Customer Reviews

Becoming Madame Mao

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Anita, my young friend from Hangzhou, tells me that Mao "is like an uncle," a paternal figure of wisdom and kindliness. His last wife, Jiang Qing? She is "like the devil. All Chinese think so." Mao's spirit must be pleased. It is, after all, what he wanted. Thirty years after his death, his fat, bald, lunar visage still looms benignly over Tiananmen Square. He is still the First Citizen, still beloved, still a fatherly figure, revered if not adored, at least for now.

Jiang Qing was evil, unquestionably so. Yet, for all the evil she did or that was attributed to her, for all the chaos, disruption and destruction that can be traced to her wasteful, mean, insane policies, for all her vindictiveness, jealousy and anger, for every loathsome attribute she had, for every death she caused directly and indirectly, for every family ruined and every person tortured and persecuted, she was, and is, a useful evil. While Mao still breathed, she was useful to him. In death, she continues to be useful to the Communist Party and the Chinese people, at least the ones who still love Mao. Whatever she was in life, her dark ghost looms large and menacing, out-Herods Herod and draws the blackness from the shade of Mao. He sparkles while she rots.

Anchee Min's "Becoming Madam Mao" is an outrageous fiction. Min, who is bold enough to attempt literature in an adopted language (and audacious enough to do it well), redoubled her boldness and took on the task of creating a novel about Mao's most despicable consort. In prose that alternates from third person to first, she attempts to take us into the mind of this strange and devious woman, illuminate her times, and provide a human dimension to the "white boned demon," this woman who shared Mao's bed, mothered one of his children and became the instigator of one of the most disastrous experiments in societal manipulation, the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Min, by alternating persons from third to first, balances her fictional portrait, narrating events from the outside, then changing to the first person to view situations from the perspective of Madam Mao.

The story unfolds in a series of fascinating vignettes, each one bringing us through the phases of Jiang Qing's life from her brutal and impoverished infancy to her final confrontation with her daughter, and her suicide. The Jiang Qing of Min's novel is a woman who creates and re-creates herself, insinuates the lives of people - men - to advance, first, her acting career, then her career in the Communist Party and in Politics. Born into poverty, the unwanted child of a concubine who has been expelled from her man's home, Jiang's early life is filled with uncertainty and misery. Even as a small child, she can't be cowed, however. Much to her mother's consternation, she refuses to have her feet bound, pulls the bindings from them, and won't be bound again. She finally finds some comfort in the home of her grandparents, where she's taught the basics of Chinese opera and learns to dream of a life on the stage. Eventually, she runs away and pursues her dream, only to find herself constrained by her choice of men and by the machinations of the KuoMinTang government. She becomes a Communist, less out of ideological conviction than out of a desire to resist the KMT and to follow her friends.

Her career on the stage faltering, she leaves Shanghai, sets her sites on Mao, follows him to his mountain lair, joins his forces, meets him, and, Mao being fond of actresses, she seduces him. She's learned much from her affairs in Shanghai. Studied and deliberate in what she does, every move and word is calculated. She manipulates well, forms her alliances, cajoles Mao into abandoning his mad third wife, and wheedles him into a dubious marriage. She is at his side as he pushes on to victory, but Mao is fickle and in time his ardor cools. A manipulator herself, she reads his moods and senses the danger that estrangement from Mao can bring.

Jiang strives for security, for power, for acknowledgment of her place at Mao's side, as his wife, partner and advisor with power of her own and a mission to fill. Her chance finally comes when Mao turns against his own Party apparatus and she joins him in the mayhem by reinventing herself as the mistress of culture. Vindictive and jealous by nature, loathing the apparatchiks in the cadre who have ignored and insulted her throughout the years, she unleashes chaos and strife with her Red Guards, tramples the educational system, and annihilates the lively arts, literature, and the stage. Resistance shattered, all culture is ultimately reduced to her eight exemplary Maoist operas, education becomes nothing more than indoctrination in the Cult of Mao. She turns her talons on everyone, motivated by jealousy and vindictiveness, indifferent to suffering (except her own), and consumed by her pathological obsession with Mao, less love than a fixation that overwhelms and obscures every villainy, every vice, every treachery, and every atrocity, no matter how monstrous.

Min's Jiang Qing is not a creature who cackles with evil. She slips into it gradually, fixed on her obsessions with power and with Mao, hardly noticing as she does. We like her as a teenager, and as a young actress. We even like her as she joins Mao and seduces him. Gradually, however, as she ages and her life becomes fixed on her obsessions and her vindictiveness, our intimacy with this appalling woman is almost too much to bear. Min brings her almost too close.

Historical fiction is difficult enough when dealing with the ancient past. Critics, forgetting that it's fiction, will carp about minor deviations from factual events. When writing about characters who are still in living memory, however, the writer cannot avoid controversy. She may trample on the emotions of some who have an investment in the character, and may be accused of obscuring or excusing the acts of a monster, glorifying a mediocrity, or in other ways exaggerating or misleading. Every omission or error will be treated as a major imperfection. Historical fiction, however, is fiction based on history, not history. The fiction writer is looking for a kind of emotional truth which may not be conveyed by a linear relation of facts. If Min is to be criticized for imagining Jiang's thoughts, then Shakespeare was equally guilty and should be criticized for virtually all his histories, as was Marlowe, Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn. Art imagines life. History tries to record it.

Whatever can be said for Jiang Qing, in history or fiction she is a character whose self-creation as the very incarnation of chaos and evil is both fightening and fascinating. Min's portrait of her is skillfully drawn, an intimate and cathartic journey through Jiang's life that in the end leaves us appalled not only at her but at the evil we humans can do, shaken by the stark realization that only a thin wall separates us from them, that people like Jiang are less exotic and extraordinary than common, banal and ordinary. This is no elegant evil, profound or even clever in its machinations. Jiang is the bitter and angry neighborhood shrew, adorned with Mao's blessing, given a country to vandalize, a culture to destroy.

"Becoming Madam Mao" was one book I could not put down. Read it, then read a history. Anchee Min provides a list of her sources, and invites us to go further. For now, however, I'll settle for acquiring more of Ms. Min's books and reading more of her remarkable stories.

The woman who became the wife of Chairman Mao was many people before she earned world-wide notoriety for her role in the tragedies of the Cultural Revolution. Her constant reinvention of herself (each time with a new name) adds up to fascinating reading. Author Anchee Min was herself one of the young women plucked from obscurity (a collective farm) by Madame Mao to play heroines in Chinese patriotic films (a story told in "Red Azalea") and she writes that she always found Madame Mao more sympathetic than she is usually represented. Ms. Min must be a very empathetic person, because the Mme Mao we see is scary as hell.

After barely escaping having her feet bound, the young Mme. M. begins a life of struggling, scraping, and plotting. She is attracted to the Communist cause, which gives her ambitions a goal she finds compatible with her career as an actress. She forgets no slight, no lover who turned his back on her, no director who didn't cast her, and she gets back at them all once her star rises. She discovers that her own greatest talent lies in manoevering the labrynthine snares of Chinese politics, which puts her intelligence, cunning, and intuition to the test. Politics is her salvation and her downfall.

It is difficult to know what name to call her in this review - by the time she became Jiang Jing this brilliant chameleon had taken on so many different personas that perhaps even she was not sure who she was.

How can her story be told? Is anything for sure? What can be proved? Anchee Min weaves fact and fiction to create a complex portrait of one of the most intriguing people in recent history. Min learned English as an adult, with an adult's understanding of depth of meaning. Her writing is prickly and interesting, which adds richness to a story about which she has an insider's view.

Min's first book, "Red Azalea" was so remarkable that equalling it is a formidable task. "Becoming Madame Mao" is not as satisfying, but it is an excellent inside look at events which are still little understood in the West.

This book was a particular disappointment for me, as I had eagerly anticipated reading it and thought the story of the rise and fall of the extraordinary woman Yunhe, the daughter of a concubine who eventually married Mao and hubristically tried to succeed him, was a great story just aching to be told well by someone. Lamentably that someone is not Anchee Min.

My singular complaint was the constant shift between the 1st person and 3rd person narrative perspectives. She'd write two or three paragraphs in the 1st person subjective, then abruptly shift to the 3rd person for a couple of paragraphs, then back to the 1st person..etc. After a bit this became so annoying and so off-putting, it almost became a challenge then to even finish the book, and I consider myself an extremely patient reader.

The other factor that underwhelmed me was the triteness of the language and the almost cartoonish dialogue Ms. Min puts in her characters' mouths. Some of it is just stultifyingly awful and you're never allowed to really feel anything for any of her people she presents.

The whole thing was a terrible letdown and I wish Anchee Min all the best, but I'll still be waiting for someone to do justice to this awe-inspiring story and deliver the real white-boned demon.

Yes, Jiang Chaing was evil at the prime of her career (Anchee Min should know this clearly as she was in a labor camp during the Mai regime and later was recruited by Jiang Chaing for her theatre) - but no one was born evil. This book is not a justification for Madame Mao, but a "histo-fiction" to try to gain some insight into what events and personality traits come together to form someone who can do such awful things.

The story is good, and takes you from feeling sorry for her as a little girl trying to escape her mother's fate, to cheering for her to get the acting parts and accomplish her dreams, to being disgusted by her describing how to torture cancer patients to get them to say something incriminating about her more moderate rivals.

The book irked me in one sense though. The writing style - switching between first person and third person every few paragraphs (without any pattern!) made it hard to read. Kinda like listening to a good CD that has a scratch. I almost gave up on it in the first few chapters, but in the end, I gritten my teeth and accepted the writing for the sake of the story.

I agree with one of the other reviewers - the shifting perspectives are very annoying. I would add to the list of annoyances, lack of punctuation. These qualities coupled with a general lack of a flow make the story difficult if not impossible to follow.

If the reader has any general knowledge of Madame Mao, the book hardly sheds any new light on this significant personality in recent Chinese history. The reader does not gain a better understanding of what made her tick or why she was so evil. The character Ms. Min portrayed is an extremely evil one, all evil and with little redeeming quality. However, near-one-dimensionally evil characters do not make very interesting subjects of novels.

The historical personality-based novel is a great tool for the author to share her view on the motivations and psychology of historical characters. Till this day, Jiang Qing lives in rumors and innuendoes yet little factual is known of her. One can only depend on fiction to explain the connections among the events in the life of the "White-Boned Demon". Ms. Min's novel, however, reads more like a poorly written newspaper account of a life rather than a deep psychological exploration. She could have done better with a really very interesting subject matter.

If your summer reading list is short, leave this title out!

Madame Mao has remained one of the most hated and yet unknown figures of Chinese History. Anchee Min tries to explore this woman's personality and the reasons why she acted the way she did.As an opera singer/actress, she was forced to endure discrimination.However, she was able to acomodate herself to the social and political changes that affected China during that period of time. She managed to survive. Was she acting purely out of personal ambition or was she really in love with Mao? Her story is full of surprises and her ending is extremely sad.

A good novel that brings us to the world of a most controversial character.

This is an impressionist version of the life of the woman who became Jiang Qing, Madame Mao. The point of view shifts back and forth from within the mind of Jiang Qing, to the view of a bystander near to the action, to the view of a historian recounting from a distance in time as well as space. The effect is like a film which uses a hand-held camera with a zoom lens - you get a sense of perspective and detail at the same time. Not every writer could pull this off, but Anchee Min does it.

This is a small book, and it assumes that the reader is fairly familiar with the historical drama of Mao's China which Jiang Qing helped direct and choreograph. It is an intimate book, totally focussed on the central character, with the other elements of history and fate revolving around her.

Anchee Min succeeds in creating a character for Jiang Qing which accounts for much that seems inexplicable in her many-faceted career as she is in turn the unvalued daughter of an alcoholic peasant , a film starlet, a soldier, a wife and mother, a director of film and stage, and ultimately a dictator whose absolute power corrupted her absolutely. An easy, informative, and absorbing read.

"I was Mao's dog. Whoever he told me to bite, I bit."

In China, Jiang Qing, aka Lan Ping, aka Madame Mao, has all the infamy of Attilla the Hun, Hitler, and the Devil all rolled into one. As leader of the Gang of Four, which led the disasterous Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing is considered directly responsible for the death of millions and the pointless suffering of hundreds of millions.

But Jiang Qing poses a complex, conflicted character, serving as the historical scapegoat for Chairman Mao, who she followed and worshipped far too blindly, not unlike a generation of Chinese who took the Great Helmsman for a god, and paid the painful price. Sure, she was scheming, power hungry, and indifferent to the ramifications of her actions, but she was also an insecure, desperate, and frightened woman. What she did was no different and no worse than the rest of the scheming, power jostling crowd in Zhongnanhai. What set Jiang Qing out from the rest, ultimately, is that she was proud, without shame, and wasn't easily cowed or afraid of "losing face." That is what made her remarkable.

"Becoming Madame Mao" is a fictional, first person attempt to get inside Jiang Qing's head and get a grasp around her motivations and all her contradictions. It is an attempt that fails utterly. The writing is awkward at best and often downright awful, but that is not its greatest shortcoming. Min's main flaw is that, rather than providing a intimate and complex insight into the most fascinating woman of 20th Century China, she trivializes both her subject matter and the events that produced her.

Anchee Min's Madame Mao is a cardboard cutout, a stereotyped harpy even less sympathetic than the vision of her presented by the official Chinese Communist propaganda.

Most of the book's plot, at least, that which isn't invented, is lifted from Ross Terrill's incredible "White Bone Demon", which remains the authoritative biography of Jiang Qing in both English and Chinese.

Terrill's forthright presentation of the facts of Jiang's life, which allow the reader to analyze for himself, is a much better means of understanding Madame Mao than Min's presumptive monologues.

As a student of chinese language and history, I had read accounts of Jiang Ching's role in the gang of four. I also read how, at one time or another, the official historians in China basically blamed her for all things bad that Mao had done.

This wonderfully scripted works makes Jiang Ching a real person. It removes her from the history books and newspaper clippings and, in a poetic style, tells a human story. While we know Madame Mao was cunning and mean, this book gives a more reasonable background for the snapshot I had seen before in history class here in the US and in China.

As for the literary critique in other reviews, remember how Faulkner's Sound and the Fury was punctuated and then reviewed!

Anchee Min, the author, grew up in China and was part of a labor collective. She also worked as an actress in Madame Mao's Film Studio. I loved her novel "Katherine" as it introduced me to the reality of living in Communist China. I was therefore very anxious to read "Becoming Madame Mao", in which she attempts to shed some light on the life Jiang Chang, the wife of Mao Tse-Tung, often referred to as the "white boned demon" and known for her vindictive cruelty.

The voice of Madame Mao come through clearly in the alternating sections written in the first person. It is here that the reader gains some psychological insight into the forces that have shaped her life. These sections are always followed by a dispassionate third person narrative. I found this technique effective in telling this story.

The tale begins when the young girl rebels against having her feet bound, and follows the headstrong young women through an acting career and three unhappy marriages before she meets the dynamic Mao and joins her life with his. She craves his love, but is treated badly throughout her life. There is always intrigue and betrayal. Favor or disfavor is subject to whim. The world she lives in is cruel and she lives in constant fear of her enemies.

I had hoped to learn more about Chinese history. But the focus is always on the person and much was not explained. I also found it difficult to follow the many different Chinese names and kept getting the people confused, especially since, with the exception of Madame Mao, most of them were not developed in depth. I was also aware that is was a historical novel about real life people and kept wondering about where the line was drawn between fact and fiction.

Mao Tse-tung saw everyone as an enemy, imprisoned anyone who seemed to threaten him. Madame Mao did the same. And whether or not she was able to ever achieve true love seems besides the point.

This book would probably be most interesting to those who already have a background in Chinese history. I can therefore not give this book any more than a very weak recommendation. It was a good try on the part of the author. But it just didn't work for me.