Everything had changed. The fires from the backyard furnaces were out, the brightly dressed peasant women gone. The fields were empty. No crops. No people. Wuhan, still under the direction of Mao's friend Wang Renzhong, was in terrible shape. We stayed, as usual, in the Meiyuan guesthouse along East Lake, but there was little to eat. In the past, our rooms had been copiously stocked with tea and cigarettes, and every meal had been a banquet. Now there was no meat, because the cows and chickens had starved and the pigs were too skinny to eat. Occasionally, we were served fish. Vegetables were scarce. There were no cigarettes or matches anywhere in the province. The warehouses had been depleted. Everything had been consumed. Only months earlier, Wang Renzhong, Mao's great sycophant, had been bragging that Hubei was producing ten or twenty thousand pounds of rice per mu. Now there was famine.

Wang Renzhong claimed that the famine was the result of natural disasters. But there had been no natural disaster in Hubei. The weather in 1958 and 1959 had been splendid. Much of the abundant crop had simply not been collected.

Changsha, in Mao's home province of Hunan, was different. Food was less plentiful than before, but no one was starving, and the small open-air restaurants were serving customers. We stayed in the magnificent Lotus Garden guesthouse, with beautiful modern buildings and lotus trees set among rolling lawns. The tea and cigarettes supplied to our rooms were stale. They had been taken out of storage in honor of our visit. But the warehouses had not been depleted and the tea and cigarettes were China's best. We ate meat in Hunan, too—the tasty ham for which the province is famous.

The irony of the contrast between Hunan and Hubei was not lost on Zhou Xiaozhou, the first party secretary of Hunan, who had been so severely criticized by Mao in 1957 for his failure to implement double cropping and who had introduced Mao to Hai Rui. Wang Renzhong was accompanying Mao's entourage to Changsha, and one day as Luo Ruiqing, Wang Renzhong, Zhou Xiaozhou, and I were chatting, Zhou could not resist needling Wang about the contrast. “Wasn't Zhejiang praised for its high output last year?” he asked bitterly. “And Hunan was criticized for not having worked as hard. Now look at Hubei. You don't even have stale cigarettes or tea. You used up all your reserves last year. Today, we may be poor, but at least we have supplies in storage.” Wang Renzhong stalked out without saying a word as the rest of us stood in embarrassed silence. But Zhou Xiaozhou was right. Even on the streets, the contrast was obvious. The province of Hunan still had food.

Mao decided to return to Shaoshan, the Hunan village of his birth. He had not been back since 1927, thirty-two years before.

Mao's trip to Shaoshan was his way of seeking to learn the truth. He did not believe the leading cadres. There could be no carefully staged performances for Mao in Shaoshan. He knew the place too well. He could see through any attempt to deceive him. Besides, the village folk would speak frankly to him. They were honest and simple, and Mao was one of them. He trusted them.