Anchee Min: Becoming Madame Mao

Allen and Unwin

$24.95

Review: Manying Ip

This is a powerful biographical fiction about Madame Mao (1910-1995), wife of China's highly controversial leader Mao Zedong. She was notorious as the ringleader of the feared and hated Gang of Four, presiding over a reign of terror during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-78.

Western readers might have first noticed her when she welcomed Richard Nixon to China, not standing with the ailing Mao, but playing host as the cultural leader of China, ushering the Nixons to see the revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women.

To the public she was known as Jiang Qing: River Green, a poetic name conferred on her when she met Mao in north-west China in the difficult days of 1938.

For a woman who created so much political havoc for so long, Madame Mao's life history is strangely obscure. Following her imprisonment, Madame Mao was widely referred to as the White-boned Demon, ridiculed and reviled. Fragments of her dirty linen became public knowledge: she was a Shanghai starlet, she had married three times previously, her relationship with Mao was staunchly opposed by other Communist leaders, and Mao promised his comrades never to accord her a public role.

It was the Cultural Revolution that gave her the chance to claim eminence and power. The world was bewildered by Madame Mao's eight revolutionary operas, and the bitter Chinese joke was how more than 800 million people were forced to watch the same eight stories as operas, ballets and movies for more than a decade.

The events of the Cultural Revolution were so bizarre and the cruelty so random that few could make sense of them. Anchee Min has given a passionate, imaginative and daring reconstruction of Madame Mao's life. The portrait is vivid, and the interpretation of her psyche highly convincing. Essentially, the world was a stage for Madame Mao. As a career actress who made her name in the experimental theatre of Shanghai, she plays her real-life role with the same passion she brings to the stage.

Min is a consummate writer, powerfully evocative. She slips from the first-person narrative of Madame Mao to the colder voice of the third-person observer for almost every event, thus giving both the protagonist's subjective viewpoint and a more objective commentary of the author. Parts of some paragraphs are rhapsodic, while parts are coldly analytical. They flow seamlessly to make a riveting read.

The Madame Mao that Min presents is ruthlessly ambitious and yet highly vulnerable because of her comparative lack of political acumen and total lack of a power base. Her cruelty stems from fear and insecurity. Her pathetic tenacity in promoting herself as Chairman Mao's closest comrade is self-deluding. She lost her husband's love for years and in the end he double-crossed her.

Min has succeeded in giving Madame Mao a three-dimensional personality, and although the reconstruction might not be totally historical, readers of this book would realise that the White-boned Demon was a woman of flesh and blood too.

* Manying Ip is a senior lecturer at the School of Asian Studies at the University of Auckland.