Mao: The Unknown Story

MME MAO WAS now reduced to currying favor with Mao’s girlfriends to gain access to her husband. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the couple had been living in separate residences even when they were both in Peking: she in the Imperial Fishing Villa, he in Zhongnanhai. In the early years of the Cultural Revolution, when she was actively involved in running things, she could visit him freely. But as her political role grew less, he restricted her access, and often barred her from his house. The plain fact was that Mao could not stand his wife. But the more she was shunned, the more desperately she tried to get close. She could not afford to be discarded. She would beg Mao’s girlfriends to put in a word for her, giving them presents like pretty material for making clothes, even a Swiss watch. On one occasion she talked her way into Mao’s house, telling the guards she was there to check “hygiene.” Mao yelled at her to get out, and afterwards told the guards angrily: “Arrest her if she tries to barge in again!”

On Mao’s eighty-second (and last) birthday on 26 December 1975, his wife was admitted, bringing two of his favorite dishes. Mao acted as though she did not exist, giving her no more than a vacant glance, and not addressing one word to her. She soon left, in a forlorn state, while five young women, mostly former girlfriends, joined Mao for his birthday dinner.

These girlfriends were not treated like royal mistresses and showered with gifts and favors. Mao used them, as he did his wife. They provided him with sex, and served him as maids and nurses. In his final year, because he was afraid of assassination, only two people were allowed into his bedroom without his express permission; both were girlfriends-turned-nurses: Zhang Yu-feng, a former stewardess on his train, and Meng Jin-yun, a former actress from the air force song-and-dance troupe. They took turns to do all the work around Mao, on their feet for up to twenty hours a day, on standby around the clock, and usually having to sleep in their clothes. They had little family life, no holidays, no weekends. Mao refused to increase the nursing staff, as they were the only two people he trusted to be constantly near him.

Meng, the former actress, longed to leave, and asked her fellow nurse Yu-feng to put in a plea for her, saying that she was nearly thirty years old and wanted to spend some time with her husband so that she could have a child. “Wait till after I die and then she can have a child,” was Mao’s reply. Yu-feng herself had a baby daughter who needed her milk (there was no baby food in China in those days). As she was unable to go home every day, she tried to feed the baby by squeezing her milk into a bottle and putting it in a fridge at Mao’s, and taking it home when she had a moment to spare. But the baby became ill from the milk. She felt anxious all the time about her child. Sometimes, when she was reading to Mao in a state of utter exhaustion, she would start to mumble her daughter’s name. None of this moved Mao enough to lessen her workload.

Few of the many women Mao had eyes for turned him down, but one does seem to have done so: his elegant English teacher and interpreter, Zhang Han-zhi. One day in late 1972, after she had been interpreting for Mao, he took her to a staff room down the corridor, and burst out in tremendous agitation: “You don’t have me in your heart! You just don’t have me in your heart!” Taken aback, she blurted out: “Chairman, how can I possibly not have you in my heart? Everyone in China has you in their heart.” He let her go. She continued to be his interpreter, and Mao even promoted the man she loved (and went on to marry) to be foreign minister. But Mao visited punishment on him by subjecting him to bouts of denunciation at the hands of Foreign Ministry staff.

ONE PERSON WHO did love Mao was his youngest daughter, Li Na, his only child with Jiang Qing. Born in 1940, Li Na had grown up by his side, and as a child her patter had helped to relax him. She had worshipped her father, as is clear from a letter she wrote him when she was fourteen, on 8 February 1955:

Dear Daddy,

Are you asleep? You must be having a sweet, sweet sleep.

You must be surprised why I’m writing to you all of a sudden. What happened was: when you were having your birthday, I wanted to give you a present, but before I finished embroidering a handkerchief, your birthday was gone. Also my embroidery was so bad, so I didn’t give it to you. Because I know you wouldn’t be angry with me, and you are my good Daddy, right? This time, Mummy’s birthday is coming, so I wanted to take this chance to make it up. You might not like the thing I’m giving you, but I made it myself. It’s small, but shows my feelings: I wish my dearest Little Daddy always young, kind and optimistic …

It was signed “Kisses, Your daughter who passionately loves you.”