Becoming Madame Mao - Anchee Min [47]
The highest building starts with a brick
The deepest river starts with a drop of water
The revolution starts here in Yenan
In the red territory led by the great Mao Tse-tung
She is moved by the atmosphere, by the action she is taking to achieve her dream, by the fact that she might become a casualty of this dream. A perfect tragic heroine. She could weep, she thinks, smiling.
Amid thunderous clapping Mao appears. The crowd cheers at the top of its voice: Chairman Mao!
He begins with a stylish folk joke very few understand.
The girl is star-struck. It feels as if she has met Buddha himself.
The man on stage talks about the relationship between art and philosophy, between the roles of an artist and a revolutionary.
Comrades! How are we doing with the weeds that have been growing in our stomachs?
His movement is scholarly and relaxed. His voice has a heavy nasal sound, mixed with a vibrating Hunan accent.
I have been cleaning up mine. A lot of pulling and scaling. The thing is that Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese are easy to identify as enemies. We know they are there to get us. But dogmatism is like weeds. It wears a mask of rice shoots. Can you tell the difference? To be a good artist one has to be a Marxist first. One has to be able to distinguish dogmatism from Communism.
She detects metal in his frame. She suddenly wonders if there is any truth in Kang Sheng's advice: what counts in Yenan is the proof of one's background as a Communist. Her instinct is telling her a different truth, telling her what nature tells men and women. There isn't anything to prove. Everything is in the bodies, in the catching of the eyes of the human animals.
The man on the stage continues. Words, phrases and concepts flow.
The dogmatists pretend to be true revolutionaries. They sit on important seats of our congress. They do nothing but mouth Joseph Stalin. The revolt and attack has started from within, inside our Party's body. They are invisible but fatal. They call themselves one hundred percent Soviets, but they are spiders with rotten spinners—they can no longer produce threads, they are useless to the revolution. They speak in Karl Marx's tune, but they help Chiang Kai-shek. We have been mocked. We have been given glasses with scratched lenses—so we can't see clearly. We have believed in Stalin and trusted the people sent by him. But what do they do here except make social experiments at our cost?
Mao elaborates on Chinese history in light of the current situation, applies theories with military design and invention. Then his expression changes, withdraws, sinks into solemnity, as if the crowd has disappeared in front of him.
The girl can't help but begin measuring. She measures the man's future with a fortuneteller's eye. She zooms in. On his face, through a glittering, she sees an imprint of a lion's claw. She hears its roar. A howling out of time. It is at that moment she hears a click between herself and her role.
His bodyguard comes with a mug of tea. The boy has a caterpillar-like scar between his eyebrows. He places the tea on the ground in front of his master's feet. This amazes the girl. In Yenan it seems natural for people to pick up a mug from the ground instead of a table.
The voice on the stage grows louder. The truth is, comrades, we have been losing—our men, horses and family members. Because of the wrong direction we have been forced to follow, our map has shrunk again. Haven't we learned enough lessons? We didn't lose the battles to Chiang Kai-shek or the Japanese, but to the enemy within. Our brothers' heads roll like rocks ... About preserving political innocence, yes, we want to preserve it, not out of ignorance, but out of knowledge and wisdom. Our leadership is so weak that bad luck has been glued to us. Our teeth fall out when we drink cold water, and we stumble over our own fart!