Anita, my young friend from Hangzhou, tells me that Mao "is like an uncle," a paternal figure of wisdom and kindliness. His last wife, Jiang Qing? She is "like the devil. All Chinese think so." Mao's spirit must be pleased. It is, after all, what he wanted. Thirty years after his death, his fat, bald, lunar visage still looms benignly over Tiananmen Square. He is still the First Citizen, still beloved, still a fatherly figure, revered if not adored, at least for now.
Jiang Qing was evil, unquestionably so. Yet, for all the evil she did or that was attributed to her, for all the chaos, disruption and destruction that can be traced to her wasteful, mean, insane policies, for all her vindictiveness, jealousy and anger, for every loathsome attribute she had, for every death she caused directly and indirectly, for every family ruined and every person tortured and persecuted, she was, and is, a useful evil. While Mao still breathed, she was useful to him. In death, she continues to be useful to the Communist Party and the Chinese people, at least the ones who still love Mao. Whatever she was in life, her dark ghost looms large and menacing, out-Herods Herod and draws the blackness from the shade of Mao. He sparkles while she rots.
Anchee Min's "Becoming Madam Mao" is an outrageous fiction. Min, who is bold enough to attempt literature in an adopted language (and audacious enough to do it well), redoubled her boldness and took on the task of creating a novel about Mao's most despicable consort. In prose that alternates from third person to first, she attempts to take us into the mind of this strange and devious woman, illuminate her times, and provide a human dimension to the "white boned demon," this woman who shared Mao's bed, mothered one of his children and became the instigator of one of the most disastrous experiments in societal manipulation, the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Min, by alternating persons from third to first, balances her fictional portrait, narrating events from the outside, then changing to the first person to view situations from the perspective of Madam Mao.
The story unfolds in a series of fascinating vignettes, each one bringing us through the phases of Jiang Qing's life from her brutal and impoverished infancy to her final confrontation with her daughter, and her suicide. The Jiang Qing of Min's novel is a woman who creates and re-creates herself, insinuates the lives of people - men - to advance, first, her acting career, then her career in the Communist Party and in Politics. Born into poverty, the unwanted child of a concubine who has been expelled from her man's home, Jiang's early life is filled with uncertainty and misery. Even as a small child, she can't be cowed, however. Much to her mother's consternation, she refuses to have her feet bound, pulls the bindings from them, and won't be bound again. She finally finds some comfort in the home of her grandparents, where she's taught the basics of Chinese opera and learns to dream of a life on the stage. Eventually, she runs away and pursues her dream, only to find herself constrained by her choice of men and by the machinations of the KuoMinTang government. She becomes a Communist, less out of ideological conviction than out of a desire to resist the KMT and to follow her friends.
Her career on the stage faltering, she leaves Shanghai, sets her sites on Mao, follows him to his mountain lair, joins his forces, meets him, and, Mao being fond of actresses, she seduces him. She's learned much from her affairs in Shanghai. Studied and deliberate in what she does, every move and word is calculated. She manipulates well, forms her alliances, cajoles Mao into abandoning his mad third wife, and wheedles him into a dubious marriage. She is at his side as he pushes on to victory, but Mao is fickle and in time his ardor cools. A manipulator herself, she reads his moods and senses the danger that estrangement from Mao can bring.
Jiang strives for security, for power, for acknowledgment of her place at Mao's side, as his wife, partner and advisor with power of her own and a mission to fill. Her chance finally comes when Mao turns against his own Party apparatus and she joins him in the mayhem by reinventing herself as the mistress of culture. Vindictive and jealous by nature, loathing the apparatchiks in the cadre who have ignored and insulted her throughout the years, she unleashes chaos and strife with her Red Guards, tramples the educational system, and annihilates the lively arts, literature, and the stage. Resistance shattered, all culture is ultimately reduced to her eight exemplary Maoist operas, education becomes nothing more than indoctrination in the Cult of Mao. She turns her talons on everyone, motivated by jealousy and vindictiveness, indifferent to suffering (except her own), and consumed by her pathological obsession with Mao, less love than a fixation that overwhelms and obscures every villainy, every vice, every treachery, and every atrocity, no matter how monstrous.
Min's Jiang Qing is not a creature who cackles with evil. She slips into it gradually, fixed on her obsessions with power and with Mao, hardly noticing as she does. We like her as a teenager, and as a young actress. We even like her as she joins Mao and seduces him. Gradually, however, as she ages and her life becomes fixed on her obsessions and her vindictiveness, our intimacy with this appalling woman is almost too much to bear. Min brings her almost too close.
Historical fiction is difficult enough when dealing with the ancient past. Critics, forgetting that it's fiction, will carp about minor deviations from factual events. When writing about characters who are still in living memory, however, the writer cannot avoid controversy. She may trample on the emotions of some who have an investment in the character, and may be accused of obscuring or excusing the acts of a monster, glorifying a mediocrity, or in other ways exaggerating or misleading. Every omission or error will be treated as a major imperfection. Historical fiction, however, is fiction based on history, not history. The fiction writer is looking for a kind of emotional truth which may not be conveyed by a linear relation of facts. If Min is to be criticized for imagining Jiang's thoughts, then Shakespeare was equally guilty and should be criticized for virtually all his histories, as was Marlowe, Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn. Art imagines life. History tries to record it.
Whatever can be said for Jiang Qing, in history or fiction she is a character whose self-creation as the very incarnation of chaos and evil is both fightening and fascinating. Min's portrait of her is skillfully drawn, an intimate and cathartic journey through Jiang's life that in the end leaves us appalled not only at her but at the evil we humans can do, shaken by the stark realization that only a thin wall separates us from them, that people like Jiang are less exotic and extraordinary than common, banal and ordinary. This is no elegant evil, profound or even clever in its machinations. Jiang is the bitter and angry neighborhood shrew, adorned with Mao's blessing, given a country to vandalize, a culture to destroy.
"Becoming Madam Mao" was one book I could not put down. Read it, then read a history. Anchee Min provides a list of her sources, and invites us to go further. For now, however, I'll settle for acquiring more of Ms. Min's books and reading more of her remarkable stories.
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An After-Market Barcode Sticker Destroyed the Dust Cover
Sending this product back. I am old-school favoring hardcovers, take pride in displaying volumes of my favorite authors, and enjoy a diverse variety of literature. Am extremely irritated that this hardcover came with an after-market bar code sticker on the binding of the dust cover. During a careful attempt to remove it it delaminated the cover leaving it with a aesthetically destroyed cover. Now I'm sending it back. Don't book vendors know that the only people left that are buying hardcover books cherise their book collections and display them. It makes me wonder who thinks of these things. Do I really have to go back to the book store to know what I'm getting??
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2007
- Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2015
Top reviews from other countries
- ORE92Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 12, 2017
Melodramatic, fun and informative.
- tanya ruthReviewed in Australia on June 16, 2015
It was a fascinating attempt to understand the complex relationship between Chairman Mao and his wife who continued to love him
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