Mao: The Unknown Story

As Gui-yuan could not bring Little Mao along on the evacuation, she entrusted the boy to her sister, who was married to Mao’s brother Tse-tan. The couple, as well as her brother and parents, were left behind. Gui-yuan wept bitterly at being parted from her son. (Her third child, a son, had died a few months earlier within days of being born.) Little Mao stayed with his wet nurse for a while. After the Nationalists took the Red territory, Tse-tan moved him secretly. But Tse-tan was killed in battle in April 1935 before he could tell his wife where.

Once Mao came to power, Gui-yuan, who had by then long ceased to be Mao’s wife, tried desperately to find Little Mao, with tragic results. Her sister, who felt guilty about Little Mao being lost while in her care, was killed in a car accident in November 1949 as she set off one night to chase a lead, within days of the Reds taking the area. In 1952 a young man was found who might possibly have been Little Mao. Gui-yuan’s brother recalled that Gui-yuan “rushed to identify him. She mainly checked two things, whether the boy had oily ears, and whether he had armpit odour [uncommon for Chinese]. She was convinced her children all inherited these characteristics of Mao Tse-tung’s. After inspecting him, she was convinced it was her Little Mao.”

But many other Communist women who had had to abandon their children had embarked on the same kind of quest, and one Red Army widow had already identified the boy as her son. The Party adjudicated that the boy belonged to this other woman. Gui-yuan’s brother went to see Mao, who had not been involved up to now, and showed him a photograph of the teenage boy, hinting that Gui-yuan would like Mao to intervene. But Mao declined, saying: “It’s awkward for me to interfere.” Mao told him to do what the Party decreed. Gui-yuan did not give up, and fought a painful — and tragic — battle for years. She and her brother kept in touch with the young man until his death from liver cancer in the 1970s, even taking care of his wedding arrangements.

MAO SHOWED NO particular sadness about leaving Little Mao behind, and did not even say goodbye to his son. His sorrow was reserved for himself. Gong Chu, the commander of the Red Army at Yudu, left a telling account of the last weeks before Mao departed, when Mao was staked out in his HQ. In early September Gong was studying a map when

suddenly my bodyguard came in and announced: “Chairman Mao is here!” I … ran to the front gate, and saw Mao Tse-tung with two bodyguards dismounting … He looked yellow and drained. I asked him: “Is the Chairman not well?” He answered: “You are right. I have recently been suffering from ill health, but more of a pain is that I feel extremely down …”

After he washed his face, he lit a cigarette and said: “… I’ll be here for quite a while.”

Mao said to Gong that as they were old friends from the outlaw land, “ ‘I hope you can come and have a chat whenever you have the time in the evenings.’ … Mao Tse-tung liked talking.” Gong took Mao up on his invitation, and after Gui-yuan joined Mao, she would “prepare delicious suppers. And the three of us would chat and drink and smoke, often … till midnight … From my observation, Mao’s place was not visited by other people except me … It really felt as if he was isolated and miserable.”

One day Gong bought a hen and some pigs’ trotters for dinner. Mao was “cheerful, and drank a lot.” He complained about the leadership, but more as a heart-to-heart between old friends than as sabotage. When Gong mentioned he had been given a reprimand for something, Mao “said he had not been in agreement with the reprimand. It was all because Chou En-lai was too harsh … Also, he said, [his Party foes] wanted all power in their hands … He seemed deeply resentful of them.”

Mao became doleful from drink, and recounted the various punishments visited on him. At one point, lamenting that he was no longer the big boss, “tears ran down his cheeks. He was coughing from time to time, and his face looked drawn and dried and sallow. Under the flicker of a tiny oil lamp, he was quite a picture of dejection.”

Neither the collapse of the Communist state nor the separation from his son could wound Mao like his loss of personal power.

Then, just when everything seemed set, Mao’s plans nearly fell apart. Days before the planned departure, his temperature shot up to 105.8°F and he grew delirious with malaria. It was the malaria season, and the mosquitoes in Yudu were so thick in the air that they flew right into people’s nostrils. Even quinine failed to do the trick. It was vital for him to recover — and recover fast, so that he could leave with the others. The best doctor in the Red area, Nelson Fu, who had looked after Mao in the missionary hospital in winter 1932–33, raced over from Ruijin and got him into good enough shape to travel. Patient and doctor both knew Fu had saved Mao’s life — and his political fortunes.