49

Mao did not attend most of the meetings in Lushan where the party debated about how to cope with the disaster as peasants still starved by the millions. Mao never admitted that he was in disgrace, never openly acknowledged that the Great Leap Forward had failed, and he still resented being reminded of the catastrophe his policies had caused. But his withdrawal from public life was the behavior of a man in disgrace.

He no longer spoke of meeting and mingling with the masses, no longer sought the limelight, though I am certain he felt the Chinese people still adulated him. His life depended on the admiration of others. He craved affection and acclaim. As his disgrace within the party grew, so did his hunger for approval. Lin Biao's campaign to study the thoughts of Mao was one way to feed this craving. His women were another. They adored him, worshiped him. He needed his women more, and he needed more of them, because he had lost so much face.

Jiang Qing joined Mao in Lushan, staying with him in the old Chiang Kai-shek villa. Her presence was an impediment to his liaisons. There were dancing parties every night, and Mao's dancing partners were many, but Jiang Qing was there, too.

He mollified Jiang Qing with a poem. It bothered her that her husband wrote poetry for other women—a paean to his first wife, Yang Kaihui, and another to a more recent liaison—but that she herself had never been the subject of her husband's verse. When she presented Mao with some of the magnificent photographs she had taken in Lushan—she spent much of her time there pursuing her hobby and had become a genuinely skilled photographer—he granted her wish and inscribed one of the best with a poem:

七绝·为李进同志题所摄庐山仙人洞照

At bluegreen twilight I see the rough pines

暮色苍茫看劲松，

serene under the rioting clouds.

乱云飞渡仍从容。

The cave of the gods was born in heaven,

天生一个仙人洞，

a vast wind-ray beauty on the dangerous peak.

无限风光在险峰。

Jiang Qing was delighted. She showed Mao's poem to everyone she met and was inspired to compose her own poem in praise of herself. Entitled, “On Self,” it was embarrassingly inept and immodest:

Overlooking the river a soaring peak

江上有奇峰，

Its face obscured in mists

锁在云雾中。

Mostly it is not beheld

寻常看不见，

Just occasionally its majesty is revealed.

偶尔露峥嵘。

The “soaring peak” was a play on the characters that made up Jiang Qing's name, and she was claiming that others unjustly prevented her grandeur from shining through. Jiang Qing wanted everyone to think she was a woman of great talent victimized by circumstances. During the Cultural Revolution she would make her poetry a rallying cry on her behalf.

Having satisfied Jiang Qing with a poem, Mao withdrew, like an emperor, to his private world. I joined him every day just after he woke, and we would swim together in the reservoir next to the comfortable, modern new villa the Jiangxi provincial committee had constructed for him, even as the peasants went hungry, after the meetings in 1959. He used the building for the many clandestine meetings he wanted to keep hidden from his wife and the party elite, retreating to it after his swim. His favorite during this visit was a young nurse from the Lushan sanatorium, whose acquaintance he had first made during the Lushan meetings in 1959.

Sometimes, in an effort to escape from the prying eyes of Jiang Qing and others, Mao would take me and a few women down the mountain to the Yangtze River town of Jiujiang. There they would swim in the river and cavort at the guesthouse. But the summer heat would soon become oppressive, and we would wend our way back up to the “soaring peaks.”

It was while we were in Lushan during that summer of 1961 that Mao invited his second wife, He Zizhen, to visit.

Sometime that spring or early summer, He Zizhen had written a letter to Mao warning him of trouble. “You should pay close attention to the people around you,” she wrote. “Some of them might belong to the Wang Ming faction and try to do you harm.” Wang Ming, the leader of the Bolshevik faction of returned students who had challenged Mao in the early 1930s, right after Mao and He Zizhen were married, had long been in disgrace and had spent the 1950s in the Soviet Union. He posed no threat to Mao. He Zizhen's mind had gone sometime after she and Mao were separated. They never got a formal divorce. When Mao lost interest in He, shortly after their arrival in Yanan in 1935, after she had become one of a handful of women to complete the Long March, she had gone, or been sent, to the Soviet Union, passing the difficult war years there together with her daughter, Li Min, and Mao's sons—Mao Anying and Mao Anqing. Soviet psychiatrists had diagnosed her as schizophrenic, and her psychological problems had continued after her return to China. Mao had set her up in a comfortable house in Shanghai at government expense, but she had never returned to normal.

Mao wrote, assuring his former wife that the Wang Ming faction was no longer a threat and that he had sent some of them down for reform and others away to study. Don't worry. Take good care of yourself, he reassured her. “Whenever you can, try to take a look at our socialist construction work.”

Now he wanted to see her.

Mao arranged for the director of the Shanghai public security bureau to send He Zizhen a carton of foreign-made “555” cigarettes and one thousand yuan, and asked the public-security personnel to accompany her to Lushan. The Shanghai officials used He Zizhen's younger brother, an officer in the garrison command there, as an intermediary.

She arrived during the party meetings, and I went with Mao to receive her in the new villa.

He Zizhen was elderly by then. Her hair was silver-gray and she walked with the unsteady gait of the aged. But her pallid face burst with delight as soon as she saw Mao.

Mao rose immediately and walked toward her, taking her hands into his, and escorting her to a chair as He Zizhen's eyes filled with tears.

He gave her a little hug and said with a smile, “Did you get my letter? Did you receive the money?” He was good to her, as gentle and kind as I had ever seen him.

“Yes, I received your letter and also the money,” she said.

Mao wanted to know more about her life and about the medical treatment she was receiving. Her voice was barely audible, and after the brief flash of recognition her words became incoherent. She seemed flushed with excitement, but her face had gone blank. Mao invited her to have dinner with him, but she refused.

“All right,” Mao said soothingly. “We have seen each other now, but you haven't talked much, have you? After you go back, listen to your doctor and take good care of yourself. We'll see each other again.”

And then she was gone.

For a long while after she left, I remained with Mao as he sat silently, smoking cigarette after cigarette, overcome with what I took to be melancholy. I had never seen him in such a mood. I sensed in him a great sorrow over He Zizhen.

Finally, he spoke. He was barely audible. “She is so old. And so sick.”

He turned to me. “This Dr. Su Zonghua, the one who treated Jiang Qing last time in Guangzhou, is he the same doctor who has been treating He Zizhen?”

I said that he was.

“And what is her illness called after all?”

“It is called schizophrenia.”

“What is schizophrenia?”

“It is a condition in which the mind cannot correctly relate to reality. Its cause is not yet clearly understood, and the drugs used to treat it have not proven very effective.”

“Is it the same illness that Mao Anqing has?”

I told him that it was and reminded him that Mao Anqing was under treatment in Dalian.

Mao said that probably neither of them could be cured and that there was nothing we could do.

I could only nod in agreement.

In 1962, in Shanghai, I saw him in a similar mood when he brought the woman with whom he had had his first sexual experience as a teenager to visit. Some fifty years had passed, and the woman was old and gray. Mao gave her two thousand yuan and sent her home. “How she has changed,” he said.

To my knowledge, Jiang Qing never knew about either meeting.