by Jung Chang
As the executioners were having lunch afterwards at their barracks, they were told that Kai-hui was not dead, so seven of them went back and finished her off. In her agony her fingers had dug deep into the earth.
Her body was taken back to her village by relatives, and buried in the grounds of her family home. Her son was released, and early in 1931 Mao’s brother Tse-min arranged for the three boys to travel to Shanghai, where they entered a secret CCP kindergarten.
When Mao learned of Kai-hui’s death, he wrote in what seems to have been genuine grief: “The death of Kai-hui cannot be redeemed by a hundred deaths of mine!” He spoke of her often, especially in his old age, as the love of his life. What he never knew is that although Kai-hui did love him, she had also rejected his ideology and his killings.
IN THE YEARS between Mao deserting her and her death, Kai-hui wrote reflections on communism, and on her love for Mao, in eight intense, forgiving and occasionally reproachful pieces, which she concealed in her house. Seven were discovered in cracks in the walls in 1982, during some renovation work. The eighth came to light under a beam just outside her bedroom during repairs in 1990. She had wrapped them up in wax paper to protect them from damp. Mao never saw them, and most are still kept secret — so secret that even Mao’s surviving family were barred from seeing the most devastating passages.
The writings show the pain Kai-hui suffered from Mao’s desertion, her disappointment and bitterness at his heartlessness towards her and their sons — and, perhaps more damning, her loss of faith in communism.
The earliest piece is a poem, “Thoughts,” dated October 1928. Mao had been gone for a year, and had only written once. He had mentioned having trouble with his feet. In June, when a CCP inspector she referred to as “First Cousin” went off to Mao’s area, she gave him a jug of chili with fermented beans, Mao’s favorite dish, to take to her husband. But there was no reply. On a cold day, Kai-hui missed Mao:
Downcast day a north wind starts,
Thick chill seeps through flesh and bones.
Thinking of this Far-away Man,
Suddenly waves churn out of calm.
Is the foot trouble healed?
Is the winter clothing ready?
Who cares for you while you sleep alone?
Are you as lonely and sad as I am?
No letters are coming through,
I ask, but no one answers.
How I wish I had wings,
Fly to see this man.
Unable to see him,
Sorrow, it has no end …
The next piece, written to First Cousin in March 1929, and marked “not sent,” talks about her loneliness and her yearning for support:
I cower in a corner of the world. I am frightened and lonely. In this situation, I search every minute for something to lean on. So you take a place in my heart, and so does Ren-xiu who is staying here — you both stand side by side in my heart! I often pray: “Please don’t let these few people be scattered!” I seem to have seen the God of Death — ah, its cruel and severe face! Talking of death, I do not really fear it, and I can say that I welcome it. But my mother, and my children! I feel pity for them! This feeling haunts me so badly — the night before last it kept me half awake all night long.
Worrying about her children, and clearly feeling she could not count on Mao, Kai-hui wrote to her First Cousin:
I decided to entrust them — my children — to you. Financially, as long as their uncle [probably Mao’s brother Tse-min] lives, he will not abandon them; and their uncle really loves them deeply. But if they lose their mother, and a father, then just the love of an uncle is not enough. They need you and many others’ love for them to grow naturally as if in a warm spring, and not be destroyed by violent storms. This letter is like a will now, and you must think I am mad. But I don’t know why, I just can’t shake off the feeling over my head of a rope like a poisonous snake, that seems to have flown in from Death, and that binds me tightly. So I cannot but prepare!..
Kai-hui had this premonition because on the 7th of that month the Hunan Republican Daily reported that Zhu De’s wife had been killed and her head exposed in a street in Changsha. The paper carried two articles in which the writers said how much they enjoyed seeing the severed head. In April, Kai-hui wrote down some thoughts which she wanted to send to a newspaper but did not, entitled: “Feeling of Sadness on Reading about the Enjoyment of a Human Head”:
Zhu De’s wife I think most likely was a Communist. [words missing from original] Or even an important figure. If so, her execution is perhaps not to be criticised. [words crossed out] And yet her killing was not due to her own crime. Those who enjoyed her head and thought it was a pleasurable sight also did so not because of her own crime. So I remember the stories of killing relatives to the ninth clan for one man’s crime in the early Manchu period. My idea that killers are forced into killing turns out not to make sense here. There are so many people so exultantly enjoying it that we can see glad articles representing them in newspapers and journals. So my idea that only a small number of cruel people kills turns out not to be true here. So I have found the spirit of our times …
Yet I am weak, I am afraid of being killed, and so afraid of killing. I am not in tune with the times. I can’t look at that head, and my breast is filled with misery … I had thought that today’s mankind, and part of mankind, the Chinese, were civilized enough to have almost abolished the death penalty! I did not expect to see with my own eyes the killing of relatives to the ninth clan for one man’s crime … (To kill the wife of Zhu De, although not quite the ninth clan, basically comes to this.) … and the human head is becoming a work of art needed by many!
The abolition of the death penalty, and of torture, had been a very popular aim earlier in the century, and the Chinese Communist Party’s charter of 1923 had included these among its goals.
Kai-hui had naturally been reading about Mao’s own killings in the newspapers. He and his troops were always called “bandits,” who “burned and killed and kidnapped and looted.” Newspapers had also reported that Mao had been driven out of the outlaw land and “surrounded on three sides, Zhu — Mao will have no chance whatever to survive.”
Kai-hui still loved Mao, and above all wanted him to give up what he was doing and come back. On 16 May 1929, in a poem marked “To First Cousin — not sent,” she wrote eight agonized lines imploring Mao’s return:
You are now the beloved sweetheart!
Please tell him: Return, return.
I can see the heart of the old [probably referring to her mother] is being burnt by fire,
Please return! Return!
Sad separation, its crystallisation, chilling misery and loneliness are looming ever larger,
How I wish you would bring home some news!
This heart, [unclear in original], how does it compare with burning by fire?
Please return! Return!
Soon after this, a letter came from her First Cousin, saying that Mao was going to Shanghai (the Party had ordered him there on 7 February 1929). This meant she might be able to see him, and Kai-hui was rapturous. She opened her next letter, “to First Cousin,” with: “Received your letter. How happy and relieved I am!” She dreamed:
If the financial situation allows, I must get out of here to do a few years’ study … I want to get out, and find a job … I’m really in a great hurry to do some studies … Otherwise I can only feel the pains of emptiness, and feel I have nothing to lean on.
That letter like a will, I didn’t send. If you can come home once, that would be all I dare to hope.
Her thoughts then reverted to Mao, the possibility that he might not go to Shanghai, and his safety if he did:
Probably he wouldn’t be able to go to Shanghai? I’d rather he didn’t go. I’m worried for him again now. Oh, heaven! I’ll stop here …
She started to write to Mao, but changed her mind. There was a heading “To my beloved — not sent,” and the rest was torn out. Instead
, she wrote down the story of her life, which she finished on 20 June 1929. Clearly, this was her way of telling Mao about herself, her thoughts and feelings. The memoir told two things: how passionately she loved him, and how utterly unable she was to tolerate violence and cruelty. The latter theme seems to have assumed an even larger place in her mind, as she began and ended her narrative with it.
She recalled that at the age of six, she began to see the world as a sad place:
I was born extremely weak, and would faint when I started crying … At the time, I sympathised with animals … Every night going to bed, horrible shadows such as the killing of chickens, of pigs, people dying, churned up and down in my head. That was so painful! I can still remember that taste vividly. My brother, not only my brother but many other children, I just couldn’t understand them at all. How was it they could bring themselves to catch little mice, or dragonflies, and play with them, treating them entirely as creatures foreign to pain?
If it were not to spare my mother the pain — the pain of seeing me die — if it were not for this powerful hold, then I simply would not have lived on.
I really wanted to have a faith!..
I sympathized with people in the lower ranks of life. I hated those who wore luxurious clothes, who only thought of their own pleasure. In summer I looked just like people from lower ranks, wearing a baggy rough cotton top. This was me at about seventeen or eighteen …
She wrote about how she fell in love with Mao, how totally she loved him, how she learned about his infidelities, and how she forgave him (these pages are in chapter 3). But at the end she showed that she was thinking of breaking away from him and the ideology to which he had introduced her:
Now my inclination has shifted into a new phase. I want to get some nourishment by seeking knowledge, to water and give sustenance to my dried-up life … Perhaps one day I will cry out: my ideas in the past were wrong!
She ended her memoir with:
Ah! Kill, kill, kill! All I hear is this sound in my ears! Why are human beings so evil? Why so cruel? Why?! I cannot think on! [words brushed out by her] I must have a faith! I must have a faith! Let me have a faith!!
Kai-hui had been drawn to communism out of sympathy for the deprived. Her crying out for “a faith” says unmistakably that she was losing her existing faith, communism. She did not condemn Mao, whom she still deeply loved. But she was letting him know how strongly she felt about the killing, something she had hated since childhood.
She wrote this piece primarily for Mao, thinking she might be able to see him in Shanghai. But as time wore on, it became clear that she would not, and in fact he was studiously avoiding the city. Kai-hui hid what she had written so far, twelve pages, between bricks in a wall.
It was in a mood of despair that she wrote her last piece on 28 January 1930, two days before the Chinese New Year, traditionally the time for family reunion. Four pages long, it described what she had been through in the past two and a half years since Mao left. She began by recalling her feelings in the days just after he went:
For days I’ve been unable to sleep.
I just can’t sleep. I’m going mad.
So many days now, he hasn’t written. I’m waiting day after day.
Tears …
I mustn’t be so miserable. The children are miserable with me, and Mother is miserable with me.
I think I may be pregnant again.
Really so wretched, so lonely, so much anguish.
I want to flee. But I have these children, how can I?
On the morning of the fiftieth day, I received the priceless letter.
Even if he dies, my tears are going to shroud his corpse.
A month, another month, half a year, a year, and three years. He has abandoned me. The past churns up in my mind scene after scene. The future I envisage also churns in my mind scene after scene. He must have abandoned me.
He is very lucky, to have my love. I truly love him so very much!
He can’t have abandoned me. He must have his reasons not to write …
Father love is really a riddle. Does he not miss his children? I can’t understand him.
This is a sad thing, but also a good thing, because I can now be an independent person.
I want to kiss him a hundred times, his eyes, his mouth, his cheeks, his neck, his head. He is my man. He belongs to me.
Only Mother Love can be relied on. I’m thinking about my mother …
Yesterday, I mentioned him to my brother. I tried to look normal, but tears fell, I don’t know how.
If only I can forget him. But his beautiful image, his beautiful image.
Dimly I seem to see him standing there, gazing at me with melancholy.
I have written to First Cousin, saying this: “Whoever takes my letter to him, and brings his letter to me, is my Saviour.”
Heaven, I can’t help worrying about him.
As long as he is well, whether or not he belongs to me is secondary. May heaven protect him.
Today is his birthday. I can’t forget him. So I quietly had some food bought, and made bowls of noodles [a special birthday meal, since long noodles symbolise long life]. Mother remembers this date, too. At night in bed, I think sad thoughts to myself.
I hear he has been ill, and it comes from overwork … Without me beside him, he will not be careful. He will simply tire himself to death.
His health is really such that he can’t work. He racks his brains too much. Heaven protect me. I must work hard, hard. If I can make 60 yuan a month, I can call him back, and ask him not to work any more. In that case, with his ability, his intelligence, he may even achieve immortal success.
Another sleepless night.
I can’t endure this now. I am going to him.
My children, my poor children hold me back.
A heavy load hangs on my heart, one side is him, the other is my children. I can’t leave either.
I want to cry. I really want to cry.
No matter how hard I try, I just can’t stop loving him. I just can’t …
A person’s feeling is really strange. San Chun-he loves me so much, and yet I don’t even look at him.
How I love him [Mao]! Heaven, give me a perfect answer!
Shortly after these heart-rending words were written, her First Cousin was arrested and executed. He was buried behind her house.
Months later, she herself was dead. During his assault on Changsha, Mao made no effort to extricate her and their sons, or even to warn her. And he could easily have saved her: her house was on his route to the city, and Mao was there for three weeks. Yet he did not lift a finger.
What we call “Red Jiangxi” does not include the base in northeast Jiangxi under Fang Zhi-min.
† One day, a Chinese was present at a talk in Moscow by a man who denounced Li Li-san ferociously. Afterwards he asked the speaker who he was, and was astonished to get the answer, “I am Li Li-san.” In February 1938 Li-san was arrested, and he spent nearly two years in prison.
One of the people kidnapped by Mao’s force was an American Catholic priest, Father Edward Young, whom the Reds tried to ransom for $20,000. Young escaped. His Chinese fellow hostages and prisoners were killed.
The following words were mostly recalled from memory after reading this document in an archive, and some may therefore not be exact. Ellipses represent parts that cannot be recalled; most other punctuation has been added for clarity.
8. BLOODY PURGE PAVES THE WAY FOR “CHAIRMAN MAO” (1929–31 AGE 35–37)
IN THE YEAR and a half since leaving the outlaw land at the beginning of 1929, Mao had seized total control over two major Red Armies, the Zhu — Mao Army and Peng De-huai’s, as well as one significant Red base, in Fujian. All along, he had also had another sizeable Red Army in his sights, this one in Jiangxi, the province between Fujian and Hunan.
Under a charismatic and relatively moderate leader called Lee Wen-lin, the Jiangxi Reds had carved out some quite secure pockets. They had been warm
hosts to Mao when he had first descended on them straight from the outlaw land in February 1929. That stay had been brief, with Nationalist troops hot on Mao’s heels, but he had nonetheless promptly declared himself their boss, and when he departed had left behind his youngest brother, Tse-tan, as chief of Donggu District, the Jiangxi Reds’ center. Neither move was authorized by Shanghai, and the locals were not happy. But they did not resist Mao, as he was leaving.
Mao expected his brother to seize control for him, but Tse-tan lacked Mao’s aggressiveness and lust for power. A Party inspector described him as “working like someone suffering from malaria, suddenly hot and suddenly cold … rather childish, and afraid of making decisions.” So three months later Mao sent over a Hunanese crony, Lieu Shi-qi, with authority over his brother.
Lieu took away from Tse-tan not just his position but also his girlfriend, whom he himself married. The woman in question, Ho Yi, was the sister of Mao’s wife, Gui-yuan, so Lieu became Mao’s brother-in-law. Like Mao he was “foul-tempered and foul-mouthed,” according to his comrades, with as much elbow, and as few scruples, as Mao. By the time Mao returned to Red Jiangxi to try to consolidate his hold on it, in February 1930, Lieu had strong-armed himself into several leading posts.
Mao returned because he now had the military force to make a grab for power in Jiangxi, but once again he did so by chicanery. A grandly termed “joint conference,” supposedly comprising representatives of all the Reds in Jiangxi, was convened at a place called Pitou. Then at the last minute Mao juggled the timetable. Having announced that the conference was to open on the 10th of February, he suddenly advanced it to the 6th, so by the time key delegates arrived, including many locals who had been resisting Lieu’s power-grab, the conference was over.
