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In Yenan, Mao Tse-tung enjoyed a starkly idyllic existence. In 1939 he had married his fourth wife, a pretty Chinese movie starlet. The Maos lived simply, in an adobe hut during the summer and during the winter in caves, which they kept changing regularly for fear of assassins. For many years, Mao's official vehicle was an ambulance donated by the American Chinese Hand Laundry Association. In the early mornings, U.S. visitors driving past Mao's residence would see him and General Chu Teh, like any Chinese peasants, in the road with baskets and small shovels, picking up animal droppings to fertilize the fields. Said Mao in a lecture to Communist writers: "Once I felt that only the intellectuals were clean, and that workers, soldiers and peasants were dirty . . . [Now I feel that] although the hands of workers and peasants may be black with dirt and their feet smeared with cow dung, they are still cleaner than the bourgeois and petty bourgeois."
U.S. visitors to Yenan described Mao as a heavy-set man (5 ft. 8 in., 200 lbs.) with the humor, the strength and often the manner of a Chinese peasant. He frequently sat with his feet propped on the table, and in warm weather he unceremoniously stripped to the waist. Once, in Yenan in the presence of General Lin Piao, president of the Red Academy, he took off his trousers for comfort while studying a military map. He smokes incessantly and tends his own tobacco patch. In 1938, the Party Central Committee gave him a $5 monthly raise so he could buy more cigarettes. Between noisy puffs, he chews melon seeds or peanuts. Until recently, when his doctors made him slow up, he used to wash down his heavy meals with kaoliang (grain liquor). Since then Mao has become something of a hypochondriac.
Mao was usually affable toward U.S. visitors. One U.S. authoress—Agnes Smedley—reported this impression: "The tall, forbidding figure lumbered toward us and a high-pitched voice greeted us. Then two hands grasped mine; they were as long and sensitive as a woman's . . . Whatever else he might be, he was an esthete . . . He asked a thousand questions . . . We spoke of India; of literature; once he asked me if I had ever loved any man, and why, and what love meant to me . . ."
Exit Into Sunset. Yenan's most remarkable form of entertainment was the "living newspaper" in which amateur mimes enacted current events. Sample: General Eisenhower invading Normandy atop a human landing barge (see cut). Sugar-coated propaganda also pervaded the Saturday night dances regularly held in a Yenan apple orchard at which Mao appeared in simple peasant dress to dance with his wife, Mme. Chu Teh, Mme. Chou Enlai, or pretty Communist office girls. For these occasions, the Communists revived (and revised) an old, gay Chinese dance form called the Yang-ko. Sample: a shepherd is asleep by his flock. A girl in flowing robes enters, dances around him, and wakes him by provocatively brushing the hem of her gown over his face. In the old version, a flirtation then began. In the Red version, she says sweetly: "How can you sleep while foreign imperialists are sucking the blood of your people?" The shepherd rises, flexes his muscles, recognizes his duty, and exits with the girl into the sunset.