Becoming Madame Mao - Anchee Min [132]
Shut up! Mao springs up. Make sure Huang-mu-niang-niang—the Mother of Heaven—empties no chamber pot of her majesty's on my funeral day!
***
The night leaves smell like the breath of a child's mouth. Jiang Ching's mind goes back to the scene of the morning. She wonders if all is but a sleepwalking. As she passes the courtyard, she hears cats wail outside the deep walls and a loud sneeze comes out of a bush.
Leaning on his bed Mao doubts the safety of his pool. He calls the chief of the security force and asks if the pool is missile-proof. When the answer is uncertain, Mao orders the entire pool torn down. Turn it into an underground bomb shelter!
A team of doctors are summoned for Mao's sleeping disorder. Yet nothing they prescribe works. It worsens after the summer. Mao refuses to get out of bed, let alone brush, wash or dress. He is in his pajamas twenty-four hours a day. He grows more restless. He mistakes his secretary for an assassin and throws an ink bottle at him when he comes to deliver the news of American president Richard Nixon's visit.
Mao describes his symptom to a doctor. I hear drizzle. Day and night this ceaseless rain inside my head. It sweeps me away.
She can no longer wait. She wants to get Mao to write a will. She is sure that a stroke or a coma is on its way. She visualizes its coming. The flood that bursts the brain.
Mao doesn't want to see her. But she keeps presenting herself, making excuses to break into his bedroom.
He fires a guard who fails to stop her by the gate.
As the acting head of state she hosts and escorts the Nixons to her operas and ballets. It makes her feels proud and finally compensated. But in the meantime she feels danger approaching. She talks nervously and the translator has a hard time following her.
I don't feel my age although I am sixty years old. My strength gets exercised every day. Mao has failed to hide his ill health from the public's eye. In the hands of the best cameraman and film editor Mao's saliva drools helplessly in a documentary called Greeting Imelda Marcos. His eyelids drop low, his chin sags, and his mouth and jaw are out of place. Eighty-two years old. The sun can't help setting. What frustrates me is that he won't acknowledge his fate. He refuses to quit. He is not passing me the business. I tell myself that he is too old to think of me.
It's been too long a battle to give up now. A few years ago I asked Chun-qiao to draw up a proposal in the name of the Party's Committee of Shanghai and send it to Mao. Brilliantly, Chun-qiao described me as "the initiator of the Cultural Revolution" and "the key contributor of the Communist Party." At the moment of crisis, Comrade Jiang Ching puts her personal welfare on the line. She leads the Party and the Revolution single-handedly. She fights against the toughest enemies such as Liu Shao-qi and Deng Xiao-ping. There isn't a better person than Comrade Jiang Ching to lead the nation and carry on the Mao Tse-tung flag.
To my great disappointment, after three years of collecting dust on Mao's desk, the proposal is turned down. Not only that, Mao writes a nasty comment on its cover: Discard.
***
I am lying on the ground breathless. I don't even have the strength to kill myself. If Mao had proven to me that he was the king of Shang, I would copy Lady Yuji and knife myself gladly. And there would have been dignity. But it is too late. Everything is a mess.
Dawn is coming and I have not slept. I recall my youth. The first moment we laid eyes on each other. It still amazes me. The moment of pure magic. The happiness. The way he and I stood in front of the Yenan cave, unable to part.
Now I am a cornered and beaten-up dog. I bite in order to escape. The irony is that my character refuses to give up its idealism. My character tries to save my soul. It pushes me to live, to survive and to create light in hell. Every time I sit in the theater I see a fleeting ghost