Giving a Face to China’s Revolutionary Villainess

Anchee Min’s exquisite new novel unfolds like a ribbon of gleaming, luminous silk--soothing in its beauty, mesmerizing in its variations, startling, delightful and ultimately transformative in a way that only the best works of art can aspire to be.

An astonishing journey into China’s recent past and the lives of its most noted leaders, “Becoming Madame Mao” uses recorded history--real characters, actual events, letters and poems and extended quotations from original documents--to reconstruct a world at once strange and familiar to the Western mind. It centers on Madame Mao Jiang Ching, China’s modern-day empress, founder of the Gang of Four and the person responsible for the tragedy known as the Cultural Revolution.

In Min’s hands, Madame Mao Jiang Ching is a sometime revolutionary who joins causes not out of conviction but to become closer to the men she loves. The daughter of an unhappy concubine and an old drunk who beats his wife with a shovel, she begins her life by rebelling against the practice of foot binding: She unwraps her feet at age 4 and swears to kill herself if her mother binds them again. Cast away by her father, soon abandoned by her mother, she lives with grandparents and relatives, marries when she is 17 and quickly moves on to other men and other lives. Shrewd and ambitious from the very beginning, she is motivated by the desire to rise above the anonymity and insignificance that have been her birthright.

Three husbands and a failed acting career behind her, she meets Mao in 1937 in the caves of Yenan during a military campaign. He is older, married and on his way to becoming the uncontested leader of China. Falling in love with him, Jiang Ching recognizes her chance at immortality and seizes it.

Mao, too, is taken by the young woman--so much so that he abandons his then-wife and defies the communist Politburo to marry Jiang Ching. Their love affair, Min tells us, is the stuff of legend. But Mao’s interest in Jiang Ching, we soon come to learn, lasts only as long as his battle to take control of China. Once in power, he retreats behind the walls of the Garden of Harvest in the Forbidden City, banishes Jiang Ching to the Garden of Stillness and pursues other loves. Jiang Ching is despondent.

“She gets up at night and sits in the dark. Cold sweat drips along her neckline. Her back is wet. Her cries crawl over the floor and stick in the wall. Mao no longer informs her of his whereabouts. His staff members avoid her. When she tries to talk to them, they show impatience as if she holds them hostage.”

While 20 million starve to death during the two years following his Great Leap Forward, we watch as Mao eats lobsters flown live to his palace on military planes and sleeps with a virgin every night to achieve longevity. To the virgins, he leaves the syphilis he refuses to treat. To China, he bestows a legacy of intrigue and betrayal. To Jiang Ching, he bequeaths a place in his coffin: “You will be pushed and nailed into my casket,” he tells her.

And so it might have come to pass, Min tells us, but for the woman who, not satisfied with being a forgotten concubine, “becomes” Madame Mao. Thirty years after her husband condemns her to oblivion, Min’s Madame Mao will rise to rule China with as much power and authority as any of her husband’s generals. In her hands, the country turns on itself, shedding innocent blood and cultivating fear and treason. Feeding on the slaughter, Madame Mao becomes a monster of unspeakable proportions. She will be denounced by Mao, despised by her only child and ultimately overpowered by the very government she has tried to destroy. Imprisoned after Mao’s death, she will spend the last 14 years of her life in the death seat, sewing dresses onto plastic dolls for export to the West.

This is a riveting tale, and Min recounts it in language that is vivid and evocative, yet restrained. And yet it is neither the quality of Anchee Min’s prose nor the plot nor the characters of the story that constitute the novel’s greatest strength. It is the writer’s ability to look through the one-dimensional freaks defined historically by the sum total of their public acts and to see the humans they all are. Min’s Madame Mao is cruel and bloodthirsty but also lost and heartbroken, dishonest and untrustworthy but also helpless in love. Her crimes are not excused or explained away. They are only one part among many she plays on the stage that is her life.

In the prison cell where she lingers until 1991, Madame Mao Jiang Ching refuses to repent for her deeds or to regret the life she has led. Her last act of defiance will be to hang herself from a makeshift rope. Before that, however, she has been managing to embroider her name into the corner of the dolls’ dresses she helped manufacture.

“And then she is found,” Min tells us, “and stopped. Nevertheless, it is too late to retrieve the ones that had already been shipped. Baskets of dolls, with her signature. Out of China and into the world. Where would they land? In a child’s forgotten bin? Or a display window?”

Into the words and memories of one who writes with courage and beauty and passion, perhaps.