The Mao Case

EIGHTEEN

CHIEF INSPECTOR CHEN STARTED his second day in Beijing by making a phone call to Diao. It was quite early in the morning.

“My name is Chen,” he introduced himself. “I used to be a businessman, but I’m trying my hand at writing. I talked with Chairman Wang of the Chinese Writers’ Association. He recommended you to me. So I would like very much to invite you to lunch today.”

“What a surprise, Mr. Chen! Thank you so much for your kind invitation, I have to say that first. But we’ve never met before, have we? Nor have I met Wang before. How can I let you buy lunch for me?”

“I haven’t read much, Mr. Diao, but I know the story of Cao Xueqin ’s friends treating him to Beijing roast duck in exchange for a chapter of the Dream of the Red Chamber. That’s how I got the idea.”

“I don’t have any exciting stories for you, I’m afraid, but if you really insist, we may meet for a late lunch today.”

“Great. One o’clock then. See you at Fangshan Restaurant.”

Putting down the phone, Chen realized that he had the morning to himself. So he started making plans.

As he walked out of the hotel, he hailed a taxi, telling the driver to go to the Memorial Hall of Chairman Mao in Tiananmen Square. Afterward, he thought, he could take a short cut through the Forbidden City Museum, to the Fangshan Restaurant in North Sea Park.

“You’re lucky. The memorial hall is open this week,” the taxi driver said without looking back. “I took someone there just yesterday.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s at the center of the Tiananmen Square,” the driver said, taking him for a first-time visitor to Beijing. “The feng shui of the memorial hall is absolutely rotten.”

“What do you mean?”

“Rotten for the dead, wasn’t it? Hardly a month after Mao’s death, his body not even properly placed in the crystal coffin yet, Madam Mao was thrown into jail as the head of the Gang of Four. And inauspicious for the square too. You know what happened in the square in 1989. There was bloodshed all over it. Sooner or later his body will have to be removed, or it will cause trouble again.”

“You really believe that?”

“Believe it or not, there’s no escaping retribution! Not even for Mao. He died sonless. One of his sons was killed in the Korean War, another suffers from schizophrenia, and still another went missing during the Civil War. It was Mao himself who said that, while he was in the Lu Mountains.” The driver added with a sardonic chuckle, “But you never know how many bastards he might have left behind.”

Chen made no comment, trying to look out at the much-changed Chang’an Avenue. They had already passed the Beijing Hotel near Dongdan.

When the taxi came to a stop close to the memorial hall, Chen handed some bills to the driver and said, “Keep the change. But tell your feng shui theory to every customer. One of them may turn out to be a cop.”

“Oh, if that happens, I’ll have a question for that cop. My father – labeled a Rightist simply so his school could meet the quota demand – died during the Cultural Revolution, leaving me an orphan without an education or skills. That’s why I am a taxi driver. So what compensation does the government owe me?”

In the anti-Rightist movement launched by Mao in mid-fifties, there was a sort of quota – each work unit had to report a given number of rightists to the authorities. The driver’s father must have been labeled a Rightist because of that. Whatever the personal grudge against Mao, however, people shouldn’t talk that way about the dead.

“The times have changed,” the taxi driver said, poking his head out of the window, as he drove off. “A cop can’t lock me up for talking about a feng shui theory.”

And whatever its feng shui, the front of the splendid mausoleum, surrounded by tall green trees, had drawn a large group of visitors, standing in a line longer than he had expected. People seemed to be quite patient, some taking pictures, some reading guidebooks, some cracking watermelon seeds.

He joined the end of the line, moving up with others. Looking at a body sometimes helps, if only psychologically, he told himself again. He had to zero in, so to speak, to get a better understanding of someone who was possibly involved.

Peddlers swarmed, hawking watches, lighters, and all sorts of small decorations and gadgets bearing the name of Mao. Chen picked up a watch with an ingeniously designed dial – it showed Mao in a green army uniform with the armband of the Red Guard. The pendulum consisted of Mao’s hand waving majestically on top of Tiananmen Gate, endless like time itself.

A security guard hurried over, shooing away the peddlers like insistent flies. Raising a green-painted loudspeaker, he urged the visitors to purchase flowers in homage to the great leader. Several people paid for the yellow chrysanthemums wrapped in plastic as the line swerved into the large courtyard. Chen did as well. There was also a mandatory booklet on all the great contributions Mao made to China, and he bought a copy, but didn’t open it.

Scarcely had the line of people turned into the north hall, however, when they were ordered to lay the flowers beneath a white marble statue of Mao standing in relief against an immense tapestry of China’s mountains and rivers in the brilliantly lit background.

“Shameless,” a square-faced man in the line cursed. “Only a minute after you’ve paid for the chrysanthemums. They cash in on the dead by reselling the flowers.”

“But at least they are not charging an entrance fee,” a long-faced man said. “At all the other parks in Beijing, you now have to buy tickets.”

“Do you think I would come here if I had to buy a ticket?” the square-faced man retorted. “They just want to keep up the long lines by promising no charge.”

Chen wasn’t so sure about that, but it took no less than half an hour for the line to edge into the Hall of Last Respects, and then to move up, finally, to the crystal coffin, in which Mao lay in a gray Mao suit, draped with a large red flag of the Chinese Communist Party, with honor gaurds solemnly standing around, motionless like toy soldiers.

In spite of his anticipation, Chen was stunned at the sight of Mao. So majestic on the screen of Chen’s memory, Mao now appeared shrunken, shriveled out of proportion, his cheeks hollow like dried oranges, his lips waxy, heavily painted. The little hair he had left looked somehow pasted or painted.

Chen had stood close to Mao in the crystal coffin for less than a minute before he was compelled to move on. Visitors behind him were edging up and pushing.

Instead of turning into the Memorial Chamber with pictures and documents about Mao on display, Chen headed straight to the exit.

Once out of the Memorial Hall, he inhaled a deep breath of fresh air. Peddlers again came rushing over. It was close to twelve, so he decided to start moving in the direction of his appointment.

Passing under the arch of the towering Tiananmen Gate, he purchased a ticket to the Forbidden City Museum, mainly for the short cut. With the traffic snarl along Chang’an Avenue, it could take much longer for him to get to the park by taxi.

The Forbidden City, strictly speaking, referred to the palace compound, including the court, various imperial halls, offices, and living quarters, but just beyond the palace, there were royal gardens and other imperial complexes no less forbidden to the ordinary people. After the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, the palace proper was turned into a museum, with various exhibition halls displaying the splendors of the imperial dynasties.

The palace was apparently too huge for a museum. So booths appeared in the courtyards, along the trails, and at the corners. Absent-mindedly, he bought a stick of sugar-glazed hawthorn, a Beijing street food speciality. It tasted surprisingly sour.

He began to be aware of a subtle effect the imperial surroundings were having on him. A self-contained world of divine sublimity, where an emperor couldn’t have helped seeing himself as the son of the heaven, high above the people, a godly ruler endowed with the sacred mandate and mission for him alone. Consequently, no ethics or rules whatsoever could possibly apply to him.

So for Mao, the anti-Rightist movement, the Three Red Banners, and the Cultural Revolution – all those political movements that had cost millions and millions of Chinese people’s lives – might have been nothing more than what was necessary for an emperor to consolidate his power, at least in his imagination within the high walls of the Forbidden City…

Instead of stepping into any of the imperial exhibition rooms, Chen kept walking straight ahead. That morning, he was the only such determined passerby there.

Soon, he walked through the museum’s back gate, from which he then glimpsed the tip of the White Pagoda in the North Sea Park.