By the time Madame Mao Jiang Qing is caught sewing her name into the skirts of the dolls she is forced to decorate for Western export from prison in 1976, the reader of Anchee Min's latest novel has come to see the longest-lived wife of Mao Zedong as a woman nearly as self-obsessed as the Chairman himself.
Most Westerners know Jiang Qing only as the witch responsible for the needless deaths of millions of innocent Chinese. It was in 1996 that Jiang Qing, along with the rest of the Gang of Four, infiltrated China's Politburo and launched the Cultural Revolution and a plot to rise to power after Mao's death. To many, she still lives on as the White Boned Demon, that villain with magical powers in the Ming Dynasty legend "Journey to the West."
But Min takes the reader back to the girl whose defiance and self-preservation started when she refused to have her feet bound as a teenager. Born Yunhe, the unwanted daughter of a concubine, the beautiful young woman destined to become Madame Mao flees the misery of her family for a provincial opera troupe, where she tastes a life of style as a Shanghai film star. After a daring trek to dusty Yanan, she falls in love with -- and is chosen for marriage by -- the young Red leader Mao Zedong.
Pre-Mao, skipping from one dysfunctional romance to another, Yunhe changes her name to Lan Ping and, as though she were changing costume, becomes a Communist because it is fashionable. A performer at her core, to be heard and seen is always her goal. Min tells the story of one of history's most ambitious but naive protagonists in a style that is initially jarring, quickly cutting back and forth from first person monologue, first person aside, and even first person internal monologue. Except for the occasional third person observation -- that reads like a director's note inserted into the margins of a script --most of Becoming Madame Mao is written as a dramatic oral history of a lonely opera player.
After Lan Ping becomes Jiang Qing, the name Mao gives her at their war time wedding -- when Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist bombs threatened to explode over the ceremony in a cave in Yanan -- the reader has developed a certain sympathy for a woman dead-set on fulfilling the great role she imagines for herself. The reader, as her rapt audience, waits to see what plot to secure Mao's heart -- and the hearts of the billion Chinese -- the actress will hatch next.
As they go through the tragedy of the separation from their children and the drastic changes they are forced to endure as the Red Army moves toward victory and the Communist accession to power in Beijing, both Mao and his Madame become human, thanks to the author's meticulous attention to plebeian detail. We watch their poetry-fueled and erotically charged romance fade as the man refuses to include her, his third wife, in his plot to save China. Madame Mao is ridiculed by nearly all Mao's followers and relegated to a secret garden within the Forbidden City.
Jiang Qing's strength, Min shows the reader, is her ability to endure. The reader watches Madame Mao dismiss her husband's daily philandering with virgins brought in from the Provinces as his "practice of longevity," but when she must make an appointment to see her own husband she goes into cahoots with one of the Chairman's advisors in order to learn his business. There begins the downward spiral. The air of paranoia that choked Mao's career and everything around him by the mid-60s is hauntingly conveyed in Min's writing. The switching from voice to voice becomes particularly effective by the time the reader sees Madame Mao locked in the Forbidden City talking to herself. Nobody will listen to the actress (they are too terrified to reply), but she plays on.
She is, after all, the wife of China's Revolutionary God. Therein lies Min's triumph in this ambitious portrayal. She has crafted from intense historical detail a woman who is at once queen and servant. By the time she returns to the stage -- both literally and politically -- the reader feels a queasy desire to cheer.
Born in Shanghai in 1957, Anchee Min has a personal connection to the story of Madame Mao. At seventeen she was sent to a labor collective, where after after a number of years a talent scout recruited her for Madame Mao's Shanghai Film Studio. Undoubtedly, her experience there during the aftershocks of the Cultural Revolution informed her ability to paint so vividly a star-struck woman, for whom Mao was at once someone to adore, to feel pity for, and to overcome.
BECOMING MADAME MAO: A Novel is available at Amazon.com.
