Mao: The Unknown Story

After the Communists settled in Yenan, some senior Reds who had been wounded were able to go to Russia for treatment. Ostensibly to get rid of the painful shrapnel still lodged in her body, Gui-yuan left for Russia in early October 1937. Their one-year-old daughter remained in Yenan.

Gui-yuan reached Moscow in the depths of winter. She and the other new arrivals were immediately warned by fellow Chinese there not to get in touch with anyone they had known previously. A great purge was sweeping Soviet Russia, and many Chinese were being arrested. It was in this freezing world of isolation and fear that she gave birth to a boy, to whom she gave the Russian name Lyova. He died of pneumonia after only six months, and Gui-yuan sank into inconsolable grief. For days she sat on a bench facing the tiny mound where he was buried in the back garden, murmuring his name, weeping.

There was no warmth from her husband. When the baby was born, she had written to Mao to say that the boy looked just like him. Mao did not reply. No word either for his son’s death. Then, in summer 1939, nearly two years after they had parted, Gui-yuan learned by chance that Mao had remarried. She and a group of non-Russian-speaking Chinese met regularly to have items from the Soviet press read out to them in Chinese. On this occasion, the translator was reading an article by a famous Russian film-maker, Roman Karmen, about meeting Mao. Karmen mentioned that Mao and “his wife” had seen him off outside their cave in moonlight. The phrase “Mao’s wife,” so casually mentioned, set Gui-yuan’s stomach churning. In the following days, people who shared a room with her said she was tossing and turning all night. She was already suffering from severe insomnia. Now she came to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Her condition worsened further when she received a brief letter from Mao. It was dry stuff: hope you will study hard and make progress politically. In one lapidary sentence Mao announced the dissolution of their marriage: From now on, we are only comrades.

Because he had remarried, Mao did not want Gui-yuan back in China. When the friends with whom she had traveled to Russia were returning to China in 1939, a cable from Yenan specifically ordered her to stay behind. As a result, the infant daughter she had left in Yenan spent her first few years as a virtual orphan. Chiao-chiao had had to live as a boarder in the elite’s nursery. When the other children were taken home by their parents at the end of the day, nobody came for her. Later in life she recalled that there was also a boy who always stayed behind. He would cry and shout: “I want Papa! I want Mama! I want Home!” Chiao-chiao had no idea what these words meant. As a grown-up, she told a friend, quietly but not without an edge: “In those days, I was an ‘orphan’ who was not exactly an orphan!”

When she was four, Chiao-chiao was taken to Russia to join her mother. Gui-yuan hugged her daughter long and hard when they were reunited, in streams of tears, which made Chiao-chiao extremely happy. She was also fascinated by her mother’s permed hair, skirts, and leather shoes with heels, all very different from the women in Yenan, who wore baggy pants and un-smart cotton shoes, attire that even those who came to Yenan from Nationalist cities had to adopt. But Gui-yuan was already crushed by poor health, the result of frequent pregnancies, injuries suffered during the Long March, and painful memories of her dead and abandoned children, as well as years of grinding loneliness. The horrors she had experienced in the revolution may also have haunted her mind. Soon she had a breakdown, and the brunt of her rage was borne by her daughter; other children often heard Chiao-chiao screaming as her mother beat her. Gui-yuan was put in a mental institution, howling as she was torn away from her room and bundled into a car. Her terrified seven-year-old daughter ran away and hid in the woods, and grew into an introverted and silent girl.

IN SUMMER 1937, before Gui-yuan left for Russia, Mao had spotted a young actress called Jiang Qing, who was to become his fourth wife. Jiang Qing cut a stylish figure even in Communist garb, her belt tightly cinching her svelte waist, and her rakishly tilted army cap exposing waves of shining black hair. She exuded femininity and sexiness. She had a soft and pliant posture and a very sweet — to some an affected — voice.