This morning I asked my driver to drop me in a place where there are woods to cover me from the rest of the world. I want to stop my mind from spinning. A half-hour later I find myself in the imperial hunting ground. I ask the driver to come back in three hours.
I walk toward a hill. The air feels like warm water pouring over my face. The scene is bleak. Plants have begun to die everywhere in the heat. The grass and bushes are all yellow. Even the most heat-bearing plant-the umbrella-shaped three-leaf goya-has lost its spirit. The leaves dangle down in three different directions.
There is a rotten smell in the air. It is the dead animals. Falcons circle above my head. I suppose the rotten smell rises fast in the heat. The birds smell their food in the air. Besides falcons, there are shit-lovers, cousins of cockroaches, crawling in and out of dead plants. I didn't know that they could fly. The heat must have made them change habits, for the ground is a baking pan.
The sky is a giant rice bowl and I am walking in its bottom-unable to climb and unable to get out.
Helplessness sucks the air out of my chest.
You need the figurehead. You need Mao, Kang Sheng says to me. Your role is to play Mao's most trusted comrade. It is the only way to empower yourself. You have to fake it. No, you don't feel. Go and kiss the corpses of the backyard concubines. They will tell you what feeling means. Get up on the giant's shoulders. So no one can overlook you.
I suppose I have to get over Mao.
Whatever you have to do.
She dreams about Mao. Night after night. The curse-that she wishes him dead-has come to bury her. Yet there is this inborn stubbornness. The way her feeling operates. It is its own cage. It blocks her. She is at a harbor, waving behind a crowd. Turn your head away, she cries to herself. Her heart refuses to let Mao go.
I tell him never to come to me, but I wait for him every day. I send him invitations using all kinds of excuses. When he does come, I show apathy. I either get servants to clean the room or pick up the camera and shoot roses in the garden. I long for him to stay yet I make his visits miserable.
I want him to finish us, I say to Nah. These days I have been spending more time with Nah. She is happy living in the boarding school but she makes sure to spend the weekends with me. She knows the fact that she is with me will give her father a good reason to visit. But I know it won't happen. I never look out the window and never respond to any of Nah's guesses regarding her father's arrival.
One evening my staff views a documentary film as a form of entertainment. The title is Chairman Mao Inspects the Country. I decline to go. When it's on, I hear the sound track from the portable projector over the kitchen. I am struck by a sudden sadness. I can't help but walk over to the screening. When it is finished I clap with the crowd with tears in my eyes.
Long live Chairman Mao and great health to Comrade Jiang Ching! everyone cheers.
In my dream I hear the whistle of a steam engine from a distance. I see wavelike crowds move in blurry dawn light. The ship begins to slowly take off. Thousands of colorful paper ribbons break in passengers' farewell cries. The ribbons dance in the air. It feels like the harbor is being pushed away by the ship. Then the noise quiets down. The crowd watches the ship draw away. It becomes smaller and smaller. The ribbons stop dancing. The sound of waves takes over. The smell of stinking fish is in the air once again.
The vast ocean, glittering under the sunlight.
My heart's harbor vacant.
16
IT'S BEEN TWO YEARS since Mao instigated the movement called the Great Leap Forward. Mao has set himself to be the greatest ruler of all time-he wants to push China to the top of the world's productivity records. The strategy is to release and utilize the energy and potential of the peasants, the same peasants who prosecuted Mao's war to such a glorious conclusion. It will be an explosion of energy and innovation; thus heaven-mandated Communism will be achieved in five years. One will get to do whatever one likes and eat whatever one wants.
Inspired by the notion, the nation answers Mao's call. Every piece of private land is taken away and put under the ownership of the government. Peasants are encouraged to "experience Communism where they live"-free-food commune cafeterias begin to bloom like weeds after a rain. On the industrial front, Mao promotes "backyard steel factories." The locals are ordered to donate their woks, axes and wash basins.
The Great Leap is the perfect expression of Mao's mind and beliefs, his daring and romanticism. He waits for the results anxiously. At the beginning there is praise for his vision, but two years later come reports of violence breaking out between poor and rich. Looting for food and shelter has become a problem. Before autumn the stir becomes so serious that it begins to threaten security. Everything is consumed, including the planting seeds for next spring, while nothing is produced. The nation's last storage is empty. Mao begins to feel the pressure. He begins to realize that running a country is not like winning a guerrilla war.
1959 begins with floods and is followed by drought. A sense of desperation falls across the land. Despite Mao's call to fight the disaster- It is man's will, not heaven, that decides -hundreds and thousands of peasants flee their hometowns in search of food. Along the coastline many of them are forced to sell their children and some poison their entire families to end the despair. By winter, the number of deaths rises to twenty million. Reports have piled up on the desk of Premier Zhou's office.
Mao is more embarrassed than worried. He remembers how determined he was to make his plan a reality. He has issued instructions:
"Race toward Communism"
"Demolish family structure"
"One rice bowl, one pair of chopsticks, one set of blankets- the style of Communism"
"One hectare, ten thousand pounds of yams, two hundred thousand pounds of rice"
"Mate rabbit with cow so the rabbit will get as big as the cow"
"Raise chickens as big as elephants"
"Grow beans as big as the moon and eggplants big as squashes"
In June, peasants' riots rise in Shanxi and Anhui provinces. The Politburo calls a vote to stop Mao's policy.
Mao retreats for the next six months.
My husband has fallen from the clouds. I have only seen him once in three months. He looks low and distressed. Nah tells me that he sees no one. No more actresses. The news fills me with mixed feelings. Of course, I am hopeful that he may reach out to me. But I am also surprised and even saddened-I have never imagined that he could be vulnerable.
Late one evening Kang Sheng visits my place unexpectedly. Mao is in need of you, he tells me excitedly. The Chairman's reputation has been terribly damaged. His enemies are now taking advantage of his error and are setting out to overthrow him.
I take a sip of the chrysanthemum tea. It has never tasted so wonderful as it does now.
I begin to see a way in which I can help Mao. I become so excited with the thought that I neglect Kang Sheng's presence. I see printing machines rolling, voices broadcasting and films projecting. I feel the power of the media. The way it washes and bleaches minds. I can feel the coming success. There is energy going through my body. I am about to enter an act leading to the climax of my life.
Trying to share the pleasure of finding a great role, I explain to Kang Sheng how I feel. But he has fallen asleep on the sofa.