The Mao Case Read online

  “In Japan, tea drinking is advocated as a sort of cultivated art. That’s bull. You enjoy the tea, not all the fuss about it,” Old Hunter said. “It’s like in an old proverb: an idiot returns the invaluable pearl but keeps the gaudy box.”

  “You’re quite right, especially with a collection of old sayings to back you up.” Chen nodded, turning to the waitress with a smile. “We will enjoy the tea for ourselves. You don’t have to stay with us and serve.”

  “That’s the way it is done in our tea house,” she said, blushing in embarrassment. “It is very fashionable nowadays.”

  “We’re old-fashioned. You cannot carve anything fashionable out of a piece of rotten wood,” he concluded. “Thank you.”

  “Sorry,” Chen said after the waitress left. “This is the only tea house I could think of — with a private room where we could talk, I mean.”

  “I see,” Old Hunter said. “What’s new under the sun, Chief?”

  “Oh, we haven’t talked for a long time.”

  That was an excuse, Old Hunter knew, so he asked casually, “So you’re enjoying your vacation?”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “In this world of ours, eight or nine times out of ten, things will not work out in accordance to your life’s plan, but as the ancient proverb tells us, who knows if it’s fortune or misfortune when the old man of Sai loses his horse? A vacation will do you good, Chief. You’ve worked too hard.”

  “I wish I could tell you more about fortune or misfortune,” Chen responded elusively, “but I’m not taking vacation for personal reasons.”

  “I understand. You know what? For the last few months, I’ve been enjoying the Suzhou opera version of the Romance of Three Kingdoms. The lines at the end are simply fantastic. ‘So many things, past and present, are told by others like stories over a cup of tea.’ ”

  “You do have a passion for Suzhou opera,” Chen said. “Time really flies. When I first read Romance of Three Kingdoms, I was still an elementary school student. There was a lot I didn’t understand in the novel. For example, the episode about Cao Cao building his tombs in secrecy.”

  “Yes, I remember — he built several tombs and killed all the workers afterward. So no one knew the location of the real tomb. And Cao Cao was not the only one. There was also the First Emperor of Qing, who had human beings as well as terracotta soldiers buried with him in different tombs.”

  “Indeed, knowledge of the emperor’s secret could be deadly.”

  Old Hunter put down the teacup, detecting a strange note in the younger cop, who wouldn’t have invited him out simply for a leisurely talk about the emperors and their tombs.

  “So is that what worries you, Chief?”

  Chen nodded without responding to the question and raised a teacup. “Look at the phrase on the cup. ‘A long, eternal life!’ Originally, that was a chant for the emperors. During the Cultural Revolution, the first English sentence I learned was ‘A long, eternal life to Chairman Mao!’ Exactly the same phrase as was used with regard to the emperors for thousands of years. Mao surely knew that, but did he object to it?”

  Old Hunter began to suspect that there was a secret investigation concerning Mao. He had worked with Chen, though not as his partner, and they trusted each other. Chen would usually have come to the point directly. But anything involving Mao would make the situation different. Chen had to be cautious — and not just for himself. Whatever the situation, Old Hunter had to assure Chen of his support.

  “You hit the nail on the head, Chief. Mao was a modern emperor, for all his talk about Marxism and communism. During the Cultural Revolution, whatever he said — a sentence, a phrase — was called ‘the supreme decree,’ and we had to celebrate by beating drums and marching under the scorching sun through the streets. And you couldn’t complain about the heat. Once I even suffered sunstroke. In ancient times, an emperor was compared to the sun, but Mao simply was the sun. One politburo member was thrown in jail for the crime of slander against Mao, because he wrote an article about the black spots on the sun.”

  “You know a lot about those years, but it may not be fair to judge Mao on something like that, considering the long feudalistic history in China,” Chen said.

  “I don’t know about the so-called feudalistic history — not a familiar term to me. An emperor is an emperor, that’s all I know.” Old Hunter took a slow sip at his tea, the tea leaves unfurling unexpectedly, like tadpoles in the white cup. “Now, let me tell you about a case I had toward the end of the Cultural Revolution.

  “In Suzhou opera, a story has to be told from the very beginning. To understand the things that happened during the Cultural Revolution, you have to learn about it from the beginning.”

  “You certainly talk like a Suzhou opera singer,” Chen said, “using tricks like enriching your speech with proverbs and tantalizing the audience with digressions before coming to a crucial point. Yes, please, start at the very beginning. The tea is just beginning to be tasty, and I’m all ears.”

  “I was about your age at the time, Chief. Li Guohua, then the associate Party secretary, gave me an assignment — the first ‘major political case’ in my career. In those days, everyone believed wholeheartedly in Mao and the communist propaganda. A low-level cop, I was so proud of working for the proletarian dictatorship. I swore to fight for Mao just like those young Red Guards. So I secretly called that case a Mao case.”

  “A Mao case?”

  “Oh, it gave such a tremendous boost to my ego. It was just like pulling a large flag over my body as if it were a ‘tiger skin.’ The suspect in the case was named Teng, a middle school teacher accused of slandering Mao in his class. Born in a worker’s family and a member of the Communist Youth League, Teng was dating a girl with a good political family background, so he appeared to be an unlikely culprit. He had no motive whatsoever. So I went over to the school, where Teng had already been in isolation interrogation for days.”

  “How did Teng commit this crime?”

  “I’m coming to it, Chen. You cannot enjoy the steaming hot tofu if you are so impatient,” Old Hunter said, holding his cup high in the air. “In those years, Mao’s poems made up a large part of the middle school textbook. In class, Teng was said to have given a viciously slanderous interpretation of one of Mao’s poems. However, Teng insisted that what he presented to the class was based on official publications, that he had done a lot of research and preparation beforehand —”

  “Hold on, which poem are you talking about?”

  “Mao’s poem to his wife Yang Kaihui.”

  “Ah, that one — ‘I lost my proud Yang, and you lost your Liu —’” Chen said, murmuring the first line of the poem. “In my middle school years, that poem was held up as a perfect example of revolutionary romanticism. In a flight of imagination, Mao described Kaihui’s loyal soul flying up to the moon, where the Moon Goddess danced and served of osmanthus-fermented wine to her, and she shed tears in a pouring rain upon learning of the victory of the Communist Party. Mao missed his first wife very much —”

  “No, his second wife,” Old Hunter cut him short. “Mao actually had a first wife, Luo, at his old home in Hunan. According to Mao’s official biography, Luo and Mao got hitched through an arranged marriage. So he didn’t acknowledge Luo as his wife, though he had lived with her for no less than two or three years. Of course, no detail of their married life ever appeared in official publications. Then he fell in love with Kaihui and married her. This time, the marriage was seen as a revolutionary act, under the circumstances.”

  “Old Hunter, you are a Mao authority. I should have known that earlier.” Chen raised his cup. “I’m sorry that it’s only tea, but cheers to your expertise.”

  “Damn my expertise!” Old Hunter said, waving his hand. “Getting back to the case in question. According to Teng, he was trying to show his students what great sacrifices Mao had made for the revolution. His younger brother, his wife Kaihui, their children, and then the children by his ne
xt wife, Zizhen, all of them either died or were lost to their parents for the sake of revolution —”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” Chen cut in again.

  “That’s what I thought too. So I had a hard time straightening things out. Teng had been in isolation interrogation for days and was already a broken man only capable of repeating his statement over and over like a robot, ‘I just put together information from several books. The books must have it wrong.’

  “So I interviewed his colleagues. They all declared that Teng did a conscientious job — at least on the surface. There was no copy machine in schools in the seventies. He had to work his butt off cutting stencils, copying passages from a number of books, proofreading all of it by himself, and paying for it out of his own pocket. I gathered together the information he had collected, including that concerning Mao’s second wife, Kaihui, and third wife, Zizhen. The material Teng distributed to his students was from official publications — and all written in an effort to eulogize Mao’s revolutionary spirit, no question about it.

  “But here was the problem. One of the students read through the material and said in the class, ‘Teacher Teng, there’s a mistake. Chairman Mao couldn’t have married Zizhen that year.’ Now Teng was a very bookish and stubborn man. He happened to have the original book in his bag, so he took it out and double-checked the date in front of the class. ‘That’s correct. Study hard and don’t bother me.’ The student, being exasperated by Teng’s response and overly influenced by Mao’s theory of class struggle, reported him to the Mao Thought Propaganda Team in school, saying that Teng represented Mao as having married Zizhen when Kaihui was still alive.

  “Now, in most official publications, there was no mention of the date of Mao’s marriage to Zizhen. It was taken for granted that he married her after the death of Kaihui. But in the sources Teng assembled, one text had a paragraph mentioning the date of Mao’s marriage to Zizhen, and another had a sentence containing the date of Kaihui’s death. The overlap of dates was unmistakable.”

  Old Hunter paused for dramatic effect, picking up the teapot, but to his dismay, no water was left. He decided to go on without asking for more hot water. It was a crucial juncture in his story.

  “It became evident that Mao was guilty of bigamy. And that meant a disaster for Teng. If he hadn’t been so devoted to accurate scholarship, he could have claimed that it was a typo. But confronted with the Mao Thought Propaganda Team, he insisted that he had carefully proofread all the material. What’s more, he produced the very book that gave the date of Mao’s marriage to Zizhen.”

  “Who wrote the book?”

  “Someone who had worked under Mao — Mao’s personal orderly. So the Mao Thought Propaganda Team had to put Teng in isolation interrogation, lest he keep blabbing. They sent a report to the police bureau, passing the problem on like a burning hot potato. And then the case came to me.

  “After researching everything, I proposed to Li that we write to the author, asking for his cooperation. Li gave me a dressing down, declaring that I didn’t understand the complexity of the class struggle and that there was no possibility of contacting the author. Teng had to confess he slandered Mao, Li insisted, or at least to admit that it was a gross typo on his part. So I had no choice but to go on ‘investigating,’ turning myself into a mouthpiece for Mao’s famous quotation: ‘Leniency to those who confess their crime, and severity to those who resist.’ I tried to give advice to Teng by citing what proverbs I could think of, such as ‘A hero cuts his losses, for the moment’ and ‘You have to hang your head low under other’s eaves,’ but he wouldn’t listen. A couple of days later, he committed suicide, leaving a will written in blood, with only one sentence: ‘A long, eternal life to Chairman Mao!’ ”

  He paused again to take a sip from the empty cup, feeling his throat suddenly dry.

  “Now, that was as an acceptable conclusion according to Li. ‘The criminal committed suicide, aware of the punishment for his crime.’ So that was the end of the Mao case. About two or three months later, Mao himself passed away.”

  “What a case!”

  “It was a case I could never get out of my mind. It was just an assignment, I’ve told myself Old Heaven alone knows how many times. After all, millions and millions of people died like ants, like weeds, during the Cultural Revolution. Apart from shouting that Mao quotation to Teng, I didn’t put any extra pressure on him. I was a cop, simply doing what I was supposed to. But I still wonder: could I have tried to do something more? To help him, I mean. It’s a question that is like a fly, inevitably buzzing back to the same spot, continuously bugging me.

  “After the Cultural Revolution, there was a short period of ‘rectifying the wrong cases.’ Without talking to Party Secretary Li about it, I dropped in at Teng’s school one day. To my consternation, there was no ‘rectifying the wrong case’ with regard to Teng, because there was no case. Nothing in official record at all. He committed suicide during an unofficial investigation. That’s all there was about it. Disaster comes in and out of the mouth, as an old saying goes. With Mao in the background, no one was willing to talk about it.

  “I kept a notebook on the case, so I got hold of the books mentioned in Teng’s class notes, as well as some new publications about Mao. I had hoped to prove that it was Teng’s typo, so he, too, was at least partially responsible. Alternatively, that one of the authors had made a typo. Either way, I wouldn’t have to hold myself responsible. A deceiving and self-deceiving trick, you may say, like silencing a ringing bell by stuffing up one’s own ears. But the more I read, the lower my heart sank —”

  “Wait a minute, Old Hunter,” Chen interrupted at the sight of the returning waitress. “Bring more hot water.”

  “Two thermos bottles of hot water,” Old Hunter said. “We don’t serve hot water like that,” she protested weakly. “We paid for a private room. At least we should be able to have the tea our way.”

  After she brought the hot water as requested, Old Hunter waved the waitress out of the room, poured a cup for himself, and resumed.

  “About Mao’s marriages, here’s a summary of what I’ve gathered from various sources. After their marriage, Kaihui gave birth to three sons. In 1927, Mao went to the Jingjiang Mountains as a guerrilla fighter, leaving Kaihui and their young children behind in the suburbs of Changsha. Less than a year later, however, Mao married Zizhen, who was then only seventeen, nicknamed ‘the flower of Yongxing County’ and a guerrilla fighter in the mountains. What proved this beyond any doubt was an article in defense of Mao’s marriage to Zizhen. It was written by a senior Party official and published in History Magazine. According to the author, it was simply another sacrifice for the revolution: Zizhen was the younger sister of a guerrilla leader who had arrived in the mountains earlier, so Mao had to marry her so as to consolidate the revolutionary forces there. ‘Any criticism of Mao’s marriage with Zizhen was irresponsible, made without proper historical perspective.’ ”

  “That’s unbelievable! Such a brazen excuse.”

  “Whatever the excuse, Mao married Zizhen — an act of undeniable bigamy. In the mountains, he lost himself in the cloud and rain of her youthful, supple body, which bore a daughter for him that same year.”

  “But Mao could have been lonely in the mountains, or lost in a moment of passion,” Chen said. “It might not be fair to judge him on one episode in his personal life.”

  “Whatever he did as the supreme Party leader is not for me to judge. I was simply looking into what he did as a man to his women.”

  “Perhaps Mao believed Kaihui had already died.”

  “No, that’s not true. Kaihui knew nothing about his betrayal, and had someone carry handmade cloth shoes to him. She also asked several times to join him in the mountains, but he always said no. Like in a Suzhou opera line, he heard only the new one’s laughter, not the old one’s weeping. And there’s something else,” he said, sipping at his tea, deliberately, like wine. “Something you will not be
lieve.”

  “Oh, the climax of the Suzhou opera is finally coming,” Chen said nodding, like a loyal audience.

  “At first, the nationalists in Changsha didn’t bother Kaihui and her children. In 1930 though, when Mao led a siege of the city of Changsha, the situation changed drastically. Kaihui and her children were in danger. Mao should have moved them out of the city, but no rescue effort whatsoever was made. The siege lasted about twenty days, and Mao and his troops were close to where she was, but he did nothing. He didn’t even try to contact her.

  “After the siege failed, the nationalists retaliated and arrested her. They wanted her to sign a statement cutting all ties with Mao, but she refused. She was executed in 1930. It was said that she was dragged barefoot to the execution grounds — according to a local superstition, her ghost would therefore be unable to find her way back to home, to Mao.”

  “What a horrible story!” Chen exclaimed, picking up the teacup but putting it back down right away. “And what an old hunter you really are to have dug up all that information!”

  “I am not saying that Mao had her killed on purpose. But it’s not too much to say that he was responsible for her death. He should have thought about the consequences.”

  “Now I understand something Mao said years later,” Chen said, “ ‘For the death of Kaihui, I could not atone by dying hundreds of times.’ He must have written that poem to her out of guilt.”

  “I’ve discussed the poem with an old friend, a senior history teacher, who has done extensive research on Mao, and not just about his personal life. He called Mao a man of snake and spider heart, and he believed that Mao got rid of Kaihui that way because he couldn’t afford to let the two women confront each other in the mountains. There is no ruling that out as a possibility, and he actually did similar things to his comrades in the Party.”

  “Well, people have opinions and opinions.”

  “I don’t want to dwell on it, but the memory of the Mao case has haunted me all these years. When Yu came back to Shanghai as an ‘ex-educated youth,’ I took early retirement so that he could start working at the bureau in my place. That was the main reason, of course, but there was another. The Mao case. Because of it, I am not a worthy cop. We’ve known each other for many years, Chief, but I have never told you about this case. Nor anybody else, not even Yu. It’s a rock on my heart.”