‘I am Zhou,’ he said calmly, ‘and you are very insistent.’
I couldn’t tell if this was a compliment or a reprimand. True, I had been obstinate in my efforts to talk to him, refusing on several occasions that morning to take no for an answer. Through Tong, I had made contact with his housekeeper and she, via the apartment building’s intercom, had batted away our requests for a meeting. But in the end, my persistence had won out.
Zhou directed us to a pair of upright chairs opposite his armchair and we sat down, listening to the noise of tea being prepared in the kitchen by his housekeeper. She had let us into the apartment just a few minutes before and had made us wait while the news report was on, her forefinger to her lips, requesting silence. She was about 40, short and rather round, but had a warm and caring nature about her that came to the fore when she was attending to Zhou. I discovered later that she had been working for him for many years, ever since his wife had died of cancer. There was a photo of a good-looking woman in a silver frame on the table beside him and, when he took off his glasses and placed them there, he ran his fingertips down the frame lightly.
With Tong as my translator, we started to chat.
‘Do you have a recorder?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t, I’m sorry,’ I said, wishing at the same time that I had bought one just for this meeting.
‘Then what kind of journalist are you?’
Rather shamefully, I had played the BBC journalist card again in order to get through Zhou’s door. It was my last throw of the dice, and it had worked. Fortunately, I had brought a notepad and pen.
‘I don’t trust machines,’ I replied, turning to a fresh page.
Zhou nodded sagely: ‘Ah, I see.’
Because I sensed that my time with Zhou was going to be short, I quickly outlined the story I was working on, regarding the disappearance of Little Mao. It seemed to take him by surprise, but then his calm demeanour swiftly returned.
‘You see, I’m a writer with an interest in a missing person.’
‘You find lost people,’ he said. ‘Tell me, what if these people don’t want to be found?’
‘I would respect their privacy, of course. But I wouldn’t know to do that until they told me, or I read a sign on their door that said I’m not wanted.’
He smiled and laughed for the first time.
‘True,’ he nodded. ‘So I gather you think I am connected to this person. Otherwise you wouldn’t be in my living room.’
‘That’s what they seem to believe.’
He leant forward in his seat slightly.
‘Who is “they”’?
‘Everyone,’ I lied. ‘In fact, I met a man in Ruijin who was convinced you had . . .’
I stopped for some reason and he leant forward a little more, clasping his hands between his knees.
‘Go on,’ he said.
I wasn’t about to blurt it out. Saying he’d killed the son of Chairman Mao would have bought us an exit ticket very quickly.
‘. . . had information relating to his death.’
‘His death?’
He clapped his hands suddenly and leant back in his chair, chuckling softly.
‘I am sorry, this journey of yours is wasted. There is not a shred of truth in any of the things you say. So let me tell you the truth, just so that you don’t feel too disappointed.’
His housekeeper brought in some Chinese tea, which she poured into small, blue-and-white ceramic cups from a matching teapot with a cane handle. As she did this, Zhou spoke of his childhood. He had been born in 1932 and raised by foster parents from an early age. They were hard-working farmers he said, but loving parents. He had done well at school and ended up joining the police, got married, had one child — a son — worked hard all his life and eventually climbed to a senior position in the police force before retiring.
‘Unlike the one you were proposing, it’s not that interesting a life,’ he said with a shrug.
I asked him if he had joined the Communist Party and he threw the answer back at me.
‘Of course I joined,’ he said. ‘Everyone did.’
It wasn’t quite as convincing a response as I had expected. There was something open-ended about it, as if his membership might have been less than voluntary. However, I didn’t want to annoy him, so we talked about his family, his son, who was in the military, and his early years in the police in Ganzhou. It was only when the subject came round to his parents again that the conversation became more stilted.
‘Can I ask what happened to your parents?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘I mean,’ I stuttered, ‘not your foster parents, but your real parents.’
‘My foster parents are my real parents,’ he replied, somewhat tersely. ‘Either way, all of them are dead.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I replied.
‘Don’t be,’ he said. ‘They died over 40 years ago serving their country. That’s all that matters.’
I did a quick calculation in my head. That meant they had died in the 1960s, during Mao’s massively catastrophic Great Leap Forward, a time of huge unrest and famine in which millions of Chinese perished. Had they been caught up in that turmoil? Would I be game enough to ask? As it turned out, I didn’t get the chance.
Zhou cut the meeting short by saying he was tired and that he hoped I would have a safe journey home. His housekeeper was summoned and we were politely escorted out. On the landing outside Zhou’s apartment, Tong expressed his doubts.
‘He’s hiding something,’ he said finally.
The battlements that surround Ganzhou
TWENTY-THREE
AROUND THE CORNER WAS THE OLD HOTEL I HAD STUMBLED ACROSS the day before. It was quiet now, with no sign of the wedding guests, although there were flower petals floating in the gutter outside. We walked in looking for a drink and found the bar was open. They served Chinese beer and spirits and a strange green liquid inside a bottle that also contained a gutted reptile.
‘Lizard wine,’ said Tong. ‘Have you tried it?’
‘No.’
‘Then don’t,’ he muttered. ‘Terrible stuff.’
The bar occupied a corner of a large, ornate room with high ceilings, gold Corinthian pillars and great swathes of red carpet. Someone had spilt something in the middle and a woman was on her knees, rubbing at it with a soft brush and soapy water. Gold-painted chairs and tables were stacked to one side, waiting to be put away in storage. Aside from ourselves, there were three men drinking cheap whisky and talking in loud voices that suggested this wasn’t their first round, as well as, at another table, a group of older men who sat quietly round a bottle of Napoleon brandy and watched the other table’s revelry disapprovingly over the top of their spectacles.
We settled in at one end of the bar and ordered a large bottle of Tsingtao beer, then reviewed the events of that afternoon with Zhou Fung Mu. Tong was convinced that not all was quite right with the retired cop.
‘Richard,’ he said, ‘in my business you get a feeling for people. Some of them will tell you they’ll pay on time and you know in your bones they will. Others will tell you the same, but you can tell it may be months before you see a single yuan. My feeling here is that Zhou is saying one thing but thinking another. He’s holding something back.’
‘You believe he did have something to do with the boy’s death?’
‘I don’t know. But when you brought up the subject it caught him out, just for a second. It was like he wasn’t expecting it.’
Tong couldn’t be any more specific, so we left it at that and poured the cool beer into small glasses. The first bottle went quickly, so we ordered another. After a third and a fourth we’d tired of beer and moved onto brandy.
‘I thought Muslims couldn’t drink,’ I said, slurring slightly after an hour.
‘This one does,’ he smiled.
I hadn’t had much to drink in months and, perhaps unwisely, I was knocking it back like water. I remember joining the vocal group of me
n and challenging them to drink the lizard wine. It was brought to the table and the challenge was accepted; fresh glasses appeared and the cap from the bottle was ripped off and thrown away. But what happened after that is still a blur; it was as if the lights went out.
The next morning I woke up in my hotel room, as sick as a dog and cursing my stupidity. I couldn’t recall anything of the night before. When I ran into Tong later that day, however, he filled in the gory details, much to his amusement.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I groaned.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It happens to all of us. It was a great night. Incredible really.’
‘I’m not sure about that,’ I protested weakly.
‘You can’t remember?’
I shook my head. Tong was grinning from ear to ear.
‘Then you don’t recall who else came into the bar? You were talking to her for about an hour.’
‘Who?’
‘Zhou’s housekeeper, that’s who.’
According to Tong, the housekeeper had come to collect her drunken husband from the bar and found us all together. She’d stayed herself and had apparently knocked back a few rice wines in the process, thereby loosening her tongue on the subject of her employer. A clearly more sober Tong had had the smarts to ask some rather pertinent questions, for which the answers were soon forthcoming.
‘And?’ I prompted.
‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he replied.
‘Try me.’
‘She believes — and in fact so do a lot of people round here — that Zhou is the boy.’
‘What?!’
‘Crazy world, huh? Zhou is roughly the right age, he was raised by foster parents, and he even looks a bit like Mao, if you ask me. He’s certainly the right height.’
I sat down. This was all too much to take in, and my head was throbbing incessantly as if being pummelled by a thousand pile-drivers. On the other hand, I couldn’t have been happier.
I stammered, ‘But the journalist in Ruijin said the boy was dead and insinuated that Zhou knew all about it.’
‘Maybe,’ said Tong, ‘what your friend meant was that Zhou had killed Little Mao by denying he was that person.’
‘Which would explain why Zhou laughed when I talked about the boy in the past tense. He was enjoying the fact that he knew he was very much alive. Not only that, he was in the room!’
When the excitement died down, one thing that didn’t make any sense was why Zhou would deny it. I was mulling this over, unsuccessfully trying to piece the puzzle together, when Tong suddenly sat upright.
‘It’s obvious,’ he said.
Tong then outlined a theory that possibly explained Zhou’s dilemma. His parents had died in the Great Leap Forward, which was Mao’s great plan to lead China into an industrial age, but which instead resulted in disaster. If Zhou was Little Mao, then his father had killed his foster parents.
‘Do you see it now?’ Tong asked excitedly. ‘How would you feel if the people who had brought you up, who gave you everything in life — food, water, education, warmth and love — were then taken from you? And how would you feel if you knew that it was all because of one man — your father?’
The weight of this man’s misery could now be clearly seen, as well as the reason for his reluctance to acknowledge any connection with Mao. I sensed hatred too. So many lives had been harmed through Mao’s own burning ambition and his Communist ideology, and yet here was one victim that no one could have predicted: his own son.
Tong was the first to speak: ‘So what do you want to do now?’
‘First things first, something for this,’ I said, massaging my temples. ‘Then, let’s go and see if we can talk to him one last time.’
TWENTY-FOUR
IN MY LIBRARY AT HOME I HAD READ WHAT LITTLE THERE WAS available on He Zizhen. The information I found described her as a formidable young woman in her own right, even before she’d met and married Mao. Intelligent, quick-witted and blessed with a determination to make a better life not just for herself, but also for her people, she was also someone for whom family was everything. Their marriage was a union of two revolutionaries, but when the march ended and the Revolution approached its successful climax, they fought each other more than they did the Nationalists. Mao’s interest in other women was something He Zizhen could not accept. She was not a political wife in that regard, who might turn a blind eye to a powerful husband’s infidelities. To Yan’an in 1937, where the marchers had made a home in the caves of Shaanxi province, there came pretty young things from the cities, who caught Mao’s eye with their lipstick and fanciful ways. The marriage was as good as over when He Zizhen used her fists against Agnes Smedley, a young and attractive American journalist whose interest in Communism in China extended to a flirtation with its leader. Mao, who probably felt his new and powerful position warranted a different kind of partner, then had He Zizhen sent away to Moscow for ‘treatment’. It was true she had suffered injuries on the Long March that would plague her for years afterwards, and the sadness connected to ‘Little Mao’ had damaged her mentally, but really it was just a way to remove her from the scene.
Naturally this further deprived He Zizhen of opportunities to look for her missing son, so the years she spent in Moscow did her more harm than good. By the time she returned in 1947, Mao had already divorced her and married Lan Ping. Though He Zizhen later became the chair of a women’s union south of Shanghai in Zhejiang province, a life in Beijing politics was never possible. It’s likely she spent the rest of her years wondering what might have been. And almost certainly the question that would have troubled her the most, right up until her death in Shanghai in 1984, where she lived alone, was what had happened to Little Mao?
Back in my hotel room I rummaged through my bag in search of painkillers, found two and knocked them back with a swig of water. I was about to zip the bag up again when I suddenly noticed the tiny silver heart, neatly sewn into the inner lining so that it wouldn’t be knocked about or broken. The bag was an old and trusted one, and I recalled many years before carefully sewing that heart in place. It was plastic, no larger than the size of a child’s little fingernail, and came from a Christmas cracker my wife and I had opened a long time before in our West London flat. It was a part of us that I carried around — secretly, quietly, almost without knowing — and each time I bought a new travel bag I’d unpick that heart and sew it into its new home. Sometimes I feared I might forget to do that, and the heart with all its memories might be lost to the rubbish heap, or to a new owner who might consider it worthless and have it cut out.
As my thoughts returned to He Zizhen, I realised how trivial such fears were in comparison to the scale and severity of her loss. She must have suffered enormously. I wondered then what Zhou Fung Mu would think if he knew the level of He Zizhen’s despair at his disappearance. If he really was her son, would that not help him find forgiveness and break the trap he was in? The knowledge of her love might be the lifeline to rescue him from hate.
TWENTY-FIVE
IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, AS THE SHADOW OF THE ANCIENT CITY walls creeps ever eastwards, Tong and I find him waiting for us in his apartment.
‘I knew you would come,’ he says at the door.
His housekeeper has apologised and told him all he needs to know. There is a philosophical note to his voice, as if he finally has to confront the demons that simply won’t leave him alone.
He invites us in and we sit in the same chairs as before. He notices me stealing a glance down the hall to the kitchen where there is a notable absence of noise.
‘It’s her day off,’ he says, without being asked.
I begin by apologising for the interruption, but he stops me halfway through.
‘Remember yesterday, when I asked you about people not wanting to be found? And you said you would respect their privacy. Well, I am asking you for that privacy. No photographs, no names, no story in the papers — at least while I am alive. Can you promise m
e that?’
I think long and hard about this, as it means giving up so much of what I’ve been working for. But then I agree.
‘Once I’m gone you can do as you want. It can be your story. But, for the moment, it is mine. Do you understand this?’
Again, I nod in acceptance of his conditions.
He places his hands on his knees: ‘Then let’s begin.’
Zhou Fung Mu gave me his life story that day, which is one of the most haunting stories I’ve ever heard. Sometimes I had to remind myself this was real and not a fairy tale. He talked of a China long ago and of a delightful childhood, including days spent gathering wild mushrooms with his adopted mother to make broth or working the oxen behind the plough with his adopted father. Though the family was of peasant class, he was schooled at home because his mother was a teacher. At first, he wanted to be a teacher also, but there was no money for university and so he had simply continued to work the land into his mid-twenties. When the local Communists commandeered the farm during the Great Leap Forward, it coincided with several years of severe drought. Never had he hated anyone as much as he did the Communist soldiers who came and emptied the family’s stores of rice. With no seed to sow and no food to eat, his mother and father succumbed to a plague in the winter that followed.
Now alone, he ventured into the city and eventually found work with the police. He was tall and strong after years of farming, and these physical qualities earned him the respect of his colleagues, as well as a number of promotions that placed him in positions of ever-increasing authority. Once, on meeting the local Communist Party leader, he recognised him as one of those thieving Communist soldiers from years before. Emboldened with liquor, the Party leader boasted of his skill as a wrestler, so Zhou challenged him to a bout and, in the ring, snapped both his arms like twigs.
It was around this time that people started remarking how similar he was to the great Mao, then at the height of his political powers in Beijing, and the story began to spread that Zhou was Mao An Hong. People zeroed in on the genetic traits that seemed to link him to Mao, from the way he walked (a product of both Zhou and Mao being quite tall) to the authoritative way he spoke. People even whispered in hushed tones that his hair was parted in the same fashion.
A Boy of China Page 21