The contents of Mao's heart
Mao was a bad poet and a disgusting lover
On my bookshelf there is a copy of “Ten Poems & Lyrics by Mao Tse-tung,” translated by Wang Hui-Ming with images of each poem written in Mao’s own brushstrokes.
None of the poems are any good.
I had half hoped at least one would have a fleeting insight or thrilling turn of phrase or, at least, a poetic glimpse into the mind of the man himself.
Instead the poems are so bad you are left scratching your head, and I suppose that is a kind of glimpse into the man’s heart after all. Here, take this example.
Once a year autumn winds lash fiercely.
It is not like spring, but
It is better than spring.
What do you even say about this? Nothing, I suppose. And here’s another.
The west wind lashes fiercely.
In the sky the geese honk in the frosty morning moonlit
The frosty morning moonlit
I mean, good grief. And what’s with the winds lashing fiercely?
As it turns out, my favorite piece of writing in the book is not by Mao or Wang, who wrote the introduction, but a handwritten note on the first page from the previous owner of this worn and faded text to the next one—me.
This scribbled note at least does offer a glimpse into the kind of person Mao was.
I pass this on — .
After seeing a personal profile
on IFC about Mousy-Dung, Stalin,
+ Moosolini ~ in which it is
recorded Mao never bathed or
got up early. Quote, “I wash
myself in the bodies of my women.”
Unquote.
ooooh.
My god. It turns out that quote is from the 1994 book The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician by Li Zhisui, Mao’s physician for 22 years.
For the sake of those poor women, I hope it isn’t true, but the book has more to offer. Li also writes that Mao, like Chinese emperors before him, believed sex with young women would make him live longer, “their numbers increasing and their average ages declining as Mao attempted to add years to his life.”
In 1997, the journalist Jonathan Mirsky interviewed a woman named Ms. Chen, who said she was a dancer when Mao noticed her and started having sex with her in 1962, when she was 14 years old. After a few years, he exiled her to the provinces.
Mao also enjoyed orgies and had beautiful young men massage his genitals at night to help him fall asleep, Li writes, adding that Mao had a parasitic STD and refused treatment, so he was infecting everyone who entered his filthy bed.
The book, to absolutely no one’s surprise, was banned in China.
To be fair, the above quote about washing his genitals was only included in the English translation, either because it did not happen and was added to appeal to Western readers or because it did happen and could not be included for Chinese readers.
Based on everything else I know of Mao I have to say, even if it didn’t happen, it’s one of those lies that gets closer to the truth than fact itself. True in the larger sense.
Put another way, it’s a story that tells you what was really in his heart better than the poetry that came out of it.
Hi, writing coach and editor here, who is also conversant in Mandarin and studied Chinese culture at university (and in person while living in Taiwan and on a sadly-brief visit to the mainland) :
"None of the poems are any good" **in English.**
The examples you give here actually sound like decent Chinese poetry. It is meant to evoke both a specific moment experienced through the senses, and an emotion connected to that moment— this isn't meant to be narrative poetry, and any rhyme or rhythm or clever word choice that might create interesting ambiguity or double-entendres would of course be lost in translation.
So I really can't say whether any of these Chinese poems are good without hearing them spoken in Mandarin, or at least seeing the characters (I probably wouldn't be able to read them all anyway without help from Google Translate). They might indeed sound like flat, wooden attempts at real Chinese poetry.
But they might also be quite powerful, in their own cultural and linguistic context.
I have no comment about the personal hygiene or sexual proclivities, except to say that they undoubtedly changed over the course of his life; like the poems themselves, the description you quote is a momentary snapshot (whether or not it's a true one, in any sense of the word, I have no idea).