Living in the Ever-Shortening Shadow of Mao

The huge portrait still hangs on Tiananmen Gate, but the distance between the China Chairman Mao envisioned and the China that is currently unfolding grows longer each day. And his shadow shortens in inverse proportion. In the bland square below, Mao’s embalmed body lies, stripped of its once-monumental power beyond the ability to draw a daily line of mostly Chinese tourists who file past respectfully. The wallets of everyone moving about in the square bear his image as well. Identical prints of Mao’s bust are on the one, five, ten, twenty, and one hundred yuan notes. Perhaps few think about the irony of honoring Mao in this fashion, but Mao himself seems to know. His eyes are fixed on something moving unseen to the left of the print, and his lips bend upward slightly into a thin, ironic smile.

As a foreigner living and working in China, I have found myself struggling to make sense of Mao. Toward this end, I have read three biographies, which, taken together, are like the proverbial three bowls of porridge. The first, Edgar Snow’s hagiographic Red Star Over China, presents the heroic revolutionary Mao. It is a gripping narrative, but more a matter of myth-making than historical truth. The second, Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, portrays the demonic Mao, a Mao who is just as wholly evil as Snow’s Mao is wholly good. Jung Chang’s own family suffered persecution under Mao’s regime, and she has a well-founded hatred of the man. Personal vendetta, however, is not an especially attractive trait in a biographer. The third book, Michael Lynch’s Mao, takes a measured look at the man. Lynch’s Mao is an admirable but flawed revolutionary and largely a disaster as a head-of-state. This is the conflicted legacy that the Chinese people must contend with today: what to do with the memory of a man once worshiped but now the icon of a discredited vision, a man once deemed infallible but now acknowledged even by his admirers to be deeply flawed?

Deng Xiaoping, who survived two purges by Mao to become his successor and who more than anyone was responsible for setting China on a decidedly anti-Maoist course, offered a mathematical resolution to the problem of Mao: Mao, Deng asserted, was 100% right 70% of the time and 100% wrong 30% of the time. Presumably the period of unmitigated error occurred during the last two decades of Mao’s life, with state of perfection spanning the long revolutionary struggle and the early years after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

For Westerners bred on Cold War ideology, the notion of the heroic Mao may initially be difficult to grasp. Our image of him derives primarily from the Cultural Revolution and the excesses and cruelty of those worshiping in the cult of his personality. But Mao as a revolutionary leader is truly a remarkable figure. From the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, he endured for nearly thirty years against extremely long odds to establish a new nation. He accomplished this despite the fact that both the United States and Soviet Union favored his rival for power in China, Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang.

The creation of the People’s Republic ended a century of humiliating foreign intervention and economic domination. Later, Deng would insist that his opening of the economy would lead to socialism with Chinese characteristics. On the streets of China today, it is hard to see the difference between such “socialism" and capitalism. Mao’s communism, in contrast, always remained Chinese. Marxism may have been a Western import, but Mao’s tendency was to bend Marxism to fit what he perceived to be the needs of China. As the increasingly hostile nature of China’s relations with the Soviet Union would show, Mao was a nationalist first and a communist second.

In making revolution in China, Mao not only had to combat foreign and domestic foes; more dauntingly, he had to push against the weight of a cultural tendency to treat the existing social order as divinely sanctioned. Such a worldview benefited those at the top of the hierarchy. It least served the interests of those at the bottom, the peasants and women. In the 1930s, Mao won over many peasants simply by insisting that the Red Army treat the peasants humanely—a policy never adhered to by armies in China’s long history and in marked contrast to the routine brutality and rapine visited upon the peasants by both Kuomingtang and Japanese soldiers in the 1930s. Mao offered peasants who joined the Red Army training in basic literary—the first formal education most had ever received. Beyond education, he offered them hope—a commodity nearly unknown in thousands of years of Chinese peasant life.

Mao had been a strong advocate for women since the 1920s. In a culture that still practiced foot-binding, Mao insisted on the unbinding of women in the social and economic spheres. His position would have been radical for its time anywhere but was remarkably so in China. After assuming power, Mao banned both foot-binding and prostitution and created an environment in which women might aspire to something higher than subordination to the men in their lives.

Even so, Mao always embodied contradictions. He waged revolution in the peasants’ name, but no class suffered more than the peasants once Mao gained power. The Great Famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s resulted in the deaths of approximately fifty million Chinese people—nearly all of them peasants. Each death ultimately could be attributed to failed policies of Mao: the poorly planned collectivization of farming and the demand that farmers divert attention away from their crops to smelting down household implements in backyard furnaces that produced worthless steel. Mao had created a political culture premised on his own infallibility. Consequently, Mao could not acknowledge his own failures of judgment, and the sycophants that served him dared not speak in terms other than praise, even in the face of ideas that were clearly ruinous. As a result, fifty million people died in a famine that was both the worst in Chinese history and easily the most avoidable.

Similarly, Mao’s progressive stand on women’s equality conflicted with his behavior toward the women in his own life. The public feminist, apparently, was a private patriarch and letch. Married four times, Mao discarded one woman and took up with another when it pleased him. Although he never divorced his fourth wife, Jiang Qing—the strong-willed and sadistic scourge of the arts during the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s alliance with her during the last three decades of their marriage was strictly political. While Mao may have advocated women’s equality in the abstract, he did not want an equal partner in his own life, and this ensured a rift with the outspoken Jiang Qing. From the mid-1940s on, they shared the same hard-line vision for China, but no longer a bed.

At sixty-eight, Mao took up with a teen-aged mistress, Zhang Yufeng. Among Zhang’s many duties as the chairman’s chief mistress was to procure other young women to join Mao in his “pleasure rooms” at Zhongnanhai inside the Forbidden City. Mao’s path to power had come full circle, for, as China fell into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Mao frolicked inside the Forbidden City with what amounted to an imperial harem. In the isolation of his unchecked power, Mao had come to resemble the decadent princes of the late-Qing period whom he had despised as a young man. The revolutionary had become an emperor. Lord Acton’s maxim about the corrupting force of absolute power could hardly find a better illustration.

Perhaps the last purely Maoist act of the People’s Republic of China was the violent suppression of the student movement in 1989. From his framed perch high above Tiananmen Square, Mao must have smiled down on that scene. But he has surely scowled at most that has transpired since. China now has a capitalist economy with a one-party state. The bargain the party has made with the Chinese people is unchallenged political power in exchange for a less invasive presence in the daily lives of ordinary citizens, increasing choice in the marketplace in exchange for the continued dearth of political choice.

Direct challenges to the party’s hold on power still exact a harsh response, and always there is memory of Tiananmen. The balance is tenuous at best, and one wonders how long the state can cling so tightly to political power while relinquishing control in other respects. There is, however, one certainty: China is no longer Maoist. Each day, it fact, it moves a little farther away from the world that Mao made, and the position of reverence he still holds requires a little more cognitive dissonance to sustain. Perhaps one day, the gulf will grow too great, and, during the night, workmen will raise scaffolding on Tiananmen Gate and draw down the giant portrait of Mao. The sun will rise again the next morning, and the people will go about their daily routines, pretending not to notice that there is now one less star in the sky.

Still Killing Us Softly, with Chinese Characteristics

For years in my writing courses in the US, I’ve used an assignment that involves close analysis of print advertisements from popular magazines. Typically, I begin the lesson by showing Jean Kilbourne’s Still Killing Us Softly—a short film that provides students with a good introduction to reading the imagery and ideology of advertising, with a primary emphasis on the impact of advertising on body image for women.

The assignment can be eye opening for students. It is often the first time anyone has asked them to pay attention to advertising, despite the fact that they live in a world inundated by it. And they generally impress me by having better skills at interpreting images than in noting the subtle details of literary texts. I usually feel a sense of idealism when I teach the unit—an awareness that I’m accomplishing something more at such moments than merely teaching students how to write academic prose. I’m teaching them how to be observant citizens and how to think about what they see.

Last week, I attempted a similar lesson with my students at Wenzheng College. If anything, such instruction seems more vital here than it is back home. My students are all very personable but also nearly all lacking in critical thinking skills. They still have committed to memory dozens of classical Chinese poems they learned as schoolchildren; however, when prompted to answer discussion questions after a reading assignment, they tend to read verbatim from the text. They look at me with puzzled expressions when I ask them not to quote from the text but instead to use their own words and think for themselves.

No doubt, these tendencies stem from traditional Chinese educational values that have their roots in Confucianism, a trunk that survived the axes of the Mao era, and branches that endure today despite the dizzying pace of social change. Chinese education favors memorization over analytical skills, rote learning over problem solving, and hierarchical deference over open discussion. In these respects, my students closely resemble preceding generations of Chinese students. In other respects, however, they are quite different—unlike any students ever seen in China before.

The source of this difference is two-fold. The students I’m teaching are products of China’s one-child policy—a policy that has stemmed the country’s population growth but also altered the structure of the Chinese family in the process. China has become a nation of only-children, and the traditional gravitational pull of the family has shifted away from veneration of the elders toward adoration of the child. By chance, this has happened at exactly the same moment that the opening of the Chinese economy has given birth to a Chinese popular culture driven, as it is in the West, by advertising. The intersection has produced what might be called the first mass consumer generation in China.

It is difficult to conceive of just how much Chinese society has changed over the course of my students’ own lifetimes. They are all about twenty years old. They were born into a China where, beyond the propaganda of the state, advertising was virtually unknown. They have come of age in a China where it is completely unavoidable. In the epilogue to her history of the Boxer rebellion, Diana Preston recollects visiting China in the years immediately after Deng Xiaoping initiated his economic reforms. Looking out the window of her bus in Beijing, Preston saw streets almost entirely void of cars, filled instead with bicycles whose riders were uniformly clad in drab Mao suits. The parents of my students lived in this world, but for the students themselves, the scene that Preston describes bears no resemblance at all to the China they have come to call their own and which I am witnessing now with my own eyes. The ubiquitous presence of advertising is among the most obvious signs of change in China. It has infiltrated every available space: it’s on the sides of busses, on billboards lining the roads, on t-shirts and ball caps, on TV and the Internet, and on the glossy pages of the Chinese editions of fashion magazines imported from the West.

As I do when I teach this lesson in America, I stressed with my Chinese students that advertising sells not only products but also a system of values. This concept has a special resonance here in China, for it’s not only the foreign companies that have cracked the Chinese market. For better and for worse, foreign values are part of what’s being imported as well.

I didn’t need to look too hard to find advertisements to use in the lesson; a single issue of the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan supplied me with everything I needed. Despite the text in Chinese characters, Chinese Cosmo differs little from her elder sister in America. I selected twenty advertisements for the students to analyze, with each advertisement selling something beyond a product: ideals of beauty, success, happiness, power, and sexuality. The ads often tell a story about how to achieve these ideals but never raise the question of why Chinese people ought to abandon one set of ideals in favor of the consumerism of the West. I doubt that anything in my students’ education has equipped them to raise such a question, much less to answer it.

Not surprisingly, given the nature of Cosmopolitan, the ideal of beauty is emphasized above all others on its pages, and this ideal of beauty is a hybrid of Chinese and Western standards. Many of the ads feature models of European descent in ads that were created for Western audiences and reconfigured with a few Chinese characters. And while many other ads do display Chinese models, these models bear little resemblance to the Chinese women that I see on the street and in my classroom. Instead, they are Chinese women with wide eyes, full lips, wavy hair, and exceptionally pale skin, skin so pale that it surely was produced with significant digital altering of the images.

Repeatedly on the pages of Cosmo, the visual message is that white is right and beautiful. It should be noted that this association is not a Western invention. It originates in part in feudal Chinese standards of beauty in which pale skin was a marker of the aristocratic status that could keep a woman out of the sun. However, the rise of a consumer culture marks the first time the ideal has been package as products fit for mass consumption. At least a dozen ads appear for products that promise to whiten a Chinese woman’s skin. Those who named the products lack the sense of either irony or shame: Perfect White C, Pond’s White Beauty, Chinfie Whitening Emulsion, Bi-White, White Glamour.

Nearly all of my students are young women—more than ninety percent in fact. This made the discussion seem all the more relevant to me. As the students closely examined the ads I had distributed to them, I moved about the room and talked with them. I was struck by the degree to which the association between white skin and beauty had been accepted. Nearly all the young women agreed that paler skin was more beautiful than darker skin, and most stated that that they would eagerly buy a product that could lighten their own skin. None appeared aware that many of the whitening agents contain high levels of mercury and are thus far more likely to poison them than to alter their pigmentation.

I mentioned to the students that this identification between white skin and beauty in China could be damaging to women’s self-esteem, for it has elevated an image counter to nature to the position of an ideal. No doubt, this is great for business, for if we seek something that we can never have, we may come to believe that beauty and in turn happiness are just one purchase away. But for Chinese women, the new consumer culture has brought along with it new anxieties as well. Increasingly, Chinese women may come to resemble their Western counterparts in terms of the body image problems that Jean Kilbourne discusses. A young woman that I saw at Auchan one day embodied the point. She was a girl with a lovely face but an anorexic frame, with legs thinner than my arms. Surely, the Chinese people knew starvation in Mao’s time, but he needed no assistance from them to achieve it. In this sense, the glossy images of fashion magazines may have a power to move minds that surpasses even the Little Red Book.

Between the time I started writing this entry and the time that I’m finishing it, I evaluated the ad analyses that my students composed. Many of them merely described the ad at face value, producing a paraphrase rather than an analysis. Some even noted how much they wanted to buy the product after seeing the ad. This was disappointing but not surprising, for these students have little experience with critical thinking.

However, in the subsequent class meeting, there was a moment that made the whole exercise worthwhile. We were discussing the changes in Chinese society brought on by the opening of the economy. In a nation that experienced much depravation during the twentieth century, the standard of living in China has dramatically improved—at least for those living in the coastal cities that have experienced the most rapid economic growth. But the benefits come at a cost, as at least one of my students recognized. Her English name is Chanel, chosen in honor of her favorite Western perfume, a choice that has made of herself a kind of advertisement. During the discussion, Chanel said the changes in China were generally for the best but troubled her nevertheless. When I asked her to elaborate, this was her reply:

“I worry that we might forget what it means to be Chinese.”

That indeed may be the heart of the matter.

Yangzhou: The Mostly Intestinal Tour

After living in Suzhou for four months and visiting places like Hangzhou and Yangzhou, I’ve reached the conclusion that the suffix ‘zhou’ must stand for a town near some significant body of water with a trinket shop occupying no less than 75% of dry land.

Last weekend, my friend Yimen invited me to come along on a visit to Yangzhou to see her high school roommate Qian Hong Juan. We toured some traditional gardens. All Chinese gardens have begun to look more or less the same to me, and I’ve no enthusiasm for them now, though there were some lovely smoky shades of red on the Japanese maples and a sad, pale winter sun setting behind the white tower at Thin West Lake.

On Friday night, we went to a dance with Qian Hong Juan and one of her friends. I, the only waiguoren in sight, made a spectacle of myself by dancing alone for a while unrestrainedly. The Chinese tend to think collectively even on the dance floor. For about half the songs, they all moved in unison to patterns that remained a mystery to me. There was also one hip Chinese guy with spiked hair, a penchant for striking poses stolen from fashion magazines, and a lone glove that hasn't been seen in America since Michael Jackson was at his pre-pedophilia peak in the mid 1980s. And then there was the Karaoke contest for which the dance would break up every few songs, though only one of the contestants could come close to holding a tune. If only I hadn’t lost my voice to a cold and could sing in Chinese, I might have taken that contest.

The food on this outing surely rivaled the worst that I’ve eaten in China, and it’s actually I wonder that I haven’t gotten sick. On our last day in Yangzhou, we ate in a small restaurant that would have earned a sanitation grade F in America. Filth covered the floor, and the owners—a tired-looking couple with no other customers in sight—had the lights shut down to save power and add to the dismal mood of the place on an overcast day. An orange tomcat wandered about at will and hopped up into the frame beneath the table and cried for us to feed him. We obliged and tossed our fish bones onto the floor and watched him greedily tear at the bits of meat that remained. After we finished eating, I saw the woman sitting on a stool outside wiping her child’s behind in broad daylight. This left me wondering if the news had reached her that it is wise to wash one’s hands before handling food. The sight filled me with a nausea that still remains more than a week later.

Though I had no appetite, Qian Hong Juan wanted us to eat some Yangzhou delicacies with her before we returned to the bus station. She bought some goose meat at a street stand that featured long plucked goosenecks fixed to the glass. A man hacked away at the body of a bird and tossed the pieces into a plastic bag for us. Then Qian Hong Juan stopped at another stand and picked up a bag of pig’s head meat. Finally, we took our street food into a small restaurant and ordered a couple of dishes, including one called “ants climbing a tree”—ants cooked up with cellophane noodles and with a sauce that reminded me of the scent of insecticide.

Qian Hong Juan insisted on picking up the tab for everything, even though she’s a cash-starved veterinary graduate student immersed in a thesis project that entails killing large numbers of rabbits for murky reasons and without pay. I appreciated her hospitality, but the culinary combination, along with the memory of the woman wiping the child in the street, was nearly too much for me. I ate very little and had to exert great willpower to refrain from vomiting on the table.

Sometimes I worry that I’m unable to read the cultural signs and commit faux pas in etiquette. But there are also opportunities to indulge freely in behavior that would drive my father into fits of rage were he here to see me. For example, in China, meat is often served with the bones still in place, and it’s perfectly appropriate to spit them out on the table. In this instance, however, I’m sure that restraint was the proper course, for table vomiting is surely frowned upon across cultures.

And Eight Inches off the Legs, Please

A few weeks after I arrived in China, I did something that I hadn’t done in twenty years: I paid someone to cut my hair. The last time I’d done that, I was still living with my parents, who would bribe me into the chair by threatening to withhold things like car privileges, college tuition, heat, and food if I refused. Eventually, I decided that my hair was more important than their support. I moved out, let my hair grow long, and paid my own way through school. For the occasional trim, I relied on my girlfriend or her mother.

Later, when Sandy and I got married, I worked a small scissors clause into the vows. This required little work on her part at first, for I didn’t cut my hair at all for two five-year spans. But there are few things sadder than a man’s ponytail streaked with gray, and, in recent years, the clause had begun to cause Sandy to do some real work with those scissors. Surely this contributed to the stresses that led to our present separation.

Hence, I found myself alone in China, with my hair growing up rather than down in the insufferable Suzhou summer air. People were staring at me constantly, and I feared that my afro might be part of the problem. Something had to be done. I hoped that a haircut might make me look a little more Chinese.

Fortunately, there’s a barbershop that shares a parking lot with the Dongwu hotel where I live. My friend Liru had offered to come along and serve as interpreter. However, I declined and decided to go it alone, figuring that the only way I’d ever learn the language was to try to speak for myself, even when I lacked the words. Considering the resulting butchery, this was probably a mistake.

But language wasn’t my biggest obstacle. Although it’s a little embarrassing to admit it, for decades I’ve had a fear of being touched by strangers. I once went five years without having my teeth cleaned, so frightened was I by dental hygienists. Something about women putting sharp objects inside my body under bright lights felt akin to torture to me, with the rinse jets standing in for water-boarding. Since barbers keep their sharp objects on the outside, I felt up to the challenge this time.

Even so, my aversion to the touch of strangers was definitely tested in the barbershop. Not only did the barber cut my hair; he also washed it in a little sink in the back of the shop. It felt very odd to have somebody else’s fingers kneading my soapy scalp, and I had to squelch a strong desire to burst out laughing. I managed to suppress the urge, for this barber was not to be toyed with. He was a poor advertisement for himself, with a haircut that made him look like Suzhou’s answer to Moe, with me playing Larry. I knew he’d say “wei shenme ni” (“why you” in Chinese) and slap me if I got out of line. Or turn me into Curly.

Back in the chair, I felt like he was cutting away my bangs altogether, which gave me a view of just how much my hairline has receded in recent years and a sense of what I would look like if I were bald. Here, the language barrier did work against me, for I’d yet to learn the Chinese word for “stop.” Then an old Chinese man came in and sat in the chair next to mine, a man with a completely bald crown and little tufts of hair above the ears, a man needing a haircut no more than Mr. Magoo. He taunted me by his presence, a mirror into my own hairless future. Then I had to squelch an impulse to cry. Fortunately, the barber did leave some bangs after all, and I left feeling weak-kneed and looking a little butchered but not so bad as I had feared.

However, any expectation that a haircut would help me blend in was quickly deflated. The next morning, I rode my bicycle to the Couple’s Garden—a garden that my guidebook had assured me was immune to the crowds that ruin the mood of so many of its peers. It proved an unfortunate choice, and not only because a newly separated man ought not go alone to a place with such a name. The garden was packed with people, most of whom followed flag-waving guides giving the history of the garden through dueling megaphones. I climbed onto a rock to escape from the crowd only to hear the word “waiguoren” (foreigner) coming out of one of the megaphones. I looked down to see a group of Chinese tourists looking up at me, taking pictures. It was only then that I realized I needed to tell the barber to take eight inches off the legs, color my hair black, and dip my whole body in a bath of skin dye. Someone else could handle the plastic surgery.

Now, as I enter my fourth month in China, I feel much less self-conscious about my status as an outsider. Winter has come to Suzhou, and the cold air has driven out the humidity, allowing my hair to grow back generally down rather than up and out. I’m sure people still stare at me, but I don’t notice it so much anymore. Besides, I’ve discovered that there are some advantages to being different. One of my American colleagues here remarked that I am the third tallest man in China. Numbers one and two—Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian, respectively—are currently away in America playing in the NBA, which leaves only me. I’ve been exploiting this advantage by playing more basketball than I have since I was a teenager. In the US, I'm a pretty average player, but here, my height makes me exceptional, and it's a boost to my ego to delude myself into thinking that, just shy of 40, I'm really good. I know, though, that one game in the US will quickly disabuse me of the notion. For now, I'll just enjoy the sensation, along with all the other pleasures that a year in China can bring, even for a freakish waiguoren like me.

Xiao Xin

My tongue falters
on slight perils:
stones in the path,

low-hanging boughs,
waters that rise
without warning.

“Xiao xin,”
the Chinese say—
meaning “small heart,”

knowing that hearts
are brittle things
that break over trifles.

Inside the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace

Perhaps history always reveals as much about how we conceive of ourselves in the present as it does about what occurred in the past. Two exhibits on the Taiping Rebellion that I visited recently in Suzhou and Nanjing bear out the point.

As I doubt that one in a thousand Americans has ever heard of the Taiping Rebellion, a short overview will be necessary. We Americans tend toward historical myopia. When we speak of our own civil war, we call it The Civil War, neglecting the fact that in overlapping years civil war was decimating China, a civil war so costly in human life that it makes our own look like a bloodless skirmish by comparison. With a death toll of between twenty and thirty million from 1850-1864, the Taiping Rebellion has no peer in history. So what did the short and bloody Kingdom of Heavenly Peace mean to the Chinese then, and what sense do they make of it now?

The Taiping Rebellion germinated in 1837 with a dream. Hong Xiuquan, a Confucian scholar whose roots were in the Hakka minority rather than in the majority Han, had failed the civil-service examinations for the third time. A combination of illness and stress produced a delirium in which Hong envisioned himself a part of previously unseen family, the son of a bearded patriarch and the brother of an elder divine son.

In small numbers, Christian missionaries by this time had already begun without much success to seek converts in China. Christian tracts had been translated into Chinese, and in these tracts Hong found the means to make sense of his own dreams and deliria. The father and son that he had met in his dreams were none other than Jehovah and Jesus, and he himself was the younger brother called by God to establish a heavenly kingdom on earth. It was a fervor wed to violence from its inception when Hong shouted out in his delirium his dictum to “kill the demons.” In time, those demons would take on very earthly shape in the figures of the Qing emperor and the ruling elite, and the path to the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace would be cut with the sword.

At his zenith in the mid-1850s, Hong had established a capital at Nanjing and controlled a region of seventeen provinces in central and southern China. Not all Taiping soldiers, however, were true believers in Hong’s odd religious vision—a hybrid of Chinese hierarchy, Christian scripture, and fevered imagination. Instead, what drew many into the cause was shared hatred of the Qing, a dynasty already bloated by decadence and loathed by many Han Chinese for its foreign Manchu origins. That Hong, too, was not a Han hardly mattered; the usurper in power generally makes a better target for scorn than does the one of the rise.

What is most striking about the exhibits at the Suzhou Museum and the Taiping Museum in Nanjing are the omissions. Both exhibits present the rebellion as a kind proto-Marxist peasant revolution. No mention at all is made of the religious vision that motivated the rebellion and sustained it through the end. If ever a regime could be described as a theocracy, it would be Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom, yet one would never know this based on the museum displays. This is the most glaring omission, but by no means the only one. The exhibits note neither the routine brutality of the Taiping nor the hypocrisy of its leaders. Despite its rhetoric of egalitarianism, some were certainly more equal than others in Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom. Expropriated property was to be communally shared, yet Hong and his high lieutenants lived in luxury. The heavenly king ordered sexual segregation, preventing even wives and husbands from sharing a bed, all the while establishing his own imperial harem. Common people who violated the policy were bound to wind up with their heads severed from their bodies. Opium addicts, homosexuals, Buddhists, Taoists, Qing sympathizers, and perceived Qing sympathizers all exposed their necks to the same blade.

The distorted presentation of the history of the Taiping is not surprising, for the original distorter was Hong himself. As his kingdom began to crumble in the early 1860s, Hong cloistered himself in his Nanjing palace and rewrote the Bible. Any passages in the Chinese translations that did not fit his vision he revised or cut, claiming that the original source had been in error. He also made sure to add numerous references to himself, giving the unsuspecting reader the sense that Hong embodied the fulfillment of a prophecy, even if that prophecy originated only in his own mind.

The curators of the museum exhibits have done something quite similar, though toward political rather than religious ends. They have given us a Hong of the mind, a hero of the people whose attractive frame can only be seen when the field is swept clean of most of the facts. In the long-standing thinking of the Party, the feudal Qing were bad, and, in opposing them, the Taiping must surely have been proletarian and good. Much must be forgotten to tell the story this way, but that is the story the exhibits present. There is no space in such a tale for Hong in his decline, when the heavenly king’s work with his distorting pen closely resembles Hitler moving about non-existent armies on maps in the Fuhrer Bunker as Berlin fell. Many rogues of history have been undone by hubris. Can there be any greater act of pride than to proclaim oneself sired by God and to found a state based on that premise? Or to assume the arbitrary power of truth and wield it in defiance of reason?

Nanjing Wedding

You may want to take deep breath before you read the next sentence….

I got married this weekend. Actually, it was a mock wedding at Zhongyuan, a garden that my friend Yimin and I visited in Nanjing on Saturday. The garden included a teahouse with four young women playing classical Chinese instruments. After the performance, a man came out and explained that they would now have a traditional wedding ceremony. I think he was supposed to be the bride’s father. He threw three red balls to men in the audience, and one of them fell to me.

The bride—one of the women who had been performing a few moments before—was led onstage wearing an elaborately patterned Chinese dress and an embroidered veil that covered her face and neck. We three potential grooms were then ushered onto the stage, and the host read some words in Chinese affixed to white labels on the red balls. My inability to understand Chinese greatly impairs my ability to narrate this story, but my cluelessness is, in the end, the outstanding feature of the tale. Naturally, the text eliminated my two competitors, and I was left alone, the lucky groom. The other musicians led me off stage and dressed me in a Chinese gown and hat, forcing me to remove my Washington Nationals cap in the process.

I was the only foreigner present, so the audience found my selection to be quite a hoot. The host was making some wisecracks at my expense, but I couldn’t understand them—I just heard everyone laughing. Yimin told me later that he’d made a joke to the effect that he hoped I wouldn’t try take off my pants as the women dressed me in the Chinese gown.

Once I was properly attired, the wedding began. To his credit and my salvation, my new father-in-law could speak enough English to give me cues at each stage of the ceremony. My bride and I held onto opposite ends of a red cord and bowed to the four cardinal directions. Then we walked around in a circle together, still clinging to our cord. The ceremony concluded with me lifting the veil from the bride’s face. Fortunately, she didn’t scream in horror at the sight of me, but, despite that auspicious sign and the bride’s beauty and musical talent, I didn’t think it would work out. The cultural and linguistic differences were simply too great, so I got an immediate annulment. In closing, the host asked me to address the audience, and I made an absurd statement—the only kind that my Chinese skills will allow:

“Xiexie. Wo jiao Weilian. Wo shi meiguoren. Wo hui shuo yidiandian hanyu. Wo xihuan kan shu.” (Thank you. My name is William. I am American. I can speak a little Chinese. I like to read books.)

The crowd roared in approval, and the musicians stripped me of my Chinese garb. What little dignity I posses had already been gone for quite some time.