(7 of 13)
I mentioned to Chiang Ch'ing that some foreign sources have claimed that she had two daughters of her own and perhaps also a son. She gave birth to but one child, she replied firmly, and the Chairman was the father. *
LIFE WITH THE CHAIRMAN
The book offers some fascinating glimpses of Mao and her relations with him. In Yenan he was a kind of rural patriarch. There were many informal get-togethers (dubbed "Saturday night barn dances" by visiting Americans) at which leaders mingled with followers. Women liked to show off their new independence by choosing their own dancing partners, and even Mao might be asked (but "respectfully"): "Chairman, will you please dance with me?" There was obvious humor and tenderness between Mao and his wife.
In one of the caves that served as their home, Mao once discovered that Chiang Ch'ing had bedded down on a heap of bedbugs. Mao formally renamed the cave "Bedbug Headquarters" and helped start an "extermination campaign "against the vermin. Another time, during a difficult mountain march in a driving rainstorm, she was wearing the only rain cape in the entire army. Though it was soggy, she offered it to him—and he reluctantly accepted. (This, observes Witke, was a personal victory for her.) A little later, he removed a thermos flask of liquor from his belt and silently passed it to her. At one point during her recollections, Chiang Ch'ing reached for a gold-brocaded box and drew from it a delicately carved sandalwood fan. On it, in a sample of Mao's own renowned calligraphy, was one of his poems titled "Winter Clouds":
... Only heroes can quell tigers
and leopards
And wild bears never daunt the
brave.
Plum blossoms welcome the
whirling snow;
Small wonder flies freeze and
perish.
When Mao was under stress, he would sometimes take his troubles out on her. Once, when the Nationalists had started bombing the Communist strongholds in Yenan, she reported to him that his own aides were afraid. "You are a coward!" he snarled at her. Strain sometimes was caused by their strikingly different backgrounds. She was a city girl. Mao came from a well-to-do peasant family, and rebelled against his conservative father—whom, as Chiang Ch'ing recalled, Mao would still curse even when he was in his seventies.
The Communists—and Chiang Ch'ing—were headquartered at Yenan until 1947, when a Nationalist attack finally dislodged them. More than two years of bitter civil war followed, ending in the rout of Nationalist forces and their retreat to Taiwan. On Oct. 1, 1949, Mao Tse-tung stood atop Peking's Gate of Heavenly Peace and proclaimed the People's Republic of China.
When the Chairman, Chiang Ch'ing, and some leading comrades and their troops descended upon Peking in March 1949 and took possession of its center point, the Imperial City, they appropriated for their own use the western section bounded by the central and southern lakes called Chung-nan-hai (literally, Central and Southern Sea). Each leader, and his wife and children —those who had survived the war—were assigned an apartment within this former