Jiang Qing had made her first public appearance on September 29, 1962, two days after the close of the Tenth Plenum. The occasion was a meeting with the wife of Indonesia's president Sukarno, and a photograph of the event, the first of Mao's wife ever published, appeared in the People's Daily the next day. As Mao shook hands with Mrs. Sukarno, Jiang Qing, dressed in a neat Western-style suit, stood between them, smiling broadly, while Zhou Enlai's wife, Deng Yingchao, hovered in the background. The People's Daily had already published several photographs of Liu Shaoqi's wife, Wang Guangmei. In his ceremonial position as head of the republic, Liu Shaoqi had been on hand to greet Mrs. Sukarno when she arrived at the airport. Wang had accompanied her husband, the wife of one head of state greeting the wife of another.

Jiang Qing's public appearance aroused widespread public attention. It was a violation of the longstanding prohibition against her involvement in politics, but as with Wang Guangmei, protocol demanded her presence. In fact, Jiang's appearance presaged an active political role. The world of Chinese culture and arts was about to fall under her hand, and culture and art would become the stage from which the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was launched.

Jiang Qing's new activities made my life easier at first. The more involved in politics she became, the more her hypochondria and neurasthenia eased. I was called less frequently to deal with her complaints or to mediate disputes between her and her nurses.

But Jiang Qing still had a vendetta against me, and political power gave her a new means to try to settle scores. My first brush with the new Jiang Qing came in early 1963.

I had learned that the renowned Beijing Opera Theater had been performing a newly revised version of Red Plum. I had found the opera thrilling in my youth, and now it was being staged with a new title, Li Huiniang. Prominent figures in the worlds of art and literature, including Tian Han, one of the country's leading playwrights, had written articles praising the opera for its depiction of the rebellion and revenge of an exploited woman. Liao Mosha, the director of Beijing's United Front Department, writing under the pen name Fan Xing, also praised the opera, arguing that there was nothing wrong with plays about ghosts.

I had last seen Red Plum as a child, and my memory of the story was fuzzy. What I remembered most was the scene in which a beautiful female ghost returns to earth, dancing gracefully across the stage in a diaphanous white silk gown. Long a fan of Beijing opera, I wanted to see the new production. But working with Mao left me no time to do so.

Then, coincidentally, Mao began talking about opera with me one night. He did not like operas about beautiful young females, he said. He preferred operas featuring middle-aged men. But I remembered that Li Huiniang had both beautiful females and middle-aged men. I thought that Mao, too, might enjoy the scene where the beautiful young actress seems to float across the stage. I suggested that he see it.

He agreed. “Let's have it performed at Huairen Hall here in Zhongnanhai,” he said. “That way we all can see it. Tell Wang Dongxing to make the arrangements.”

The performance became a special event within Zhongnanhai. Because Mao himself had requested the opera, all the other top leaders attended, too. Even Lillian joined us.

Midway into the performance, sitting just behind Mao, I realized I had made a terrible mistake. I had not remembered the story at all. The turning point in the opera comes when Song dynasty premier Jia Shidao, then an old man, is watching a song-and-dance performance from a boat on Hangzhou's West Lake, Mao's favorite retreat. Jia's many young concubines are gathered round. As they watch, the beautiful Li Huiniang, one of Jia's favorite concubines, spots a dashing young scholar and blurts out in spontaneous admiration: “What a handsome man!” she says, loudly enough for Jia Shidao to hear. Jia is so infuriated with the young woman's lapse in loyalty that he has his favorite concubine executed. The scene I had remembered was the concubine returning from the dead—a beautiful ghost seeking revenge on the man who had been both her lover and executioner.

Just at the point when the beautiful concubine cried out in admiration for the younger man, Mao's demeanor changed. Aside from his occasional outbursts of temper he rarely allowed himself overt displays of displeasure. But I had learned to read his changes in mood—the slight frown, the raised eyebrow, the stiffening of his body. I realized that I had unwittingly insulted him. The scene had struck too close to home, to Mao's own philandering and to his young women. It recalled Mao's refusal to allow one of them to marry the young man she loved and her accusations that he was a bourgeois womanizer.

At the opera's conclusion, when the performers took their curtain call, Mao stood up, sulky and glum, offering only three or four desultory claps and leaving without his usual friendly greetings and thanks to the performers. He was silent as we walked back. My intention to please him had been a terrible failure. I knew he would be angry with me, and I knew that eventually he would find a way to vent it.

Shortly afterward, Shanghai's leading newspaper, Wen Hui Bao, began printing articles criticizing both the man who had written the opera and Liao Mosha, arguing that the play was ideologically incorrect and suggesting that the problems had something to do with class struggle. Then the government banned any further staging of operas or plays that had anything to do with ghosts, and Mao began criticizing the Ministry of Culture for failing to give proper guidance to theatrical works, calling it a ministry “for the monarch and court officials, for talented young men, beautiful women, and dead foreigners.” Suddenly an opera that I had seen as innocuous but beautiful was becoming a major political and ideological issue, a manifestation of the continuing class struggle that was part of Mao's new interpretation of China.

Several months went by and still I had not been implicated. Then Wang Dongxing came to see me. “We're in big trouble,” he said. “Jiang Qing thinks Li Huiniang is a very bad opera, a big poisonous weed. It talks about ghosts. It praises superstition.” Jiang Qing knew that Mao had not asked to see the opera himself but that someone had suggested it to him. She knew that none of the other top leaders, or Mao's political secretary Chen Boda, had made the suggestion. She knew that whoever did was both very close to the Chairman and a follower of Beijing opera. She knew that I was the only opera buff among Mao's inner circle and that Mao and I often talked about our mutual hobby. Only I could have made the suggestion. But she never mentioned my name.

Mao protected me, not out of friendship, but because he still needed me to serve as his doctor. When Jiang Qing asked him who had suggested the opera, he claimed not to remember. Wang Dongxing protected me, too, saying that he didn't know who made the suggestion and that he had merely been following orders when he arranged to have it performed. Besides, he knew nothing about opera—what was good and what was bad.

But Jiang Qing insisted on knowing and told Wang Dongxing to find out. “She has a bone to pick with you,” Wang warned me. “She wants you out of here. She's been looking for an excuse for a long time, and now she's found one.” Jiang Qing, he told me, was not going to let this go easily. She wanted to have me labeled a rightist.

Finally, Wang Dongxing and I decided to talk to Mao and suggest that we tell Jiang Qing that he decided to see the opera after reading Tian Han's article praising it. Mao agreed, and Wang Dongxing gave the article to Jiang Qing to read.

The Chairman's wife was delighted, but our plan was a disaster for Tian Han, for she now had an excuse to attack him. “So it's those people in literature and the arts who were behind it,” she said to me after Wang had shown her the article. “Fine. Let the bastards come out so we can grab them. They can't get away with it.” She was going to Shanghai. She and Ke Qingshi had become allies and they were going to work with Ke's cronies on a strategy of attack.

But she had to try one last time to coax me out of my hole.

“You saw Li Huiniang when it was performed here, didn't you?” she asked me casually, just before she left for Shanghai. “How did you like it?”

“The opera has been around for a long time,” I replied. “It's a fantasy. It's similar to the revolutionary opera White-Haired Girl. They are both about young girls who are exploited by landlords.”

She thought my theory strange and wondered how the two operas were alike.

I told her that they were both stories about oppressed females trying to get revenge. The white-haired girl is still alive but she is tortured so much she looks like a ghost. Li Huiniang becomes a ghost after she dies of torture.

But Jiang Qing thought I was talking nonsense. “Those two stories are completely different,” she said. “Talking about ghosts promotes superstition. It's not good for the common people.”

“But opera is art,” I tried to explain. “The ghost is fantasy. Shakespeare's Hamlet has a ghost. It's not superstitious.”

Jiang Qing did not agree. To her, ghosts were both superstitious and somehow a manifestation of class conflict. Shakespeare was both dead and English, and the plays of a long-dead foreigner were neither an accurate representation of reality nor progressive. “Just because Shakespeare's plays have ghosts doesn't mean we have to have ghosts, too,” she said. “The Chairman has discovered many problems in literature and art that indicate serious class conflict. You had better pay attention to my words.”

I was too conservative for Jiang Qing, still unable to escape the influence of my own bourgeois background. If I persisted in arguing with her, I knew she would have me labeled a rightist. The possibility was sobering. I was forty-three years old and already my hair had turned white from the anxiety of maneuvering within Group One. I had grown thin. But I had to survive, and self-interest required me to remain silent.

Jiang Qing left for Shanghai, where she relished her new role as overseer of culture. Ke Qingshi, loyal to Mao, was anxious to do his bidding and to assist Jiang Qing. He introduced her to Zhang Chunqiao, head of Shanghai propaganda. She had a busy schedule, visiting theaters, opera houses, dance troupes, and musical bands. “I am just a plain soldier, a sentry of the Chairman patrolling on the ideological battlefront,” she would tell everyone she met. “I am keeping watch and will report what I find to the Chairman.”

What she found, not surprisingly, was a world corrupted by capitalism, riddled with evil influences from the past.

On December 12, 1963, Mao asked me to read one of the results of Jiang Qing's investigations into Chinese culture—an article directed by Ke Qingshi called “Conclusive Report on the Revolutionary Changes in Plays and Operas in Shanghai.” Mao had written comments on the document. “Take a look,” he said. “We have established a socialist foundation in our economy, but the superstructure—literature and art—has not changed so much. Dead people are still in control of literature and the arts. We should not belittle our achievements in film, plays, folk songs, art, and novels. But problems still exist, and those problems are especially serious in the field of theater. We have to study this problem. Even party members are enthusiastically promoting feudal and capitalist art but ignoring socialist art. This is absurd.”

Several months later, Mao turned his attack directly against the All China Federation of Literature and Art. “For the last fifteen years, the organizations and magazines under their control have not been carrying out the party's policy,” he said. “They still act like overlords, shying away from close contact with the workers, peasants, and soldiers. They don't reflect the socialist revolution. They're moving in the direction of revisionism. If these organizations are not thoroughly reformed, one day they will become like the Hungarian Pet fi Club.” When young Hungarian workers established the Pet fi Club in 1954 to advocate greater freedom and democracy, the government waited two years before decimating them in the crackdown of 1956. Mao was planning his own crackdown on dissidents within China.