Chapter One
On the Cusp from Ancient to Modern
(1893-1911 H age 1-17)
Mao tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of
one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over
70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other
twentieth-century leader. He was born into a peasant family in a
valley called Shaoshan, in the province of Hunan, in the heartland
of China. The date was 26 December 1893. His ancestors had lived in
the valley for five hundred years.
This was a world of ancient beauty, a temperate, humid region whose
misty, undulating hills had been populated ever since the Neolithic
age. Buddhist temples dating from the Tang dynasty (ad 618-906),
when Buddhism first came here, were still in use. Forests where
nearly 300 species of trees grew, including maples, camphor,
metasequoia and the rare ginkgo, covered the area and sheltered the
tigers, leopards and boar that still roamed the hills. (The last
tiger was killed in 1957.) These hills, with neither roads nor
navigable rivers, detached the village from the world at large. Even
as late as the early twentieth century an event as momentous as the
death of the emperor in 1908 did not percolate this far, and Mao
found out only two years afterwards when he left Shaoshan.
The valley of Shaoshan measures about 5 by 3.5 km. The 600-odd
families who lived there grew rice, tea and bamboo, harnessing
buffalo to plough the rice paddies. Daily life revolved round these
age-old activities. Mao’s father, Yi-chang, was born in 1870. At the
age of ten he was engaged to a girl of thirteen from a village about
10 kilometres away, beyond a pass called Tiger Resting Pass, where
tigers used to sun themselves. This short distance was long enough
in those years for the two villages to speak dialects that were
almost mutually unintelligible. Being merely a girl, Mao’s mother
did not receive a name; as the seventh girl born in the Wen clan,
she was just Seventh Sister Wen. In accordance with centuries of
custom, her feet had been crushed and bound to produce the so-called
three-inch golden lilies that epitomised beauty at the time.
Her engagement to Mao’s father followed time-honoured customs. It
was arranged by their parents and was based on a practical
consideration: the tomb of one of her grandfathers was in Shaoshan,
and it had to be tended regularly with elaborate rituals, so having
a relative there would prove useful. Seventh Sister Wen moved in
with the Maos upon betrothal, and was married at the age of
eighteen, in 1885, when Yi-chang was fifteen.
Shortly after the wedding, Yi-chang went off to be a soldier to earn
money to pay off family debts, which he was able to do after several
years. Chinese peasants were not serfs but free farmers, and joining
the army for purely financial reasons was an established practice.
Luckily he was not involved in any wars; instead he caught a glimpse
of the world and picked up some business ideas. Unlike most of the
villagers, Yi-chang could read and write, well enough to keep
accounts. After his return, he raised pigs, and processed grain into
top-quality rice to sell at a nearby market town. He bought back the
land his father had pawned, then bought more land, and became one of
the richest men in the village.
Though relatively well off, Yi-chang remained extremely hard-
working and thrifty all his life. The family house consisted of half
a dozen rooms, which occupied one wing of a large thatched property.
Eventually Yi-chang replaced the thatch with tiles, a major
improvement, but left the mud floor and mud walls. The windows had
no glass-still a rare luxury-and were just square openings with
wooden bars, blocked off at night by wooden boards (the temperature
hardly ever fell below freezing). The furniture was simple: wooden
beds, bare wooden tables and benches. It was in one of these rather
spartan rooms, under a pale blue homespun cotton quilt, inside a
blue mosquito net, that Mao was born.
Mao was the third son, but the first to survive beyond infancy. His
Buddhist mother became even more devout to encourage Buddha to
protect him. Mao was given the two-part name Tse-tung. Tse, which
means “to shine on,” was the name given to all his generation, as
preordained when the clan chronicle was first written in the
eighteenth century; tung means “the East.” So his full given name
meant “to shine on the East.” When two more boys were born, in 1896
and 1905, they were given the names Tse-min (min means “the people”)
and Tse-t’an (tan possibly referred to the local region, Xiangtan).
These names reflected the inveterate aspiration of Chinese peasants
for their sons to do well-and the expectation that they could. High
positions were open to all through education, which for centuries
meant studying Confucian classics. Excellence would enable young men
of any background to pass imperial examinations and become
mandarins-all the way up to becoming prime minister. Officialdom was
the definition of achievement, and the names given to Mao and his
brothers expressed the hopes placed on them.
But a grand name was also onerous and potentially tempted fate, so
most children were given a pet name that was either lowly or tough,
or both. Mao’s was “the Boy of Stone”-Shisan yazi. For this second
“baptism” his mother took him to a rock about eight feet high, which
was reputed to be enchanted, as there was a spring underneath. After
Mao performed obeisance and kowtows, he was considered adopted by
the rock. Mao was very fond of this name, and continued to use it as
an adult. In 1959, when he returned to Shaoshan and met the
villagers for the first-and only-time as supreme leader of China, he
began the dinner for them with a quip: “So everyone is here, except
my Stone Mother. Shall we wait for her?”
Mao loved his real mother, with an intensity he showed towards no
one else. She was a gentle and tolerant person, who, as he
remembered, never raised her voice to him. From her came his full
face, sensual lips, and a calm self-possession in the eyes. Mao
would talk about his mother with emotion all his life. It was in her
footsteps that he became a Buddhist as a child. Years later he told
his staff: “I worshipped my mother … Wherever my mother went, I
would follow … going to temple fairs, burning incense and paper
money, doing obeisance to Buddha … Because my mother believed in
Buddha, so did I.” But he gave up Buddhism in his mid-teens.
Mao had a carefree childhood. Until he was eight he lived with his
mother’s family, the Wens, in their village, as his mother preferred
to live with her own family. There his maternal grandmother doted on
him. His two uncles and their wives treated him like their own son,
and one of them became his Adopted Father, the Chinese equivalent to
godfather. Mao did a little light farm work, gathering fodder for
pigs and taking the buffaloes out for a stroll in the tea-oil
camellia groves by a pond shaded by banana leaves. In later years he
would reminisce with fondness about this idyllic time. He started
learning to read, while his aunts spun and sewed under an oil lamp.
Mao only came back to live in Shaoshan in spring 1902, at the age of
eight, to receive an education, which took the form of study in a
tutor’s home. Confucian classics, which made up most of the
curriculum, were beyond the understanding of children and had to be
learnt by heart. Mao was blessed with an exceptional memory, and did
well. His fellow pupils remembered a diligent boy who managed not
only to recite but also to write by rote these difficult texts. He
also gained a foundation in Chinese language and history, and began
to learn to write good prose, calligraphy and poetry, as writing
poems was an essential part of Confucian education. Reading became a
passion. Peasants generally turned in at sunset, to save on oil for
lamps, but Mao would read deep into the night, with an oil lamp
standing on a bench outside his mosquito net. Years later, when he
was supreme ruler of China, half of his huge bed would be piled a
foot high with Chinese classics, and he littered his speeches and
writings with historical references. But his poems lost flair.
Mao clashed frequently with his tutors. He ran away from his first
school at the age of ten, claiming that the teacher was a martinet.
He was expelled from, or was “asked to leave,” at least three
schools for being headstrong and disobedient. His mother indulged
him but his father was not pleased, and Mao’s hopping from tutor to
tutor was just one source of tension between father and son.
Yi-chang paid for Mao’s education, hoping that his son could at
least help keep the family accounts, but Mao disliked the task. All
his life, he was vague about figures, and hopeless at economics. Nor
did he take kindly to hard physical labour. He shunned it as soon as
his peasant days were over.
Yi-chang could not stand Mao being idle. Having spent every minute
of his waking hours working, he expected his son to do the same, and
would strike him when he did not comply. Mao hated his father. In
1968, when he was taking revenge on his political foes on a vast
scale, he told their tormentors that he would have liked his father
to be treated just as brutally: “My father was bad. If he were alive
today, he should be ‘jet-planed.'” This was an agonising position
where the subject’s arms were wrenched behind his back and his head
forced down.
Mao was not a mere victim of his father. He fought back, and was
often the victor. He would tell his father that the father, being
older, should do more manual labour than he, the younger-which was
an unthinkably insolent argument by Chinese standards. One day,
according to Mao, father and son had a row in front of guests. “My
father scolded me before them, calling me lazy and useless. This
infuriated me. I called him names and left the house … My father
… pursued me, cursing as well as commanding me to come back. I
reached the edge of a pond and threatened to jump in if he came any
nearer … My father backed down.” Once, as Mao was retelling the
story, he laughed and added an observation: “Old men like him didn’t
want to lose their sons. This is their weakness. I attacked at their
weak point, and I won!”
Money was the only weapon Mao’s father possessed. After Mao was
expelled by tutor no. 4, in 1907, his father stopped paying his
son’s tuition fees and the thirteen-year-old boy had to become a
full-time peasant. But he soon found a way to get himself out of
farm work and back into the world of books. Yi-chang was keen for
his son to get married, so that he would be tied down and behave
responsibly. His niece was at just the right age for a wife, four
years older than Mao, who agreed to his father’s plan and resumed
schooling after the marriage.
The marriage took place in 1908, when Mao was fourteen and his bride
eighteen. Her family name was Luo. She herself had no proper name,
and was just called “Woman Luo.” The only time Mao is known to have
mentioned her was to the American journalist Edgar Snow in 1936,
when Mao was strikingly dismissive, exaggerating the difference in
their ages: “When I was 14, my parents married me to a girl of 20.
But I never lived with her … I do not consider her my wife …
and have given little thought to her.” He gave no hint that she was
not still alive; in fact, Woman Luo had died in 1910, just over a
year into their marriage.
Mao’s early marriage turned him into a fierce opponent of arranged
marriages. Nine years later he wrote a seething article against the
practice: “In families in the West, parents acknowledge the free
will of their children. But in China, orders from the parents are
not at all compatible with the will of the children … This is a
kind of ‘indirect rape.’ Chinese parents are all the time indirectly
raping their children …”
As soon as his wife died, the sixteen-year-old widower demanded to
leave Shaoshan. His father wanted to apprentice him to a rice store
in the county town, but Mao had set his eye on a modern school about
25 kilometres away. He had learned that the imperial examinations
had been abolished. Instead there were modern schools now, teaching
subjects like science, world history and geography, and foreign
languages. It was these schools that would open the door out of a
peasant’s life for many like him.
(Continues…)
Knopf
Copyright © 2005
Jung Chang
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-679-42271-4
Excerpted from Mao
by Jung Chang Jon Halliday
Copyright © 2005 by Jung Chang.
Excerpted by permission.
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