The Mao Case

the head of the CPC Cultural Revolution Group, she ran amuck for her revenge. Several people who were supposedly
     ‘intimate and close’ to Mao were persecuted to death. Weishi, a young and beautiful Russian interpreter for Mao, was thrown
     into jail at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and found dead in a stinking cell there, stark naked, her body bruised
     all over.”
    “Madam Mao worshipped Empress Lu of the Han dynasty, lauding her to the skies during the Cultural Revolution. I’m no scholar,
     but I remember one story about Empress Lu,” Chen commented, chopsticking up a piece of shark fin shaped like a Buddha’s finger.
     “After the emperor died, Empress Lu threw his favorite concubine into jail. Cutting off her ex-rival’s arms and legs, severing
     her tongue, and gouging out her eyes. The empress kept the mutilated woman moaning and writhing in a sordid cell that was
     a stinking sty, her body naked and soiled. Empress Lu chose to show the woman to her own son like that, saying that it was
     a human pig.”
    “Yes, her son never recovered from the shock, fell sick and died. That’s another story, of course.”
    “So I have a question, Mr. Diao. Empress Lu did that after the death of the emperor. Madam Mao attacked her rivals when Mao
     was still alive. Wasn’t she afraid of him?”
    “That was a question for me too. She described herself as a dog loyal to Mao, biting and attacking whomever he wanted her
     to. He
might have needed her badly during the Cultural Revolution. Besides, Mao cared little for women no longer in his favor,” Diao
     said, taking a careful bite at the abalone. “This is the first abalone I’ve ever had.”
    It was not the first for Chen, but it was the first time he was paying for it. He waited for Diao to continue.
    “He dumped his wife Kaihui, without so much as divorcing her or notifying her, when he married Zizhen in the Jinggang Mountains,”
     Diao went on. “In fact, Kaihui’s death resulted from his siege of Changsha, a consequence he should have anticipated. After
     the Long March, he dumped Zizhen like another worn-out mop, letting her suffer alone in a Moscow mental institution, while
     he wallowed in the clouding and raining on the
Kang
bed with Madam Mao. So he dumped Shang, just one of the women he had slept with. It’s no surprise he didn’t do anything to
     help her.”
    “That’s unbelievable,” Chen said, the slice of the stewed camel paw slipping from his chopsticks, splashing gravy out of the
     platter. He had no idea how the emperors could have enjoyed the fatty greasy taste.
    “Think about what happened to Liu Shaoqi. Once the chairman of the People’s Republic of China, he, too, died naked in prison
     without any medical treatment, and his body was instantly cremated under a false name. Mao was so cold-blooded.”
    “Leaving Mao aside, you mentioned in the book that the special team put a lot of pressure on Shang, to try and make her cooperate,
     but what could they have been trying to obtain from her?”
    “From what I learned, it was something like ‘her evil plan to harm Mao.’ No one believed it.”
    “Then what do you think it could be?”
    “For one thing, an unpublished poem to her in his calligraphy.”
    “That’s intriguing. A poem knocked off during a moment of amorous passion?” Chen said. But would that have triggered a special
     team from Beijing? After all, a poem could be open to many interpretations, unless it was downright erotic or obscene. He
     doubted it. “whatever it might be, did they find it?”
    “I don’t know, but I don’t think so.”

    “So could Shang have left it to her daughter Qian?”
    “Not likely. Like other kids of black family background, Qian denounced Shang, and she didn’t come back home until after Shang’s
     death. No, Shang had no time to do so before jumping out of the window.”
    “So Qian went through a dramatic change — from one radically cut off from her black family to one hopelessly lost in bourgeois
     carnival passion?”
    “She was a girl traumatized at a young age, plagued by those stories about Shang’s ‘shameless sex saga,’ ” Diao said. “I don’t
     want to be too hard on her.”
    “I couldn’t agree more. Qian, too, suffered a lot. But her death too was quite suspicious, I’ve heard.”
    “Her death was an accident — almost at the end of the Cultural Revolution. I don’t see anything suspicious about it.”
    “I see,” Chen said,