7

The morning after our first nocturnal chat was May Day, and I reported to the duty office at Mao's residence at a little after nine, emergency medical bag in hand. Wang Dongxing was already there, and Mao soon emerged from his bedroom, dressed in a woolen Sun Yat-sen suit and a pair of brown leather shoes. He was excited about the upcoming event and greeted us with obvious delight.

Luo Ruiqing, minister of public security, arrived, and gave Mao a military salute. At Mao's signal, we all piled into the waiting limousines to be whisked off to Tiananmen.

I had attended every National Day and May Day celebration since my return to China in 1949, and the holidays had always thrilled me. I loved the excitement of the huge crowds gathered in the square, the parade, the music, and the flags. I loved watching the leaders atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, reviewing the parade and waving to the throngs. The celebrations had always made me proud to be Chinese. But today, I was no longer one of the crowd. I, too, would be standing atop Tiananmen, with the country's highest leaders, watching the celebration below.

I sat in the lead car with Luo Ruiqing. As we pulled up to the staging area behind the Gate of Heavenly Peace, Luo jumped out and rushed to Mao's car, opened the door, and offered his hand. Mao glared at the public-security minister, got out of the car himself, and said angrily, “Don't be so thoughtless. There's no need to help me. Help Vice-Chairman Song Qingling.” May Day was a state occasion, and the communist government still maintained the facade of a united front with the non-communist, “democratic” parties. Sun Yat-sen's widow, Song Qingling, was the most prominent spokesperson for the united-front policy. Luo rushed to Song's car, but she was already out.

Song Qingling must have been about sixty then, but she was still as beautiful and graceful as the first time I saw her atop Tiananmen. She was warm and outgoing and came forward to greet us, graciously shaking hands with everyone.

The other so-called democratic personages, by contrast, seemed senile and cold, taking their time about greeting us, moving with the deliberate, painful slowness of the very old. Mao greeted them pleasantly, though, then turned to Song Qingling and gallantly asked her to lead the way to the reception room atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, helping her climb the rough-hewn outdoor stone stairs.

We reached the top of Tiananmen to applause from the already-assembled guests, and I was surprised to discover a spacious indoor reception area furnished with numerous comfortable overstuffed chairs, arranged in a large semicircle. Snacks, fruits, and drinks were laid out in abundance. So this was how the top leaders were able to spend five or six hours reviewing parades with never a hint of discomfort!

Mao shook hands with many of the guests, then turned toward the balcony that overlooked the square. Decorated with colorful red lanterns and banners, it was separated from the reception area by a huge screen and could not be seen from inside. I followed Mao to the podium and watched in wonderment as he waved to the crowd, slowly and deliberately walking back and forth across the length of the balcony, extending his blessing to every corner of the square. His expression was impassive, but I knew he was thrilled. I was overcome with excitement. The square was a sea of color, filled with thousands of young students dressed head to toe in white, the bright red Young Pioneers' scarves a splash of color around their necks. Thousands of carefully selected cadres and workers were carrying huge banners of every imaginable hue. The crowd went wild the moment Mao appeared, waving their banners and leaping into the air, shouting slogans supporting the Communist party, new China, and Mao.

Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing, opened the celebration. Just at the foot of Tiananmen, near where I had been standing on October 1, 1949, a military band played the Chinese national anthem. Cannons fired a twenty-one-gun salute. The band kept playing—“The East Is Red” (“The east is red; the sun shines; China has brought forth a Mao Zedong”), “The Internationale,” “The March of the People's Liberation Army.”

The festivities began.

The military paraded by first, the army, navy, and air force troops in full military dress, displaying their weapons—tanks and cannons and so on. The band continued its martial music as Mao and all the other government leaders stood in review. Then waves upon waves of cadres, workers, and students marched by—with national flags, factory flags, school flags, colorful banners, waving their greetings to Mao and the other leaders. The parade continued for hours. Only rarely did the exhilarated Mao return to the reception room to rest.

The final contingent, thousands of children dressed in white and sporting red scarves, did not arrive at the foot of the podium until mid-afternoon. Raising their huge bouquets of flowers in another colorful salute, the children began shouting slogans of praise for China and the Communist party. That the crowds loved and respected Mao there was no doubt. Everyone participating in the parade had been specially selected. They were meant to love Mao.

Participate in these celebrations and you will receive an education in patriotism, Mao had told me. “Participate and you will love your country even more.” He was right. On May 1, 1955, accompanying him for the first time, standing near him as he reviewed the crowds, thrilling to the martial music and the sea of color and the displays of China's military might, I was indeed overcome with patriotism.

The parade ended at about four-thirty in the afternoon, and we returned to Zhongnanhai. As Mao returned to his residence in the Chrysanthemum Fragrance Study, Luo Ruiqing reminded him that we would be returning to Tiananmen at seven o'clock for the evening fireworks display.

“It's been a long, hard day,” Luo Ruiqing said, turning to us. “Be back here at six-thirty. Don't be late.”

I returned to my apartment in Zhongnanhai's South Building, where my wife and son, John, were waiting, playing chess. I had promised to take them to the park that afternoon, and we had planned to go to my mother's house for a holiday dinner. Our plans were ruined.

“What should I tell Mother?” Lillian wondered. I sent them off, promising to join them as soon as I could, and told them to return home if I had not showed up by nine. I returned to my office in Group One and quickly ate a bowl of noodles.

As the other staff members gathered, the secretaries and guards began complaining that they had not had enough time for supper. “Don't worry,” Wang Dongxing assured them. “There will be plenty of snacks at Tiananmen. Just don't all get together and eat at the same time or people will say that the staff of Group One gets special treatment—eating food intended for the leaders.”

Seven o'clock came and Mao did not emerge from his quarters. “Big Beard Wang is cutting the Chairman's hair,” Wang Dongxing explained. At seven-thirty, Luo Ruiqing turned to Wang Dongxing. “You'd better let the Chairman know it's time to leave,” he said. Wang disappeared into the Chrysanthemum Fragrance Study. I followed to take a look.

Mao was sitting on a wicker chair in his dining room, a white sheet wrapped around his neck, holding an old-fashioned linen string-bound book, reading, shifting first this way and then that with no regard for the difficulties he was causing old Big Beard Wang. The back of the chair was too high, which gave Wang problems, and Mao's constant shifting from one position to another kept Wang in constant motion. He was perspiring heavily.

Big Beard Wang, whose real name was Wang Hui, was then in his sixties. He had been cutting Mao's hair since the late 1930s. When the party launched a rectification campaign in 1942, Mao told me later, Big Beard Wang had been accused of some sort of perfidy against the party. As the campaign against hidden traitors continued and the accused were pressured to confess, Big Beard Wang was among those who did, saying he was a secret assassin and had intended to kill Mao with his razor.

“I had my doubts when I heard about Big Beard Wang's confession,” Mao told me. “Big Beard Wang had been cutting my hair and shaving me for years and had never so much as nicked my face. If he had wanted to kill me, he could have done it long before. I asked Big Beard Wang to come see me. He cried when he saw me, kneeling down and confessing that he had planned to kill me. ‘So why haven't you killed me already?' I asked. Wang said he was waiting for the Guomindang to come, then he would kill me. ‘If the Guomindang comes, they'll kill me. You won't have to,' I told him. I urged Wang to tell me the truth, and he explained that his interrogators had been keeping him awake day after day, not allowing him to sleep, trying to get him to confess. Only when he confessed was he finally allowed to sleep.

“So I halted the campaign,” Mao continued. “I stressed that people had to tell the truth, not be forced to lie.”

Big Beard Wang had remained impeccably loyal. Indeed, many members of Mao's inner court, those closest and most loyal to him, had once been similarly saved by Mao.

Luo Ruiqing came in. “Can't you hurry it up?” Luo whispered to Wang.

“Minister Luo, you can't hurry him,” Wang Dongxing whispered in reply. “If he hurries, he might accidentally hurt the Chairman. Then what a mess!”

After the haircut was finished, Big Beard Wang began shaving Mao, an even more difficult task. Big Beard had to crouch on his knees to get at Mao's chin while the Chairman continued to read, chin down, face thrust into his book. It was getting later and later.

Finally, Wang was finished, and the motorcade set out. Riding with Wang Dongxing and Luo Ruiqing, we talked about the problem of Mao's haircuts. Luo wanted to bring in a barber's chair from the Beijing Hotel and set it up in a special room.

But Wang had already made the same suggestion to Mao. He did not want the barber's chair. “The Chairman prefers it this way,” Wang said.

“But Big Beard Wang is so old. His hands are trembling,” Luo continued. “If he accidentally cuts the Chairman's face, it would be terrible.”

“But it's even more difficult to find someone else,” Wang said. “The Chairman won't allow him to be replaced. He doesn't trust a new barber moving around with a sharp razor.”

Luo was silent. I thought he should have known better. He should have understood the difficulties Mao faced in finding people to trust. He should have known how important trust is. Luo Ruiqing, loyal though he was, never did understand the Chairman. I realized that someday I might have to use syringes and needles, maybe even a scalpel, on Mao. His permission for me to treat him would also depend on trust, and I would have to win that trust before I could do my work as his doctor. To do that, I would have to get closer to him, let him know me better. We would have to become friends.

The fireworks began as soon as Mao reached the top of Tiananmen. All the major buildings in the city had been strung with white lights, and we could see the white outlines of the buildings traced against the night sky. It was a spectacular sight—the colors of the shooting fireworks against the white lights and thousands upon thousands of colorfully dressed people performing folk dances in the square below.

As the fireworks were still splashing across the sky, Premier Zhou Enlai came to ask Mao to have his picture taken with some of the foreign dignitaries attending the occasion. Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, then sixty-five years old, was among the guests, lean and energetic, with a long, wispy white goatee. Ho was dressed like a peasant, his bare feet in rough straw sandals. Ho had spent much of his adult life in China, and his Chinese bodyguard told me that the Vietnamese leader was fond of practically everything Chinese—food, clothing, transportation, houses. He spoke fluent Chinese. Ho was still spending most of his time in China then, in the two southern provinces of Guangxi and Yunnan, which border on Vietnam. I was introduced to him and liked him enormously. Mao commanded great respect, but Ho was more personable, less awesome.

The fireworks were over around ten. No one involved in the preparations for the evening would tell me how much the lavish food and refreshments had cost, but I learned that about half a million renminbi had been spent on the fireworks alone. The average monthly wage of workers then was thirty renminbi. Later, I would come to regard these festivities as almost criminally wasteful, particularly when they continued uninterrupted through the “three bad years,” when millions starved. They lost their meaning for me then.

They would lose their meaning for Mao as well. National Day and May Day were the only two days of the year that he had to rise early and was expected to appear on time. He was always excited before the celebrations, and his insomnia would grow worse. Often he would get no sleep at all the night before the festivities. He was exhilarated by the crowds and their adulation and his energy always carried him through the event, but he often caught cold afterward. Sometimes the cold would become bronchitis, and he would be miserable for weeks. As he got older, the bronchitis would sometimes turn into pneumonia.

He hated having to dress for those occasions. One of the reasons he later resigned from his position as chairman of the republic was his disaffection with the National Day and May Day celebrations. He wanted to be relieved of the burdens of ceremony and official formality. The decision in the mid-1960s to celebrate National Day only once every five years was not motivated, as he claimed, by a concern for wasteful expenditures. During the Cultural Revolution, at the height of the internal struggle for power, Mao went eight times to Tiananmen to review millions of Red Guards from all over the country at a far greater cost than any National or May Day celebration. In his struggles against his political opposition, cost was of no concern to Mao. After Lin Biao's disastrous abortive flight to the Soviet Union in September 1971, Mao never participated in the celebrations again.

On May Day 1955, however, Mao still reveled in the excitement, and the twinge I felt over the cost of the extravaganza quickly evaporated in my elation at being there.

Nonetheless, I was looking forward after the day's excitement to returning home to my family. But that was not to be. Mao, I was astonished to learn, was hosting a dance. Ballroom dancing had been prohibited after the revolution as decadent and bourgeois, and the dance halls had been closed. But behind the walls of Zhongnanhai, in the huge Spring Lotus Chamber (Chunou Zhai), just to the northwest of his walled compound, Mao held dancing parties once a week. When he returned from the evening of fireworks, Mao planned to spend the night dancing and I was expected to join.

I walked into the huge chamber with Mao. Immediately, he was surrounded by a dozen or so attentive, attractive young women from the Cultural Work Troupe of the Central Garrison Corps, flirting with him and begging him to dance. A band from the Cultural Work Troupe was performing Western music—fox-trots, waltzes, and tangos—and Mao danced with each of the young girls in turn, his ballroom style a slow, ponderous walk. After each dance, his young female partner would sit with him and chat, only to be replaced by a new one a few minutes later. Jiang Qing was not there that evening, having left not long before for Hangzhou, but Zhu De and Liu Shaoqi were. Only Mao and the other two party leaders sat at tables. The hundred or so others, most of them cadres from the General Office and young people from the Cultural Work Troupe, sat in chairs lining the walls of the huge ballroom. Since I was young, Mao's doctor, and one of the few men in the room, the young women invited me to dance, too.

Periodically, the Western dance music would stop and the room would fill with the sounds of Beijing opera. Beijing opera is a folk tradition rather than high art, and the stories it tells are often earthy, filled with intrigue, romance, and deceit. Some are pornographic. The music itself can be distressing to Western ears—loud and cacophonous, the antithesis of Western dance music. I was surprised that night to hear tunes from Shushan Qijie, an opera about a prostitute who falls in love with a student, and even more astonished when Mao took to the floor as it was playing to indulge in his form of Western ballroom dance.

As the evening wore on, my presence seemed superfluous. I assumed that my responsibilities for the day were over. When I went to Li Yinqiao to tell him I was leaving, the bodyguard warned me to stay. “Please don't go,” he said. “Chairman may be dancing, but he is still paying attention to his staff. He knows who is around and who is not. If you leave now, he will think that you and I don't get along well, and I will be blamed.”

“But how could that be?” I wondered. “There are no problems between us.”

“Yes, but you don't understand Chairman yet. You will understand after you have worked here for a while.”

Li Yinqiao was right. Even when he was relaxing, Mao knew where everyone was and insisted that they be nearby. A year later, in Hangzhou, I was tired and went to my room to rest rather than attend the dance the party committee had organized on Mao's behalf. Just as I was settling in, there was a knock on my door. One of Mao's bodyguards was standing there. “Chairman wondered if the other guard failed to tell you about the party,” he said. “You'd better come.” Still later, in 1958, in Hunan, when I decided to forgo the evening entertainment because of a heavy downpour, the director of Hunan's public security came personally, at Mao's direction, to escort me to the performance. Thus I learned never to miss one of Mao's parties.

It would be several years before I understood the purpose of these dancing parties. The Cultural Work Troupe of the Central Garrison Corps had been organized by Wang Dongxing. It provided entertainment not only for the Central Garrison Corps but also for Mao. The troupe contained a pool of young women, selected for their looks, their artistic talent, and their political reliability. Over time, the role of these dancing parties, and of some of the young women who participated in them, became too obvious for me to ignore.

In 1961, one of Mao's specially made beds was moved to the room adjacent to the ballroom where Mao would retire to “rest” during the course of an evening of dance. I often watched him take a young woman by the hand, escort her to the room, and close the door behind them.

Peng Dehuai, a vice-chairman of the Military Affairs Commission, had criticized Mao's use of the Cultural Work Troupe twice, once in 1953 and again at a politburo meeting in 1957. Peng was the frankest, most honest man on the politburo, the only top leader who consistently dared to confront Mao. He accused him of behaving like an emperor, with a harem of three thousand concubines, and criticized Luo Ruiqing and Wang Dongxing as well. The Cultural Work Troupe was disbanded, but Mao continued to have plenty of female partners. Dancing girls from other cultural troupes—from the Beijing Military Region, the air force, the special railway division, the Second Artillery Corps, and from the provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangxi, and Hubei—came to serve him. So did many young, attractive, and politically reliable women from the Bureau of Confidential Matters.

I knew none of this at that first dancing party on May Day 1955. I knew only that I wanted to go home to my family. But the dance did not end until two o'clock in the morning. I declined Wang Dongxing's offer to join him for a snack and hurried home to Lillian, who had waited up.

As we shared a bowl of fried rice, she told me how disappointed she was that the family holiday had passed without me. My mother had prepared a huge feast, and they had waited until ten o'clock before finally eating. My son, John, had been so tired that he fell asleep at my mother's and was spending the night there.

Less than a week had passed since my first meeting with Mao and already my whole life had changed. My regular schedule had been turned upside down. “You've already picked up Chairman Mao's habits,” Lillian said. From that point on, for more than two decades, my life with Lillian and my family would never be the same. I loved Lillian very much, but I was rarely at home. We had once looked forward to our holidays—National Day, May Day, Chinese New Year—and the whole family usually spent them with my mother, but in all the time I worked for Mao, we were never again able to celebrate together, and in twenty-two years I had only one weeklong vacation.

Mao's schedule often required me to be with him through the early hours of the morning, so I could return home only just before dawn. Lillian would often wait up for me, and she was always worried.

Mao traveled constantly, and I accompanied him wherever he went, sometimes staying away for months at a time, occasionally not returning for an entire year. Lillian was particularly anxious during these extended trips, unable to eat or sleep well. My second son, Erchong, was born while I was away in 1956.

Not only were we often separated, but Lillian was excluded from my life in the inner circle even when I was in Beijing. She never became a party member. Because of her family background and prior work with the British and Americans, she was considered irredeemably unreliable politically. Only my own position as Mao's doctor protected her in the series of devastating political campaigns that were to destroy so many lives.

During those years, she sacrificed herself to make my own work easier, carrying the entire burden of our household, caring for both our children and my aged mother. Lillian had returned to China a vivacious and outgoing young woman, full of energy and zest for life. But she changed over time, and the changes were painful to watch. Gradually, with her constant worry over my job, her pain at being excluded from so much in new China, and her own difficulty finding work, she became quiet and withdrawn. “We live like drifters,” she would say. “Our family is really no family.” Her spark seemed to die.