It was not like visiting Lincoln’s log cabin. It wasn’t Blenheim. It wasn’t Paul Revere’s house. For one thing it was very empty. The few Chinese nearby seemed indifferent to the house itself. They sat under trees listening to a booming radio. There were girls in pretty dresses. Their clothes alone were a political statement. But this handful of people were hardly visible. Its emptiness meant something. Because when it was heavily visited Shaoshan had represented political piety and obedience, now that it was empty it stood for indifference. In a sense, neglect was more dramatic than destruction, because the thing still existed as a mockery of what it had been.
It had the fusty smell of an old shrine. It had outlived its usefulness, and it looked a little absurd, like a once-hallowed temple of a sect of fanatics who had run off, tearing their clothes, and had never returned. Times have changed. Toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, the pseudonymous Simon Leys visited China and in Chinese Shadows, his gloomy and scolding account of his trip, he wrote that Shaoshan “is visited by about three million pilgrims every year.” That is eight thousand a day. Today there were none.
If Shaoshan was embarrassing to the Chinese, it was because the whole scheme had been to show Mao as more than human. There was an obnoxious religiosity in the way his old schoolhouse had been arranged to show little Mao as a sanctified student. But the building was empty, and there was no one walking down the lane, so it didn’t matter. I had the impression that the Chinese were staying away in droves.
One stall sold postcards. There was only one view: MAO’S BIRTHPLACE (the house in the glade). And there were a few Mao badges. It was the only place in China where I saw his face on sale, but even so it was just this little badge. There were also towels and dishcloths, saying SHAOSHAN.
There was a shop in the Mao Museum.
I said, “I would like to buy a Mao badge.”
“We have none,” the assistant said.
“How about a Mao picture?”
“We have none.”
“What about a Little Red Book — or any Mao book?”
“None.”
“Where are they?”
“Sold.”
“All of them?”
“All.”
“Will you get some more to sell?”
The assistant said, “I do not know.”
What do they sell, then, at the shop in the Mao Museum? They sell key chains with color photographs of Hong Kong movie actresses, bars of soap, combs, razor blades, face cream, hard candy, peanut brittle, buttons, thread, cigarettes, and men’s underwear.
The museum did try to show Mao as more than human, and in its eighteen rooms of hagiography Mao was presented as a sort of Christ figure, preaching very early (giving instructions in revolution by his mother’s stove) and winning recruits. There were statues, flags, badges, and personal paraphernalia — his straw hat, his slippers, his ashtray. Room by room, his life is displayed in pictures and captions: his schooldays, his job, his travels, the death of his brother, the Long March, the war, his first marriage …
And then, after such languid and detailed exposition, an odd thing happens in the last room. In Number Eighteen, time is telescoped, and the years 1949–76, his entire chairmanship, his rule, and his death, are presented with lightning speed. There is no mention of his two other marriages, nothing about Jiang Qing. Nonpersons like Jiang Qing and Lin Biao have been airbrushed out of photographs. The 1960s are shown in one picture, the mushroom cloud of China’s first atom bomb in 1964. The rest of the decade does not exist. There has been no Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Mao Museum was founded in 1967, at the height of it!
But by omitting so much and showing time passing so quickly, the museum gives the viewer a bizarre potted history of Mao’s final years. In the previous rooms he looks like a spoiled child, a big brat, scowling and solemn. In this final room he develops a very unusual smile and on his pumpkin face it has a disturbing effect. After 1956 he seems to be gaga. He starts wearing baggy pants and a coolie hat, and his face is drawn from a sag into a mad or senile grimace. He looks unlike his earlier self. In one picture he is lumberingly playing Ping-Pong. In 1972 and after, meeting Nixon, Prince Sihanouk, and East European leaders, he’s a heffalump, he looks hugely crazy or else barely seems to recognize the visitor grinning at him. There is plenty of evidence here to support what the Chinese say about him all the time — that after 1956 he was not the same.
Mao had set out to be an enigma and had succeeded. “The anal leader of an oral people,” the sinologist Richard Soloman had said. Mao can be described but not summed up. He was patient, optimistic, ruthless, pathologically anti-intellectual, romantic, militaristic, patriotic, chauvinistic, rebellious in a youthful way, and deliberately contradictory.
Shaoshan said everything about Mao: his rise and fall; his position today. I loved the empty train arriving at the empty station. Was there a better image of obscurity? As for the house and village, they were like many temples in China, where no one prayed any longer — just a heap of symmetrical stones representing waste, confusion, and ruin. China was full of such places, dedicated to the memory of someone or other and, lately, just an excuse for setting up picnic tables and selling souvenirs.
*“These were the virtues of Confucius, as described by one of his disciples,” runs the commentary in Mao’s Selected Works. So Mao was also criticizing Confucius for not being of a revolutionary spirit.
The Great Wall
BECAUSE IT IS A FLAT, DRY, NORTHERN CITY, AT THE EDGE OF Mongolia, Peking has beautiful skies. They are bluest in the freezing air of winter. China’s old euphemism for itself was Tianxia, “All beneath the sky”—and, on a good day, what a sky! It was limpid, like an ocean of air, but seamless and unwrinkled, without a single wavelet of cloud; endless uncluttered fathoms of it that grew icier through the day and then at the end of the winter afternoon turned to dust.
Thinking it would be empty, I went to see the Great Wall again. Dr. Johnson told Boswell how eager he was to go to China and see the Wall. Boswell was not so sure himself. How could he justify going to China when he had children at home to take care of?
“Sir,” Dr. Johnson said, “by doing so [going to China] you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a lustre reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China. I am serious, sir.”
The Wall is an intimidating thing, less a fortification than a visual statement announcing imperiously: I am the Son of Heaven and this is the proof that I can encircle the earth. It somewhat resembles, in intention, the sort of achievement of that barmy man Christo, who giftwrapped the Golden Gate Bridge. The Wall goes steeply up and down mountainsides. To what purpose? Certainly not to repel invaders, who could never cling to those cliffs. Wasn’t it another example of the Chinese love of taking possession of the land and whipping it into shape?