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By Root 753 0

about Shang-guan Yun-zhu and Mao's seriousness in taking her as a future wife. I tried to ignore the rumor. I tried to focus on what I set out to achieve. I met interesting young people, the graduates of the Music Conservatory and the School of Opera of Shanghai. I was looking for new talent and they made perfect candidates. They complained about the lack of opportunities to perform. I understand how frightening it can be for actors to grow old on the sidelines. I told them that I would love to work with them. I promised to give them a chance to shine. I am in a mood to smash chains, I said. I want to renew my dream of a truly revolutionary theater, a weapon and a form of liberation. But the young people were not enthusiastic. They were unsure of my position. They wanted to check out my power first.

***

This morning I asked my driver to drop me in a place where there are woods to cover me from the rest of the world. I want to stop my mind from spinning. A half-hour later I find myself in the imperial hunting ground. I ask the driver to come back in three hours.

I walk toward a hill. The air feels like warm water pouring over my face. The scene is bleak. Plants have begun to die everywhere in the heat. The grass and bushes are all yellow. Even the most heat-bearing plant—the umbrella-shaped three-leaf goya—has lost its spirit. The leaves dangle down in three different directions.

There is a rotten smell in the air. It is the dead animals. Falcons circle above my head. I suppose the rotten smell rises fast in the heat. The birds smell their food in the air. Besides falcons, there are shit-lovers, cousins of cockroaches, crawling in and out of dead plants. I didn't know that they could fly. The heat must have made them change habits, for the ground is a baking pan.

The sky is a giant rice bowl and I am walking in its bottom—unable to climb and unable to get out.

Helplessness sucks the air out of my chest.

***

You need the figurehead. You need Mao, Kang Sheng says to me. Your role is to play Mao's most trusted comrade. It is the only way to empower yourself. You have to fake it. No, you don't feel. Go and kiss the corpses of the backyard concubines. They will tell you what feeling means. Get up on the giant's shoulders. So no one can overlook you.

I suppose I have to get over Mao.

Whatever you have to do.

She dreams about Mao. Night after night. The curse—that she wishes him dead—has come to bury her. Yet there is this inborn stubbornness. The way her feeling operates. It is its own cage. It blocks her. She is at a harbor, waving behind a crowd. Turn your head away, she cries to herself. Her heart refuses to let Mao go.

I tell him never to come to me, but I wait for him every day. I send him invitations using all kinds of excuses. When he does come, I show apathy. I either get servants to clean the room or pick up the camera and shoot roses in the garden. I long for him to stay yet I make his visits miserable.

I want him to finish us, I say to Nah. These days I have been spending more time with Nah. She is happy living in the boarding school but she makes sure to spend the weekends with me. She knows the fact that she is with me will give her father a good reason to visit. But I know it won't happen. I never look out the window and never respond to any of Nah's guesses regarding her father's arrival.

One evening my staff views a documentary film as a form of entertainment. The title is Chairman Mao Inspects the Country. I decline to go. When it's on, I hear the sound track from the portable projector over the kitchen. I am struck by a sudden sadness. I can't help but walk over to the screening. When it is finished I clap with the crowd with tears in my eyes.

Long live Chairman Mao and great health to Comrade Jiang Ching! everyone cheers.

In my dream I hear the whistle of a steam engine from a distance. I see wavelike crowds move in blurry dawn light. The ship begins to slowly take off. Thousands of colorful paper ribbons break in passengers' farewell cries. The ribbons dance in the air. It feels