Mao: The Unknown Story

Kai-hui had this premonition because on the 7th of that month the Hunan Republican Daily reported that Zhu De’s wife had been killed and her head exposed in a street in Changsha. The paper carried two articles in which the writers said how much they enjoyed seeing the severed head. In April, Kai-hui wrote down some thoughts which she wanted to send to a newspaper but did not, entitled: “Feeling of Sadness on Reading about the Enjoyment of a Human Head”:

Zhu De’s wife I think most likely was a Communist. [words missing from original] Or even an important figure. If so, her execution is perhaps not to be criticised. [words crossed out] And yet her killing was not due to her own crime. Those who enjoyed her head and thought it was a pleasurable sight also did so not because of her own crime. So I remember the stories of killing relatives to the ninth clan for one man’s crime in the early Manchu period. My idea that killers are forced into killing turns out not to make sense here. There are so many people so exultantly enjoying it that we can see glad articles representing them in newspapers and journals. So my idea that only a small number of cruel people kills turns out not to be true here. So I have found the spirit of our times …

Yet I am weak, I am afraid of being killed, and so afraid of killing. I am not in tune with the times. I can’t look at that head, and my breast is filled with misery … I had thought that today’s mankind, and part of mankind, the Chinese, were civilized enough to have almost abolished the death penalty! I did not expect to see with my own eyes the killing of relatives to the ninth clan for one man’s crime … (To kill the wife of Zhu De, although not quite the ninth clan, basically comes to this.) … and the human head is becoming a work of art needed by many!

The abolition of the death penalty, and of torture, had been a very popular aim earlier in the century, and the Chinese Communist Party’s charter of 1923 had included these among its goals.

Kai-hui had naturally been reading about Mao’s own killings in the newspapers. He and his troops were always called “bandits,” who “burned and killed and kidnapped and looted.” Newspapers had also reported that Mao had been driven out of the outlaw land and “surrounded on three sides, Zhu — Mao will have no chance whatever to survive.”

Kai-hui still loved Mao, and above all wanted him to give up what he was doing and come back. On 16 May 1929, in a poem marked “To First Cousin — not sent,” she wrote eight agonized lines imploring Mao’s return:

You are now the beloved sweetheart!

Please tell him: Return, return.

I can see the heart of the old [probably referring to her mother] is being burnt by fire,

Please return! Return!

Sad separation, its crystallisation, chilling misery and loneliness are looming ever larger,

How I wish you would bring home some news!

This heart, [unclear in original], how does it compare with burning by fire?

Please return! Return!

Soon after this, a letter came from her First Cousin, saying that Mao was going to Shanghai (the Party had ordered him there on 7 February 1929). This meant she might be able to see him, and Kai-hui was rapturous. She opened her next letter, “to First Cousin,” with: “Received your letter. How happy and relieved I am!” She dreamed:

If the financial situation allows, I must get out of here to do a few years’ study … I want to get out, and find a job … I’m really in a great hurry to do some studies … Otherwise I can only feel the pains of emptiness, and feel I have nothing to lean on.

That letter like a will, I didn’t send. If you can come home once, that would be all I dare to hope.

Her thoughts then reverted to Mao, the possibility that he might not go to Shanghai, and his safety if he did:

Probably he wouldn’t be able to go to Shanghai? I’d rather he didn’t go. I’m worried for him again now. Oh, heaven! I’ll stop here …

She started to write to Mao, but changed her mind. There was a heading “To my beloved — not sent,” and the rest was torn out. Instead, she wrote down the story of her life, which she finished on 20 June 1929. Clearly, this was her way of telling Mao about herself, her thoughts and feelings. The memoir told two things: how passionately she loved him, and how utterly unable she was to tolerate violence and cruelty. The latter theme seems to have assumed an even larger place in her mind, as she began and ended her narrative with it.

She recalled that at the age of six, she began to see the world as a sad place: