A Boy of China Read online

  MAP

  DEDICATION

  For Tom and Issie

  EPIGRAPH

  As for me, I am tormented by an everlasting itch for things remote.

  Herman Melville, 1844

  CONTENTS

  Map

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  BEIJING, 1949

  He Zizhen, third wife of Chairman Mao, clasped and unclasped her hands anxiously as she peered from the windows of China’s Communist Party headquarters. A grey winter sky hung low over Beijing’s rabbit warren of ancient cobbled lanes and humble timber dwellings, where the inhabitants of her husband’s new China huddled round mah jong tables and desperately gambled for scraps of food. Loyalists of the former ruler, General Chiang Kai-shek, had already been arrested and their bodies hung lifelessly from street posts and city gates, swaying in the icy wind that blew down from the Mongolian steppe. A wary population pointed fingers of suspicion in any direction, seeking to avoid becoming the focus of the Communist Red Army guards. They had good reason: the guards were young radicals, fired up by Mao’s speeches, which denounced the old ways and promised them a brighter future in which their militant voices would be heard. These were dangerous times. Close neighbours and even family members looked nervously at each other over their half-empty rice bowls.

  Not far away was the Forbidden Palace: dormant, emperorless, devoid of the officials, concubines and eunuchs that once inhabited its many thousands of rooms. Little did He Zizhen care for history. What mattered most was the present, and that her world had now shifted on its axis in the most terrible of ways. Her husband Mao Tse-tung’s infidelity with the actress Lan Ping had long since destroyed their marriage, but now word had come of something far worse. Her beloved sister had disappeared in a province many thousands of kilometres away to the south, while on a mission to look for the young son He Zizhen had been forced to give up years before, at the beginning of what had become known as the Long March. A father who cared more for power than his progeny, Mao had forbidden He Zizhen to travel there herself. Now, with her marriage over, and her life unravelling, she was tortured by guilt, grief and not knowing.

  Within the tight circle of Mao’s advisors, from which she was increasingly excluded, she could hear whispering that a madness had overtaken her. The murmurings were becoming stronger too, counselling ‘him’ that there were other places better able to care for her, places far away and out of sight that could tend to her worsening mental condition. Perhaps they were right. The loss of her child, her ‘Little Mao’, whom she loved with all her might and feared she would never hold again, was a weight on her heart that was beyond unbearable. Whatever strength of hope she had left now deserted her. Whatever life she’d imagined for them all was gone.

  Her husband’s officials said her son was a boy of China now: not hers or any other individual’s, but a citizen who would grow to help make this new nation great through hard work on the land. It would be a noble life, a victorious existence, not in the arms of his birth mother, but in the warm embrace of Mother China.

  ‘He Zizhen, you should rejoice and be proud,’ they said.

  But whenever she tried to feel that way, the tears would come and not stop. And nothing could be done to stem their flow.

  ONE

  IT WAS WHILE TRAVELLING THROUGH THE MORE REMOTE REGIONS of western China, towards the end of 1989, that I first heard the strange story of Little Mao. I had entered the country from Northern Pakistan after travelling by foot across Afghanistan from Iran, arriving on the Chinese border just before an early snowfall closed the towering Khunjerab Pass. From there I had made my way to the horse-trading town of Kashgar in Xinjiang province, and an eventual encounter one Sunday with Mr Wong, the local schoolteacher.

  Mr Wong was a thin, wiry figure in his thirties who wore grey suit trousers and a white business shirt through which a singlet was clearly visible. On his feet were sandals that showed off an assortment of unsightly toenails. He hated Kashgar and thought the local children dirty.

  ‘Uighurs,’ he said disparagingly, referring to the local population of ethnic Muslims. ‘They use their hands to wipe their bottoms.’

  His real home was thousands of kilometres away to the east in Hunan province, but Mr Wong had upset a Communist Party official there and had found himself ‘relocated’ to the far west ‘for the good of the state’. I asked him what he had done to deserve such treatment and initially he wouldn’t say, but the loose tongue that had got him into trouble in the first place was still active in his mouth. Over the next few hours, as we sat slurping Chinese tea in an outdoor restaurant beside a dusty street, Mr Wong described how he, personally, felt that the official story of the famous Long March was seriously inaccurate.

  ‘Communist history is full of lies,’ he whispered.

  This was either very brave or very foolish. Questioning the official line on this historic event was always going to end in tears, for the Long March was portrayed as a key episode in the Civil War between the government forces of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao’s Communist Party. To dispute its authenticity was tantamount to questioning Mao himself, who had personally overseen and contributed to its written account.

  What was true was that, after a great deal of political strife and violent skirmishes against Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist government’s regime, the Chinese Communist Party was born in 1931 in Jiangxi province, in southeastern China. In reply, Chiang Kai-shek sent wave upon wave of what he called ‘annihilation forces’ to wipe it out. For three years, the Communists held the Nationalists at bay, until the fledgling Communist Red Army found itself surrounded, pinned down in the mountains of Jiangxi. However, after the Nationalists launched one final, powerful offensive involving 500,000 troops, Mao and the Communists managed, in October 1934, to break free of this blockade and secretly flee their southern bases. The plan was first to escape, then eventually meet up with other Communists in the northern provinces of Gansu and Shaanxi. This tactical retreat became known as the Long March, even though it was not one march, but several, made up of different armies at first pushing westwards, then to the north. Some 100,000 people set out, but fewer than 10,000 made it to the finish. Those men and women, including high-ranking Communist officials and their wives, endured snow-covered passes, treacherous swamps, raging rivers and, of course, the armies of General Chiang Kai-shek, which pursued them relentlessly. The march lasted 368 days and covered 9,650 kilometres, ending in Shaanxi province. In all, 24 rivers were crossed, 18 mountain ranges were climbed and 11 provinces were traversed before the journey finally finished on the edge of the Gobi Desert in the caves of Yan’an, a location that would become the Communists’ main base for the next 13 years.

  In a Party conference speech in 1935, soon after the march had ended, Mao called the Long March a manifesto that had shown the Red Army to be heroes, a propaganda force that pointed the way to liberation, and a seed
ing-machine that would yield a great harvest across all of China.

  Clearly that seed hadn’t reached Mr Wong, whose doubts were almost certainly well founded. The Party is now known to have embellished many parts of the story of the Long March in order to depict it as a glorious moment in China’s nationhood. The Battle of Xiang River in Guangxi, fought in the early part of the march, is one such event with a slightly embroidered history. Though a battle in which the Communists lost tens of thousands of men, it was painted as a victory where those soldiers had sacrificed their lives, paying the ultimate price in order to allow their fellow marchers to escape. In actual fact, it is now thought that at least half of them simply deserted. Many of Mao’s armed forces had been forcibly recruited and so, facing the vastly superior forces of Chiang Kai-shek, they had shouldered their rifles and made a run for it. Not that you would know that from the official description of this particular battle. Clearly, Mao was never one for letting the facts get in the way of a good story.

  In truth, the Long March was almost a terrible failure, with Mao’s military mistakes along the way costing thousands of people their lives, through starvation and disease, in some cases as a result of his own unbridled political ambition. For instance, any regiments Mao suspected of not being entirely loyal to him, or perhaps maintaining allegiances to other Communist Party generals, he despatched through swamps that could have been avoided or made backtrack many hundreds of kilometres, just to break their spirit.

  ‘Chairman Mao says he walked the whole way, but I know better,’ said Mr Wong virtuously. ‘The Leader was carried on the backs of soldiers he treated like slaves. He never cared for people, not even his own children.’

  This was dangerous ground. No matter how far west you go in China, no matter how far from Beijing you travel, you just don’t demean Mao Tse-tung. You might as well walk up to a Red Guard and stick your finger up his nose. Talk like this made me nervous. But Mr Wong was not about to stop and what he said next caught my full attention.

  ‘You know of course, the sad story of Little Mao?’

  The person Mr Wong was referring to was one of Mao’s sons, Mao An Hong, who became affectionately known as ‘Little Mao’ because he looked so like his father. Mr Wong recounted that the boy was born in 1932, four years after Mao met his future third wife, He Zizhen, in the Communist stronghold of Jinggangshan. This secret mountain fort was surrounded by thick forests that enabled the Communists to mount many successful attacks on Nationalist forces, then disappear back into the jungle. Mao and He Zizhen were introduced to each other by a friend of He Zizhen’s brother. Partly because she was well known as a brave fighter, a crack shot with a rifle (her nickname was ‘the Two-Gunned General’) and a devout Communist, Mao was smitten, and they married soon after. He Zizhen would eventually have six children by him, three boys and three girls. Only one, however, Li Min, who was born in 1936 after the Long March ended, survived to adulthood. Tragically for He Zizhen, the other children either died in childbirth or were compulsorily given away.

  Because the Communists were often on the run, Mao and other senior leaders deemed a crying child a security risk, as the sound might give away their position. When Mao An Hong was just two years old, Mao and He Zizhen were forced to set off on the Long March. He Zizhen had no option but to leave Little Mao with local villagers, whom she no doubt hoped would stay behind and be spared harsh treatment by the chasing government soldiers. But by the time the Civil War was over and the Communists had gained control of the country, Mao and He Zizhen had lost all contact with their son.

  Later, in 1949, continued Mr Wong, He Zizhen desperately searched for any information on Little Mao, but to no avail. Her sister tried to help, and on hearing of a child who matched his description in a town called Ruijin in Jiangxi province, hurried to the area — only to perish in a car crash en route.

  He Zizhen never recovered from these tragedies, and suffered mentally as a result, spending many years in institutions in China and the Soviet Union. During one such absence, Mao declared his marriage to He Zizhen over and wed his fourth wife, the politically ambitious former actress Lan Ping. More famously known as Jiang Qing, she would later become the leader of the notorious Gang of Four.

  For Mr Wong, all of this was proof of the dubious character of Chairman Mao. The fact he never bothered helping in the search for his son was unforgivable.

  ‘A son is very important in Chinese society,’ he said. ‘To lose one is careless. The ancestors would be angry.’

  After that I didn’t see Mr Wong again, but his story of the lost boy stayed with me for a long time. Gradually my interest faded, partly because of the lack of real information, partly because I was busy working on other projects. But then, 17 years later, it was rekindled in the most unexpected of ways.

  TWO

  IT WAS BAKING HOT AND AIRLESS IN BANGKOK. THE ENTIRE population was waiting for the rains to arrive and provide some respite from the boiling furnace that this concrete city had become. Once upon a time there were trees lining the streets, but in the rush to modernise many had been cut down, leaving little in the way of shade from the burning sun. Town planners had begun to plant replacements, but these were no more than shoulder high and would take years to grow to their full height. From my office on the forty-third floor of the Empire Tower, I could see out over the city towards the west, where the monsoon still lurked off the coast of India in the Bay of Bengal. It was there: building, broiling, waiting for its moment to charge east and envelop us. Perhaps in a week or two it would come, but for now the searing sun and 40-degree temperatures were a daily burden.

  I was in Thailand on a month-long contract with a large international advertising agency, whose job, on behalf of a client, was to launch anti-dandruff shampoo in China. The endless millions of Chinese office workers who had dandruff constituted an attractive and relatively untapped market, and major European shampoo brands were readying themselves to enter the fray.

  It was in this capacity that I came to meet quite a few Thai of Chinese extraction. Many were the children or grandchildren of those who had escaped the political instability of China in the 1930s, often fleeing by boat and braving the South China Sea in order to reach the relative safety of what was then called Siam. One of them was Li, our agency receptionist. An attractive woman in her early thirties, Li was unmarried as yet, much to the distress of her mother, who was ever hopeful and sent a steady stream of willing suitors in Li’s direction. Li took all of this in her stride; it was her duty, after all. But she viewed the prospective husbands with little enthusiasm. They were never her type. They were usually too fat, too old, too poor or too ugly. Sometimes, one might pass muster and we would hear about him the next day. But even the most promising of potential partners had one fateful flaw: they were all men. Li’s tastes lay elsewhere, though she could never admit that to her parents.

  It was, however, one of her male admirers who was to rekindle my interest in Mao’s lost son. Chen, the man in question, was rich, he was handsome, he was even quite tall. He was a successful businessman and more besides: his number-one claim to fame, and no doubt his trump card in the boardroom, was that his family, purportedly, was closely linked with a number of high-ranking Communist Party officials from the early days — something akin to being related to royalty.

  He came to the agency one Friday night when the boss was away and the caps were taken off the most expensive whisky bottles in the agency bar. The mood was ebullient because the Chinese shampoo client, a man who unwittingly went about introducing himself as the ‘Head of Hair’, had signed off on a campaign. On this occasion, however, Chen was not in a party mood and I found him sulking in a corner, perhaps, I thought, because Li had once again turned down his advances.

  During the course of the evening we talked about a wide range of subjects, from English Premier League football (of which he was an avid fan) to the vagaries of the weather, until he brought up the subject of the Long March. Chen told his version of the sto
ry, mentioning how children could not go on the march, and how Mao had left his own son behind in a place called Yudu.

  ‘They say he was never seen or heard from again,’ said Chen.

  If Mao An Hong were still alive, I thought, he would be in his late seventies now. I pictured a doting father, possibly even a grandfather, with skin like brown leather and a weathered straw hat perched on his balding head, leaning on a hoe in the walled garden of his mud-brick home as he surveyed a neat row of cabbages. This man, would he even know who he was? Would he even suspect he was the last surviving son of the ‘Great Helmsman’, whose ideals had formed a nation but also led to the agonising deaths of countless millions of his countrymen?

  Chen shook his head slowly. ‘But I don’t believe that is the end of it.’

  I asked Chen what he meant by this statement. He looked me in the eye, swilling the whisky around in his glass.

  ‘If I told you, you would not believe me,’ he said finally.

  ‘Try me,’ I replied.

  Despite my best efforts, however, Chen could not be persuaded to divulge anything further on the subject. Just then, also, the lovely Li had found a table top upon which she could dance, as was her wont, and for the moment, all the men in the room — Chen, half a dozen drunken ex-pats, a handful of Thai staff and me — were under her spell.

  Over the following weeks I was to hear more snippets relating to Chen’s background, and not always from Chen himself. Li was equally interested when I broached the subject of Mao’s lost son with her in the office, and she began quizzing Chen too. No doubt her questions were met with more enthusiastic responses from the lovesick businessman than mine. In a way, Li became my mole, passing on information that Chen would possibly have preferred to keep to himself and certainly not made available to a prying foreigner. Most of it was of little interest, but, on my last night in Bangkok, all that changed.