“Mao red book?” street salesmen asked. Surely you, Lao Wai, needed a copy of Mao’s political manifesto. How had you made it so far without one?
Chairman Mao Zedong, father and architect of Communist China, was a politician-warrior who expelled both Chinese aristocrats and Japanese invaders. Mao was more than a statesman – he was a sex symbol. Many of my students carried baseball trading cards in their wallets: plump old Mao on one side, dashing 22-year-old Mao on the other.
“You really think he’s good looking?” I asked. My female students fanned themselves.
Twenty years deceased, Mao’s shadow lingered in everyday life. The elderly still wore Mao uniforms (plain blue trousers, plain blue jacket, plain blue hat) in public. They walked their birdcages to Beihai Park, hung them on treebranches and listened to the parakeets sing frenetically to one another.
Old or young, nearly all men smoked. To bolster the economy Mao had popularized smoking as something akin to a civic duty. He smoked; he told patriots to smoke. Instant tobacco industry.
Despite communism’s ideal of gender equity, women did not smoke. One of my female students was an exception. Whenever I spotted her smoking it was hard not to stare at so uncommon a sight. Why had Communists urged men to smoke but not women? For all its massive problems, Communism had improved women’s social status and prospects. Considering the benefit nicotine-addicted women would have brought to the economy, the double standard seemed uncharacteristic.
* * * * *
I wondered if those Mao red books were printed in English. Was selling them to foreign tourists a means of Communistic proselytizing? Or was it – ironically – simple capitalistic opportunism?
On Saturdays my students attended political class. I didn’t know where it was held or what it covered. One Saturday morning I noticed the staff within a restaurant listening to a stern voice speaking through a loudspeaker on one wall. Employees sat at tables, either taking notes, staring at their shoes or reading the newspaper. Was that political class? Piped lectures?
At the end of the semester my students told me they’d taken their political final exam. “Was it difficult?” I asked.
“No,” they laughed. “It was true/false.”
“All true/false?”
“Yes.”
A political exam of only true/false questions – the very definition of political correctness.
* * * * *
Mao grew fat – a sign of prosperity for the Chinese. Fat was good. One of my students continually bragged about his infant’s weight: “She is very beautiful, and very fat.” In a country of little means, fatness indicated vitality. Yet the hypocrisy of Mao’s fatness seemed lost on his own resource-strapped citizenry. Mao represented the nation, and if Mao was fat, the nation must be thriving (even if individuals were not). Such was Communism. Between the two, old Mao or young, it was the older, fatter portrait that hung at the Forbidden City gate.
Homes, stores, restaurants used to set up Mao shrines, small portraits attended by tassels and candles. I came across just a few such displays. Times were changing, the economy had begun to boom, and everyday life accelerated, leaving little time to dwell on the past.
I did visit Mao in his mausoleum. You can too. There was no missing it – large edifice flocked by steps and security, a final resting place that ate up a third of Tiananmen Square. Stand in line about an hour and you too can be ushered past the glass case of Mao’s preserved remains, paying hushed ten-second respect from fifteen feet away.
He looked like a wax dummy. No surprise there – he died in 1972. Still, if long-term preservation made a real body look artificial, why not stick with a dummy? I didn’t mention this thought to my students, but they addressed it anyway. “There are two bodies,” Carol explained. “One is real, one is not real. They are under the ground, perhaps one hundred of feet down. Each day they bring up one body for looking. You do not know whether it is the real body.”
If such were the case, of course, the government would have no motivation ever to display Mao’s real body. It was simply a myth to create an illusion of authenticity, the feeling that common citizens could connect with a leader who truly cared for each and every one of them … as he grew fat.
How very Communist.
How very Mao.
