That was delicate: nothing about his being a great leader. Mao's dying wish (obviously ignored) was to be remembered as a teacher.
I walked through the village, reflecting on the fact that nothing looks emptier than an empty parking lot. There were many here, designed for buses; they were very large, and nothing was parked in them. I went to the hotel that was built for dignitaries and I sat in the almost-empty dining room, under a Mao portrait, eating and listening to people spitting.
The tide was out in Shaoshan; it was the town that time forgot—ghostly and echoing. And so it fascinated me. It was actually a pretty place, a rural retreat, with lovely trees and green fields, and a stream running through it that topped up the lotus ponds. In any other place an atmosphere of such emptiness would seem depressing; but this was a healthy neglect—what is healthier than refusing to worship a politician?—and the few people there had come as picnickers, not as pilgrims.
Mao's house was at the far end of the village, in a glade. It was large, and its yellow stucco and Hunanese design gave it the look of a hacienda—very cool and airy, with an atrium and a lovely view of its idyllic setting. Here Mao was born in December 1893. The rooms are neatly labeled: Parents' Bedroom, Brother's Room, Kitchen, Pigsty, and so forth. It is the house of a well-to-do family—Mao's father was "a relatively rich peasant," clever with money and mortgages, and he was a moneylender of sorts. There was plenty of space here— a big barn and a roomy kitchen. Mrs. Mao's stove was preserved (Do Not Touch) and a placard near it read In 1921 Mao Zedong educated his family in revolution near this stove. And in the sitting room, In 1927 meetings were held here to discuss revolutionary activities.
It was not like visiting Lincoln's log cabin. It wasn't Blenheim. It wasn't Paul Revere's house. For one thing it was very empty. The few Chinese nearby seemed indifferent to the house itself. They sat under trees listening to a booming radio. There were girls in pretty dresses. Their clothes alone were a political statement. But this handful of people were hardly visible. The emptiness meant something. Because when it was heavily visited Shaoshan had represented political piety and obedience; now that it was empty it stood for indifference. In a sense, neglect was more dramatic than destruction because the thing still existed as a mockery of what it had been.
It had the musty smell of an old shrine. It had outlived its usefulness, and it looked a little absurd, like a once-hallowed temple of a sect of fanatics who had run off, tearing their clothes, and had never returned. Times have changed. Towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, the pseudonymous Simon Leys visited China, and in Chinese Shadows, his gloomy and scolding account of his trip, he wrote that Shaoshan "is visited by about three million pilgrims every year." That's 8000 a day. Today there were none.
If Shaoshan was embarrassing to the Chinese it was because the whole scheme had been to show Mao as more than human. There was an obnoxious religiosity in the way his old schoolhouse had been arranged to show little Mao as a sanctified student. But the building was empty, and there was no one walking down the lane, so it didn't matter. I had the impression that the Chinese were staying away in droves.
One stall sold postcards. There was only one view: Mao's Birthplace (the house in the glade). And there were a few Mao badges. It was the only place in China where I saw his face on sale, but even so, it was just this little badge. There were also towels and dishcloths, saying Shaoshan.
There was a shop in the Mao Museum.
I said, "I would like to buy a Mao badge."
"We have none," the clerk said.
"How about a Mao picture?"
"We have none."
"What about a Little Red Book—or any Mao book?"
"None."
"Where are they?"
"Sold."
"All of them?"
"All."
"Will you get some more to sell?"
The clerk said, "I do not know."
What do they sell, then, at the shop in the Mao Museum? They sell key chains with color photos of Hong Kong movie actresses, bars of soap, combs, razor blades, face cream, hard candy, peanut brittle, buttons, thread, cigarettes and men's underwear.
The museum did try to show Mao as more than human, and in its eighteen rooms of hagiography Mao was presented as a sort of Christ figure, preaching at a very early age (giving instructions in revolution by his mother's stove) and winning recruits. There were statues, flags, badges and personal paraphernalia—his straw hat, his slippers, his ashtray. Room by room, his life is displayed in pictures and captions: his school days, his job, his travels, the death of his brother, the Long March, the war, his first marriage...
And then, after such languid and detailed exposition, an odd thing happens in the last room. In No. 18, time is telescoped, and the years 1949-1976, his entire chairmanship, his rule, and his death, are presented with lightning speed.
There is no mention of his two other marriages, nothing about Jiang Qing. Nonpersons like Jiang Qing and Lin Biao have been airbrushed out of photographs. The 1960s are shown in one picture, the mushroom cloud of China's first atomic bomb in 1964. The rest of the decade does not exist. There has been no Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, though the Mao Museum was founded in 1967, at the height of it.
But by omitting so much and showing time passing so quickly, the viewer is given a bizarre potted history of Mao's final years. In the previous rooms he looks like a spoiled child, a big brat, scowling and solemn. In this final room he develops a very unusual smile, and on his pumpkin face it has a disturbing effect. After 1956 he seems to be gaga. He starts wearing baggy pants and a coolie hat, and his face is drawn from a sag into a mad or senile grimace. He looks unlike his earlier self. In one picture he is lumberingly playing Ping-Pong. In 1972 and after, meeting Nixon, Prince Sihanouk, and East European leaders, he's a heffalump; he looks hugely crazy or else barely seems to recognize the visitor grinning at him. There is plenty of evidence here to support what the Chinese say about him all the time—that after 1956 he was not the same.
Mao had set out to be an enigma and had succeeded. "The anal leader of an oral people," the sinologist Richard Solomon had said. Mao can be described but not summed up. He was patient, optimistic, ruthless, pathologically anti-intellectual, romantic, militaristic, patriotic, chauvinistic, rebellious in a youthful way, and deliberately contradictory.
Shaoshan said everything about Mao, his rise and fall; his position today. I loved the empty train arriving at the empty station. Was there a better image of obscurity? As for the house and village—they were like many temples in China where no one prayed any longer; just a heap of symmetrical stones representing waste, confusion and ruin. China was full of such places, dedicated to the memory of someone or other and, lately, just an excuse for setting up picnic tables and selling souvenirs.
Mr. Fang was sitting in the hotel lobby with his head in his hands. He did not look up when a man near him hoicked loudly, spat a clam onto the floor and scuffed it with his foot.
"I'm leaving, Mr. Fang."
He raised his head and looked at me with his swollen eyes.
"Where are you going?"
"Canton for a while. Then Peking."
He groaned. "By train?" he asked. His lips were dry.
"The People's Railway is for the people," I said, recalling the slogan I had seen in the Yunnan town of Yiliang.
This made him wince. He said, "I am fifty-six years old. I have traveled a great deal. I was a Russian interpreter. I have been to Leningrad and other places. But I have never taken so many trains all at once. I have never slept on so many trains—I don't sleep at all. Trains, trains."