The Mao Case

by Unknown

  “Hold on, Mr. Diao. In your book, you mention a special team from Beijing. So those men were from that team?”

  “The fishmonger had no idea who they were, but they stood around her, keeping others away from the scene. When an ambulance finally arrived, she was long dead.”

  “Did the police come?”

  “It took hours for a police car to arrive. What did they do? They tried to wash away the bloodstains on the curb. For that matter, they didn’t do it thoroughly. Flies swirled around the dark red spots for days.”

  “What a tragic fate!”

  “A fate full of twists and turns,” Diao said, finishing a duck-stuffed pancake and wiping the sauce stain on his fingers with the napkin, as though wiping away memories. “As you know, she first became well-known in the forties. She must have attracted a lot of men — rich and powerful ones — and that shadowed her after 1949. Things were different in the early fifties. Young lovers kissing in Bund Park then could have been detained for pursuing a ‘bourgeois lifestyle.’ But Shang continued to lead a ‘notorious bourgeois life.’ What’s worse, her husband got into political trouble, which spelled the end of her career.

  “It was then that a guiren appeared in her life. Guiren — you know, an important man who brings about a change of luck into one’s life. One day, she got a handwritten note from the mayor of Shanghai, ‘Please come, Comrade Shang.’ So she hurried to the China-Russia Friendship Hall, where she was received by Mao. There was a grand dance party that evening. Swirling in Mao’s arms, she told him about her troubles. Shortly afterward, she was assigned new movie roles, one after another. In the fifties, the movie industry was state controlled and planned. Only a few movies were made each year. A lot of talented actors and actresses couldn’t get parts — whether or not they had political problems. Against all odds, in one movie she played a militia woman, for which she even won a major award. She visited several foreign countries as a member of a Chinese artists delegation. And at a convention, the Party leaders would receive the delegation members before or after those visits abroad. So she appeared in newspaper pictures together with Mao.”

  “You have done a thorough study, Mr. Diao.”

  “Let me say one thing about my research. Even in the official publications, Mao’s passion for dancing has been acknowledged. After 1949, social dancing was condemned and banned as part and parcel of the bourgeois lifestyle, but within the high walls of the Forbidden City, Mao still danced to his heart’s content. According to the interpretation given in the People’s Daily, Mao worked so hard for China that these parties were necessary to provide relaxation for our great leader. But that’s nonsense. As for what happened after he danced with Shang, I don’t think I have to go into graphic details.”

  “No, you don’t,” Chen said. “But I have a question. During those years, perhaps there weren’t too many gifted partners in the Forbidden City. As a celebrated actress before 1949, Shang must have danced well. Could it be that Mao came to her for that reason?”

  “It takes a couple of hours for a young girl to learn how to dance like a pro. Mao was no dancing master. There was no need for him to go to the trouble to look for a partner in another city. Mao wasn’t without rivals at the top, in those days. Even his special train was bugged. What would people say about his relationship with such a notorious actress?” Diao went on, putting a crispy duck tongue into his mouth. “But he couldn’t help it. When he first met her, she was in her mid-thirties, in the full bloom of a woman’s beauty, elegant, highly educated, and from a good family too. Her dancing was like waves rippling in the breeze, like clouds wafting in the sky. And he could have watched her movies as early as in Yan’an. Madam Mao was also an actress, we shouldn’t forget that.”

  “Mao had an actress fetish, you mean?”

  “whatever you want to call it, Shang’s fate changed dramatically.”

  “But could it be some local officials contributed to the change in her life? Seeing her as Mao’s favorite partner, they tried to curry favor. Mao might not have been aware of it.”

  “They wouldn’t have gone out of their way for one of his partners,” Diao said. “He had so many. They knew that. And the poems Mao wrote for her were unmistakable.”

  “Poems — ‘The Militia Woman,’ right?”

  “So you’ve also heard about that poem? Actually, there’s another one, ‘Ode to the Plum Blossom.’ ”

  “Really!” Chen said, remembering what he had discussed with Long about the poems. “Are you sure? Did you see a scroll of that poem that Mao wrote for her?”

  “No, I didn’t, but the meaning of the poem is obvious. ‘Pretty, she does not claim the spring for herself, / content to be a herald of spring. / When hills are ablaze with wildflowers, / in their midst she smiles.’ It’s really in the tradition of the Book of Poems. In the first poem of that collection, an emperor’s virtuous wife rejoices at his finding a new love. Shang would have known better than to exhibit such a scroll at home, I would think,” Diao said thoughtfully. “I interviewed some of her neighbors, and according to one, there was a scroll on the wall of the bedroom. But it was a poem by Wang Cangling, a Tang-dynasty poet, entitled ‘Deserted Imperial Concubine at Changxing Chamber.’ ”

  “Yes, I know it. ‘At dawn, having swept the courtyard / with the broom, she has nothing else / to do, except to twirl, / and twirl the round silk fan / in her fingers. Exquisite as jade, / she cannot compete with the autumn crow flying / overhead, which still carries the warmth / from the Imperial Sun Palace.’ ”

  “The meaning of the poem is unmistakable,” Daio said, nodding in approval. “Her complaining about the emperor’s neglect, feeling worse than an autumn crow that still carries the warmth, as it were, from the Imperial Sun Palace.”

  “But Shang was no imperial concubine.”

  “He might have made some promise to her. Then the choice of the poem in her bedroom would make perfect sense.”

  “You have a point,” Chen said. “Was there anything else unusual about her that you found out but didn’t mention in your writing?”

  “Let me think. There were some details, but I didn’t pay much attention to them,” Diao said, picking up a piece of pickled garlic. “Oh, she had a passion for photography, among other things.”

  “You mean she liked taking pictures?”

  “Yes. I tried to find some of those pictures for the book. According to her neighbors, she took a lot of pictures of Qian, but the special group from Beijing must have taken them all away. That’s another thing she and Madam Mao have in common. They both loved photography. A weird coincidence. Not many Chinese in the sixties could afford cameras. Shang even did her own developing, having converted a storage room into an occasional darkroom.”

  “That’s unusual,” Chen said.

  The waitress reappeared with a golden cart, on which she brought to their table an impressive array of special dishes.

  “Shark fin stewed in the shape of Buddha’s fingers, camel paw braised with scallion, Mandarin-duck-like prawns, abalone in white sauce —”

  “Why like Buddha’s fingers?” Diao asked again. “The Empress Dowager had long, long fingernails, like Buddha’s,” the waitress explained glibly. “In her day, people at the palace called her Old Buddha —”

  “Thank you. We’ll enjoy them at our leisure,” Chen cut her short before she could start an elaborate introduction. “If we need anything else, we’ll let you know.”

  “A different question, Mr. Diao,” Chen said as the cart wheeled out of the room. “In her last days, did Shang say anything concerning Mao to the Red Guards or to the special team from Beijing?”

  “I talked to the Red Guards from her movie studio. According to them, she said something to the effect that Chairman Mao knew how much she loved him. No one took it seriously. At least not in the sense that she might have been suggesting. Every one could have said those words at the time. But I know nothing about what she might have said to the special team.”

&
nbsp; “Now, why a special team from Beijing?”

  “A common interpretation is that it was because of Madam Mao. Her persecution of her ex-fellow artists was brought up in the charges against her after the Cultural Revolution. For her, those who knew of her notorious past, especially those with old newspapers and letters in their possession, had to be silenced. Another guess was that it was because of Madam Mao’s jealousy. Once she became the head of the CPC Cultural Revolution Group, she ran amuck for her revenge. Several people who were supposedly ‘intimate and close’ to Mao were persecuted to death. Weishi, a young and beautiful Russian interpreter for Mao, was thrown into jail at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and found dead in a stinking cell there, stark naked, her body bruised all over.”

  “Madam Mao worshipped Empress Lu of the Han dynasty, lauding her to the skies during the Cultural Revolution. I’m no scholar, but I remember one story about Empress Lu,” Chen commented, chopsticking up a piece of shark fin shaped like a Buddha’s finger. “After the emperor died, Empress Lu threw his favorite concubine into jail. Cutting off her ex-rival’s arms and legs, severing her tongue, and gouging out her eyes. The empress kept the mutilated woman moaning and writhing in a sordid cell that was a stinking sty, her body naked and soiled. Empress Lu chose to show the woman to her own son like that, saying that it was a human pig.”

  “Yes, her son never recovered from the shock, fell sick and died. That’s another story, of course.”

  “So I have a question, Mr. Diao. Empress Lu did that after the death of the emperor. Madam Mao attacked her rivals when Mao was still alive. Wasn’t she afraid of him?”

  “That was a question for me too. She described herself as a dog loyal to Mao, biting and attacking whomever he wanted her to. He might have needed her badly during the Cultural Revolution. Besides, Mao cared little for women no longer in his favor,” Diao said, taking a careful bite at the abalone. “This is the first abalone I’ve ever had.”

  It was not the first for Chen, but it was the first time he was paying for it. He waited for Diao to continue.

  “He dumped his wife Kaihui, without so much as divorcing her or notifying her, when he married Zizhen in the Jinggang Mountains,” Diao went on. “In fact, Kaihui’s death resulted from his siege of Changsha, a consequence he should have anticipated. After the Long March, he dumped Zizhen like another worn-out mop, letting her suffer alone in a Moscow mental institution, while he wallowed in the clouding and raining on the Kang bed with Madam Mao. So he dumped Shang, just one of the women he had slept with. It’s no surprise he didn’t do anything to help her.”

  “That’s unbelievable,” Chen said, the slice of the stewed camel paw slipping from his chopsticks, splashing gravy out of the platter. He had no idea how the emperors could have enjoyed the fatty greasy taste.

  “Think about what happened to Liu Shaoqi. Once the chairman of the People’s Republic of China, he, too, died naked in prison without any medical treatment, and his body was instantly cremated under a false name. Mao was so cold-blooded.”

  “Leaving Mao aside, you mentioned in the book that the special team put a lot of pressure on Shang, to try and make her cooperate, but what could they have been trying to obtain from her?”

  “From what I learned, it was something like ‘her evil plan to harm Mao.’ No one believed it.”

  “Then what do you think it could be?”

  “For one thing, an unpublished poem to her in his calligraphy.”

  “That’s intriguing. A poem knocked off during a moment of amorous passion?” Chen said. But would that have triggered a special team from Beijing? After all, a poem could be open to many interpretations, unless it was downright erotic or obscene. He doubted it. “whatever it might be, did they find it?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t think so.”

  “So could Shang have left it to her daughter Qian?”

  “Not likely. Like other kids of black family background, Qian denounced Shang, and she didn’t come back home until after Shang’s death. No, Shang had no time to do so before jumping out of the window.”

  “So Qian went through a dramatic change — from one radically cut off from her black family to one hopelessly lost in bourgeois carnival passion?”

  “She was a girl traumatized at a young age, plagued by those stories about Shang’s ‘shameless sex saga,’ ” Diao said. “I don’t want to be too hard on her.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. Qian, too, suffered a lot. But her death too was quite suspicious, I’ve heard.”

  “Her death was an accident — almost at the end of the Cultural Revolution. I don’t see anything suspicious about it.”

  “I see,” Chen said, picking up a pork-stuffed sesame cake, a surprisingly ordinary snack that tasted more agreeable than the exotic delicacies. “You must have talked to Jiao too.”

  “She knew little about her mother, let alone her grandmother. An ill-fated girl.”

  Diao must have contacted Jiao a couple of years earlier and was unaware of the subsequent change in her life.

  “She’s doing fine now, I think,” Chen said. “Now, tell me more about what happened to Qian after Shang’s death.”

  “Qian was driven out of her apartment —”

  “Immediately?”

  “No, two or three months after Shang’s death.”

  “So, hypothetically, she could have looked around the apartment for something left behind by Shang.”

  “Well, Shang could have left something behind, but the place had been turned upside down by the special group —”

  Once again the waitress entered, serving the celebrated duck soup. The table now appeared overcrowded, several dishes untouched or hardly touched.

  “The emperor’s way. You have to have a table full of dishes. Symbolically complete,” the waitress said, smiling before retracing her light-footed steps, “like the complete banquet of the Manchurian and Han.”

  “That’s why people want to be an emperor, paying for a banquet they cannot finish,” Diao said, putting a spoonful of the soup into his mouth. “The soup is hot.”

  “One can see meaning in anything from the perspective one chooses. For a different question, was there anyone else close to Shang in her last years?”

  “No. There’s a superstitious belief about an emperor-favored woman being different, almost divine, through the cloud and rain. In ancient China, the imperial concubines or palace ladies had to remain single all their lives, even after the demise of the emperor. Untouchable, forbidden too, like part of the Forbidden City. People could have heard of her relationship with Mao. They may have known better than to get involved with her.”

  “But I don’t necessarily mean in that sense — not necessarily men.”

  “She didn’t have any close friends, not with such a well-guarded secret.” Diao added broodingly, “Well, except perhaps for that maid of hers, who had been with Shang before her first marriage and stayed with her until the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution.”

  “Yes, there are stories about exemplary relationships between master and servants, mistress and maid, in classical Chinese literature. Like in the play Seeking and Saving the Only Heir of the Zhao. It even inspired Brecht, as I recall. So do you think Shang could have trusted her?”

  “You’re no literary novice, Mr. Chen,” Diao said, casting him a sharp look.

  “I’m a novice beside you,” Chen said, regretting that a moment of unrestrained bookishness had given him away.

  “If it was something concerning Mao, I don’t think Shang would have given it to the maid. The maid, because of her class status, could have easily denounced Shang in those years.”

  “But did you hear anything about the maid after Shang’s death?”

  “In my research about Jiao’s childhood, I learned that nobody visited the girl in the orphanage except an unidentified old woman who came a couple of times. I’m not sure if it’s the maid, who must have been old then,” Diao said, visibly more and more
uncomfortable with the direction of the talk. He must have started to suspect Chen’s purpose. He glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry, I have to go back to babysitting, Mr. Chen. This lunch has taken much longer than I expected. You may call me if you have other questions.”

  It was almost three. A long, protracted lunch. Chen also rose, shaking hands with Diao, watching him leave.

  Afterward, Chen sat alone in the private room for several minutes, facing the littered table, on which a number of dishes remained untouched.

  He then picked up his cell phone and dialed Old Hunter in Shanghai, while meeting the glare of a golden dragon embossed on the vermilion-painted pillar.

  TWENTY-ONE

  IN THE HOT-WATER HOUSE, Old Hunter sat alone, drinking tea in silence, in the afternoon sunlight.

  The hot-water house was far less than a tea house, with the sort of dual function of providing hot water to the neighborhood and tea to occasional customers. There were only a couple of rough wooden tables behind the stove. There were several cheap snack booths nearby. In the past, people sometimes came to the hot-water house with baked cakes and steamed buns, spent a penny or two for a cup of tea, then would talk and enjoy themselves like lords.

  But Shanghai was rapidly turning into a city of contrasts and contradictions. Across the street stood expensive new apartment buildings, but here beside the hot-water house, it remained pretty much a slum. In fact, no tea-drinking customers came in for hours.

  It suited Old Hunter well, though. He didn’t have to play a role. An old, non — Big Buck tea drinker, that’s what he was, even bringing in his own tea. All he needed to pay for was the hot water. He could sit there for hours, talking about the tea to the proprietor, or, like that afternoon, drinking tea alone without a single waiter walking around with a long-billed kettle, ready to serve.

  The tea was getting cold but was still black as hell. He had put in a large handful of oolong, trying to revive himself with extra-strong tea. It was because of the scene he had caught at Jiao’s window last night and had continued watching, sitting there across the street, late into the night. As a result, the next day, he was feeling as groggy as a sick cat.