Further life and times of *liltayinchina*

I’ve just finished a book called Wild Swans. In it, the author details the lives of her grandmother, her mother and herself chronologically from her grandmother’s birth in 1909 in Northern China to her own life and her time in Mao’s communist regime. I’ve just read of Mao’s death and have a few thoughts of my own on the subject.

What strikes me first is that the self-created god died four years before my birth. So it seems natural that he stands in my minds eye a few shades fuzzier than say, Bob Hope or Ronald Regan. I mention these two men because to me, Mao was never a dictator or demagogue, he was a cultural ICON. Hope was an ancient entertainer and Regan was purveyed to me in parody rather than politics, thanks to pop culture.

Even though I didn’t understand the lyric, my first encounter with his name might have been through John Lennon’s lips: You can’t go around carrying pictures of Chairman Mao. And I suppose my first real acknowledgement of his face came from Andy Warhol’s famous prints. From my understanding of the artist’s other iconographic appropriations, Warhol’s deification of Mao put the Chairman benignly in the category of the celebrity of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup. If I am embarrassing you with my lack of worldly understanding and my naiveté, let me say that it is for a cause. I’m trying to show that the man who wanted to be a god, managed to orchestrate his own history as if from beyond the grave. Perhaps all truths are proven in time, but will it be too late for Mao? Will the discoverers of history place blame where it is due, or will they revere the image so long put before them and spread the blame to those who seem placed in history by Mao for just such the purpose? Here I speak of the Gang of Four, led by Mao’s own ruthless and pitiless wife.

And having just read of a woman’s life under his policies from birth to the age of 25, I see that the man carried out the exact purpose of his time on earth: to be remembered forever and ever as a mythical legend of a man. Known less for what he did and more for the mystery shrouding his extreme godliness. For here is one woman who suffered so greatly, and she can speak of countless others. Yet whose story do I know better? I won’t say that Mao wasn’t shrouded in mystery, but his benevolent smile made it easy to believe the myth. And that smile still shines down, oppressively so, on the passersby in Tiananmen Square.

In Shanghai, at the propaganda poster museum, there were many, many posters portraying a pre-Long March Mao. He wears a long faded-blue gown, in the style of a monk. One hand clutches a book of unknown title while the other hand is raised in a magnanimous, yet vague gesture. His face carries a serene and beatific smile and a halo of light surrounds his head. Had these pictures been replaced with the ones adorning my great-grandmother’s Sunday school walls, my little understanding of Jesus could have helped in creating a belief that the only son of God had been Chinese.

At the time of Mao’s death, the author of Wild Swans, Jung Chang, was finishing a degree in English studies. She writes of incredulous stories written about China and Mao from the perspective of foreign visitors after returning from tours of China. She marvels at the lack of understanding and the lack of information. Yet, if the people of China continued to view Mao as a god and as a benevolent leader, how could it be possible that the outside world would know more or even glimpse the real story?

After this one account, and it is extremely detailed, of the events that unfolded during Mao’s reign, I find any doting impression of the Chairman to be a grave error in judgment and a misunderstanding of the brutality he willingly thrust upon his people. And I’m speaking of the uses of his image in Western pop culture. In China, the confusion and continued loyalty to Mao are only slightly understandable to me, an outsider. But, let it be said that Wild Swans, just one woman’s account of the tragedy the Cultural Revolution made of her parents’ and friends’ and family’s lives, isn’t available to Chinese people. This particular copy was bought for a friend of mine in England and I’ve borrowed it from her.

I suppose this mini-tirade of mine was written out of surprise at my own ignorance. But I’d like to bring a strange loyalty of my own to light and through it, attempt to create a link to why information about Mao and his reign of terror is so difficult to access. Loyalties are strange beasts and it is impossible to ascertain their origins. I am from Alabama. Many terrible things happened in my home state, let alone my hometown of Birmingham. Some of those things continue to happen to this day, and so I find it easier to live in a city (Seattle) where my own points of view are echoed. And yet, to this day, the moment a harsh or critical word is spoken of Birmingham, Alabama or the South in general, I bristle and defend with an ardor that surprises even me. I don’t know where this loyalty comes from, but deep inside, I find that I’d take the bad with the good because I appreciate the good things about the South that outsiders just can’t and don’t understand. And maybe that’s why it is so hard to find a man or woman over 50 in China who will speak of Mao with bitter tones. There seems to always be deference, even if there is sadness and pain. Mao may have done atrocious things, but he also did things that brought light into the darkest lives, leaving them a dull shade of grey.

In my current mood of intense optimism, I look forward to learning more about Mao and the people surrounding him, helping him with his deification. The Cultural Revolution and Mao himself are still a curtained mystery to me, but I can almost sense the day when I will recollect his image as rooted in history and not as silk-screened on a T-shirt or an expensive canvas in an air-conditioned museum.