The day was sunny and hot when we set out by car from Changsha on June 25, and the country roads were unpaved and dusty. Our car had no air-conditioning, and the dust came floating in through our open windows. We were perspiring so heavily that by the time we arrived in the Xiangtan prefectural seat some two hours later, we must have looked as if we were made of mud.

The party secretary of Xiangtan prefecture, Hua Guofeng, welcomed us. It was the first time I had met the man who would become Mao's successor some sixteen years later. We rested for a while in Xiangtan, chatting with Hua, but the prefecture chief did not accompany us on the final lap of our trip. Mao was afraid that the peasants of Shaoshan might speak less frankly with the head of their prefecture around.

Shaoshan village was a forty-minute drive from Xiangtan. Mao stayed on a hilltop in an old guesthouse once owned by Christian missionaries (even in as remote a village as Shaoshan, the missionaries had set up a church), and I stayed in a school at the bottom of the hill. The weather was hot and humid even at night, and the mosquito net covering my bed was stifling. I could not sleep.

Li Yinqiao phoned me at a little after five the next morning. Mao had not slept either. He wanted me to join him now for a walk. I met Mao at his guesthouse, and we began walking down the back of the hill, with Luo Ruiqing, Wang Renzhong, Zhou Xiaozhou, and a host of bodyguards following. Partway down, in the middle of a small pine grove, Mao stopped before a burial mound. It was only when he bowed from the waist in the traditional manner of respect that I realized we were standing before his parents' grave. Shen Tong, one of the security officers accompanying us, quickly gathered a bunch of wildflowers. Mao placed the flowers on the grave and bowed three times again. The rest of his entourage, standing behind him, bowed too. “There used to be a tombstone around here,” Mao said. “It has disappeared after all these years.” When Luo Ruiqing suggested that the site be repaired and restored, Mao demurred. “It's good just to have found the place,” he said.

We continued walking down the hill, in the direction of the Mao clan ancestral hall. Again Mao stopped, puzzled, looking for something. We were standing on the spot where the Buddhist shrine Mao had referred to so often in our conversations once stood—the shrine his mother used to visit when he was sick, where she burned incense and fed the ashes to her son, certain of their curative powers. The tiny shrine, like the tombstone, had disappeared, torn down only months before with the establishment of the commune. The bricks were needed to build the backyard steel furnaces, and the wood had been used as fuel.

Mao had fallen silent on our walk. The destruction of the shrine had saddened him. “It's such a pity,” he said. “It should have been left alone. Without money to see doctors, poor farmers could still come and pray to the gods and eat the incense ashes. The shrine could lift their spirits, give them hope. People need this kind of help and encouragement.” I smiled when he said this, but Mao was serious. “Don't look down on incense ashes,” he said, repeating his admonition that medicine is good only for curable disease. “Incense ashes give people the courage to fight disease, don't you think? You are a doctor. You should know how much psychology affects medical treatment.” People could not live without spiritual support, Mao believed.

My smile was not meant as disagreement. I have always believed that one's state of mind has a profound effect on health.

We went then to visit Mao's old family house. No one lived in it then. The personality cult surrounding Mao was still in its early stage, so the family house was still in its original state, old farming equipment neatly displayed on the porch. Only a wooden board above the entrance designated the place as Mao's childhood home. The style of the house was typical of that area—simple mud walls and a thatched roof. There was nothing modern about it. But with eight rooms built around a courtyard, the home was obviously that of a wealthy peasant.

The land Mao's father had once farmed, with help from temporary laborers, was now part of the people's commune. Just beyond the house was a pond lined with trees. “That's where I used to go swimming and where the cattle drank water,” he said.

He began reminiscing about his childhood. “My father was tough,” he said. “He always beat us. Once when he tried to beat me, I ran away, and he chased me around this pond, cursing me for being an unfilial son. But I told him that an unkind father will have an unfilial son.”

Mao described his mother as kindhearted and always willing to help others. She, Mao's younger brother, and Mao often formed a “united front” against Mao's father. “My father died a long time ago, but had he lived to this day, he would have been classified a rich peasant and been struggled against,” Mao said.

Mao began contacting his relatives to learn firsthand how the Great Leap Forward had affected them. Only the women and children were at home. The men were away working on the backyard steel furnaces or water conservancy projects. Mao did not have to delve far to learn that life was hard for the families in Shaoshan. With the construction of the backyard steel furnaces, everyone's pots and pans had been confiscated and thrown into the furnace to make steel—and nothing had been returned. Everyone was eating in the public mess halls. The families had no cooking equipment. Even if they still had had pots and pans, their earthen hearths had been destroyed so the mud could be used as fertilizer.

When Mao took a swim in the newly constructed Shaoshan reservoir that afternoon, he talked to the local folk about the project. Everyone criticized it. The reservoir had been poorly built, one old peasant pointed out. The commune secretary was in such a rush to finish that it leaked. The reservoir's capacity was too small, and when it rained, water had to be released to prevent flooding.

The commune directors called the menfolk back to meet with Mao in the evening, and Mao hosted a dinner party for them at his guesthouse—some fifty people in all. Everyone complained about the mess halls. The older people did not like them because the younger people always cut in and grabbed the food first. The younger people did not like the mess halls because there never was enough food. Fistfights often broke out, and much of the food was wasted when it ended up on the floor.

Mao asked about the backyard steel furnaces. Again he heard nothing but complaints. Indigenous raw materials were scarce. They used locally mined low-quality coal to fuel the furnaces, but there was not enough coal and no iron ore at all. The only way to comply with the directive to build the furnaces was to confiscate the peasants' pots, pans, and shovels for iron ore and their doors and furniture for fuel. But the furnaces were producing iron nuggets that no one knew what to do with. Now, with no pots or pans, people couldn't even boil drinking water at home, let alone cook. The commune kitchens were no help with the water problem, because the cooks had to devote all their energies to preparing food.

When Mao's questions stopped, the room fell silent. An air of gloom descended. The Great Leap Forward was not going well in Shaoshan. “If you can't fill your bellies at the public dining hall, then it's better just to disband it,” Mao said. “It's a waste of food. As for the water conservancy project, I don't think every rural community has to build a reservoir. If the reservoirs are not built well, there will be big problems. And if you cannot produce good steel, you might as well quit.”

With these words, Shaoshan probably became the first village in the country to abolish the public dining halls, halt its water conservancy project, and begin dismantling the backyard steel furnaces. Mao's comments were never publicly released, but they spread quickly through word of mouth. Soon many areas were dismantling their projects.

Thus it was that I, and certainly Mao, began to be aware that the economic situation in the country had deteriorated. Mao's return to Shaoshan awakened him to reality, shaking him into a growing awareness that trouble was brewing. When he returned to Wuhan, his previous ebullience had evaporated. But there was still no doubt in his mind that the programs themselves were basically sound, that they simply needed further adjustment. Mao still did not want to do anything to dampen the enthusiasm of the masses. The problem was how to bring the cadres back to reality without crushing their spirit or spreading gloom to the people. It was a question of propaganda—how to mobilize cadres and peasants alike to the right level of realistic enthusiasm. Mao decided to call a propaganda meeting to discuss the issues. It would be held in Wuhan.

We arrived in Wuhan on June 28. The weather was scorchingly hot and would only become hotter as the summer progressed. Wang Renzhong thought the meeting would be best held in a more hospitable climate. He suggested Qingdao, the site of the meetings in the summer of 1957, but Mao remembered the month-long cold he had contracted during his stay and refused to return to Qingdao.

Shanghai mayor Ke Qingshi suggested Lushan, the famous mountain resort along the Yangtze River in Jiangxi province where Chiang Kai-shek used to convene meetings of the Guomindang. At nearly fifteen hundred meters' elevation, the weather would be cool, and the facilities, built for Chiang and the Nationalist party elite, were excellent. There was even an auditorium for meetings. Besides, Lushan was not too far from Wuhan—just down the Yangtze by boat. Many of the party leaders had already begun gathering in Wuhan. Transporting them to Lushan would be easy.

Mao agreed. The party would convene in Lushan.