delanceyplace.com 3/5/08 - chairman mao

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In today's excerpt - Mao Tse-tung, absolute ruler over one-quarter of the world's population and ultimately responsible for over 70 million deaths in peacetime, became well known for his many wives, his mistresses and his indifference to his children:

"Mao ... acquired a wife—his third—almost as soon as he settled into outlaw country.  A pretty young woman with large eyes, high cheekbones, an almond shaped face and a willowy figure, Gui-yuan was just turning eighteen when she met Mao. ... Mao at once began to court her, and by the beginning of 1928 they were 'married'—with no binding ceremony but a sumptuous banquet prepared by Mrs. Yuan. ... Unlike [his previous wife], who was madly in love with him, Gui-yuan married Mao with reluctance. A beautiful woman in a crowd of men, she had many suitors and considered Mao at thirty-four 'too old' and 'not worthy' of her. ...

"By the end of a year of marriage, Gui-yuan had resolved to leave Mao. She confided to a friend that she was unlucky to have married him. ... When Mao decided to leave outlaw land, in January 1929, she tried desperately to stay behind. ... However, Mao ordered her to be taken along 'at any cost.' She cried all the way, repeatedly falling behind, only to be fetched by Mao's guards. ...

"[In 1937] for Gui-yuan, Mao's years of flagrant womanizing was the last straw. Over their marriage of nearly ten years, she had had to live with her husband's heartlessness. ... She was bitter that although he was indifferent to children, and he had not cared when four of theirs had died or been abandoned, he repeatedly made her pregnant. ... Gui-yuan left for Russia [for hospital care] in early October 1937. Their new one-year-old daughter remained in Yenan. ... It was in this freezing world that she gave birth to a boy, to whom she gave the Russian name of Lyova. He died of pneumonia after only six months, and Gui-yuan sank into inconsolable grief. For days she sat on a bench facing the tiny mound where he was buried in the back garden, murmuring his name, weeping.

"Their was no warmth from her husband. When the baby was born, she had written to Mao to say that the boy looked just like him. Mao did not reply. No word either on his son's death. Then in summer 1939, nearly two years after they had parted, Gui-yuan learned by chance that Mao had remarried. ... Because he had remarried, Mao did not want Gui-yuan back in China. ... As a result, the infant daughter she had left in Yenan spent her first few years as a virtual orphan. ... When she was four, [the daughter] was taken to Russia to join her mother. Gui-yuan hugged her daughter long and hard when they were reunited, in streams of tears ... [but] soon she had a breakdown, and the brunt of her rage was born by her daughter; other children often heard [the daughter] screaming as her mother beat her. Gui-yuan was put in a mental institution, howling as she was torn away from her room and bundled in a car. Her terrified  seven-year-old daughter ran away and hid in the woods, and grew up an introverted and silent child."