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Her olive skin glistening from the unremitting heat of the late evening become an early morning, Chiang Ch'ing said, "So I was once kidnaped and detained for eight months by the Kuomintang," a phase of her past she had never before revealed.
Released from jail early in 1935, Chiang Ch'ing resumed her acting career, gaining some fame for her portrayal of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House and then appearing in several popular films. In 1937, however, her career as an actress came to an end. At the time, Japan began its full-scale invasion of China. The Communists' Red Army had just completed its epic Long March from the Southeast to its new headquarters at Yenan in remote northern Shensi province.
A strained peace emerged between the forces of Mao and those of Chiang during which thousands of left-leaning intellectuals went to join the Communists in Yenan. The ratio of men to women was about 18 to 1, writes Witke. Some of the Communist soldiers who had lost or abandoned their wives during the Long March formed "local liaisons. " But most were too young or poor for this and were urged by their commanders, in Witke's words, "not to dissipate their virility on sex and their money on prostitutes." In this puritanical atmosphere, the newcomers from the cities — many distinctly bohemian—were regarded with suspicion. That applied to Chiang Ch'ing, the movie actress, who arrived in August 1937. Her journey to Yenan was arduous: she rode in the backs of trucks, and where roads had been destroyed, she had to switch to horseback, although she had never been on a horse before. One mount almost ran away with her.
YENAN: MEETING MAO
The key event in Chiang Ch'ing's decade-long stay in Yenan was, of course, her marriage to Mao, a man whom she already knew by reputation:
While still in Shanghai she had heard rumors about the Red Army's maverick chief Mao Tse-tung and his redoubtable partner Chu Teh. Sporadic news reports and travelers shuttling back and forth between the White and the Red Areas conveyed mixed impressions of Mao, a peasant rebel and people's defender with a modern revolutionary consciousness. She had only a faint idea of his appearance and no notion of his personality. Like other recruits to Yenan she was fascinated by differences among the leading comrades and became aware of Mao's aura of aloofness—his Olympian air, as some called it.
Mao Tse-tung learned about her as Lan P'ing, the actress, not long after she arrived. How could she tell? He sought her out personally and offered her a ticket to a lecture he was to give at the Marxist-Leninist Institute. Startled and awestruck, she declined, then swiftly conquered her shyness, accepted the ticket, and went to watch him perform.
From the early days of their marriage [he was 45, she 24] they joked about their disparate backgrounds, Chiang Ch'ing recalled wryly. The Chairman used to tell her that as a child she learned to "believe in deities and read Confucius." From there she went on to learn the "bourgeois stuff," as he put it; that came with indulgence in theater. Only later did she begin to tackle Marxism-Leninism, which was her