42

Corruption within the party grew worse even as the food crisis deepened and more people died. In early January 1960, several days after Mao's sixty-sixth birthday, we left Hangzhou for Shanghai, where an enlarged meeting of the politburo was scheduled for January 7. Mao spent the nights on his train, but the meeting participants and members of his entourage were housed in the elegant, formerly French-owned Jinjiang Hotel. Inside the hotel, shielded from reality, the meetings produced one fantastical document after another as the politburo veered further and further to the left. Production targets went up. Steel production was to increase to 18 million tons. Small-scale business enterprises were to be set up at the level of the county and the people's communes. Irrigation projects would be expanded. Large pig farms would be established.

During the day, China's leaders deluded themselves by formulating unworkable economic plans. At night they played and were entertained by acrobats and music and dance troupes from all over the country, serenaded by leading stars of Beijing and local operas.

And they shopped. Now it was Shanghai mayor Ke Qingshi's turn to stage an elaborate charade for Mao and the party elite. Even as the nation lay crippled from an awesome shortage of foodstuffs and consumer goods, the stores within the compound of the Jinjiang Hotel were brimming with high-quality, reasonably priced merchandise of every description—bicycles, leather shoes, fine woolens, all of which were unavailable in local shops. China's leaders, the staff of Zhongnanhai, and we in Group One went on a shopping spree. I did too, and bumped into Yang Shangkun and Ye Zilong one afternoon as they emerged from a shop laden with purchases.

As the country's economic situation worsened, Ye Zilong's work for Mao had begun to suffer. This made Li Yinqiao happy, and Li began maneuvering to wrest away some of Ye's power. Finally, prodded by Jiang Qing, Mao acted, transferring some of Ye Zilong's control of his funds to Li Yinqiao.

Ye Zilong was furious.

“Fart! I have done his dirty business all these years, and look how I'm treated,” he complained to me one day.

“It seems to me that the Chairman has been quite good to you,” I said, trying to humor him.

Ye cursed. “He's taking away my power and telling people I'm bad. He's trying all sorts of things to squeeze me out. It's worse than being dismissed. This isn't the place for me. What a sad result.”

Talking to Ye Zilong, something inside me snapped, too. Among other things, I could no longer pretend that I didn't know about Mao's infidelities. For years, I had stayed away when I thought Mao might be entertaining his female guests, feigning ignorance. But now I could no longer hide the truth from myself.

After my release from the hospital, Mao no longer attempted to hide his affairs. While I was in the hospital, Mao had met a new clerk in the Bureau of Confidential Matters, a young, white-skinned woman with clear, dark eyes and delicately arched eyebrows. She had attracted Mao at once when she told the Chairman how she had defended him against his detractors when she was in primary school. Many of her schoolmates had vilified Mao as a “bandit” and spread rumors that the party was intent on communizing both marriage and property. The young woman had defended Mao and the communist party and once was hurt in a fight when her schoolmates beat her for her devotion to Mao.

After that, the young woman was often with Mao, and their relationship became increasingly public. She was with Mao in Shanghai, accompanying him day and night, often dancing with him until one or two in the morning. Mao was inexhaustible and often consented to return to the train only when his new companion was too tired to continue.

She was the first of Mao's women who made no effort to hide that relationship from Jiang Qing. She was proud of her relationship with Mao and was warm and outgoing to Jiang Qing, treating the Chairman's wife as a friend. Jiang Qing seemed to return the friendship, and I presumed her apology to Mao after discovering him having an affair with her nurse had forced her finally to accept the inevitability of Mao's other women.

His complaints about impotence subsided after I left the hospital. My faith in the Chairman had been shattered by the purge of Peng Dehuai, and once I could no longer avoid the truth of his private life, I felt only revulsion for the man I had once revered.

But having Li Yinqiao in charge of Mao's personal affairs did not clean up Group One.

In 1958, we in Group One became aware that Li Yinqiao had befriended a woman on Mao's staff. Li's work began to slip, and Mao began to notice. One day he complained to me that the two were sticking together like glue, working for each other rather than him.

While Mao was asleep on the train, Li Yinqiao and his friend began slipping off the train to the Jinjiang Hotel. One day when Ke Qingshi came to pick Mao up to escort him to the party meeting, Mao's personal bodyguard was nowhere to be seen. Mao was furious when Li finally returned. “Li Yinqiao, you're with that woman night and day. Who do you think you are?”

Ke Qingshi was worried. Li Yinqiao was charged with the Chairman's safety. Mao's well-being in Shanghai was Ke Qingshi's responsibility. Ke spoke with his counterpart from the capital, Beijing mayor Peng Zhen. Other ranking leaders were contacted. Everyone agreed that something had to be done. Mao's safety was at stake.

The problem worsened when we left Shanghai for Guangzhou. Three days after our arrival there, Li Yinqiao's friend came to me, distraught. She was pregnant. She wanted me to help her get an abortion in Guangzhou.

I was reluctant. As a matter of policy, we tried not to use local medical facilities except in emergency. The woman said she had become pregnant in Beijing. Why could she not return and get the abortion there, I asked. Why did she have to get it in Guangzhou?

Two days later, Li Yinqiao came to plead his friend's case, begging me to help. It would be “inconvenient” for her to have the abortion in Beijing, he explained. Too many people knew her there. She would have no way to keep the problem secret. Ye Zilong had given his okay for the abortion to take place in Guangzhou.

Ye Zilong's permission, I knew, was an exchange for Li Yinqiao's silence on another matter. Just after we arrived in Guangzhou, Ye had asked me for a prescription to treat his baldness. The Japanese-made lotion would have to be imported from Hong Kong, which could only be done if I wrote the prescription and charged it to a government account. This time I wrote the prescription. Ye Zilong still remembered that I had not given him penicillin to treat his relative's syphilis, and I knew Ye would make my life miserable if I refused him again. It was the type of petty blackmail that went on daily in Group One. Ye Zilong agreed to the abortion with the understanding that Li Yinqiao would not tell Mao about the imported tonic.

As I delayed, Li's friend came again to plead her case. She was already two months pregnant. She did not want to wait any longer.

Still uncomfortable to be using my position as Mao's doctor, I nevertheless arranged for the abortion through the president of the People's Hospital in Guangzhou. Li's friend checked into the hospital that afternoon.

Jiang Qing found out immediately. Confronting me that same evening, she wondered—disingenuously, I was sure—why the woman had been hospitalized. When I told her that she was having an abortion, Jiang Qing did not ask whose baby it was. “This is intolerable!” she said, hitting the table with the palm of her hand.

Still the friendship continued, and its reverberations affected all of us in Group One. Back in Beijing, Li Yinqiao began spending time with his friend while his wife was away. It was about this time that the woman's husband tried to commit suicide. The woman came running to my apartment one afternoon frantically yelling for help. Her husband was dying, she said, crying, and urged me to hurry to see what I could do.

He was lying on the floor of their apartment, his breathing labored. “I cannot live anymore,” he said to me. “I have lost too much face.” He had swallowed the mercury from a thermometer. But his most serious injury was his loss of face. His vital signs were normal, and he did not even have to be taken to the hospital.

Li Yinqiao still did not break the friendship.

Ye Zilong was still unhappy. “Mao does not say outright he wants me to leave, but doesn't let me do anything for him either,” he complained. Mao began criticizing Ye before other members of the staff. Ye Zilong began looking for a way out and talked to Beijing mayor Peng Zhen about finding a job with him. Ye continued to gossip about Mao, and the circle of people who knew about his indiscretions widened to include some of the country's ranking leaders—Peng Zhen and Yang Shangkun among them. Mao's private escapades were an open secret among the party elite, but Ye Zilong's talk was dangerous.

Ye Zilong's talk was his undoing. Mao never knew what Ye was saying, and I am not certain what he would have done had he known. Wang Dongxing told me that Liu Shaoqi did find out. Liu Shaoqi acted to protect the Chairman and moved quickly and ruthlessly against Ye. Ye has slandered the party, Liu declared when he heard what Mao's confidential secretary had been saying. He wanted to arrest him and have him shot. Only when Zhou Enlai and Peng Zhen intervened on Ye's behalf did Liu Shaoqi agree to spare Ye Zilong's life.

It was no surprise, given Mao's private life, that others in Group One followed the Chairman's example. Mao's staff was young and the men were handsome, and at the dancing parties in which we all participated, opportunities to meet pretty young women were plenty. But the standards for Mao and other top leaders were different from those imposed on the lesser ranks. Mao was subject to discipline from no one and could do whatever he wanted, but the demands the party made on his staff were strict. Now something had to be done. The solution began when Mao ordered the return of Wang Dongxing.