow had done for Mao.