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My years at Mao's ear

In his new memoir The Man on Mao's Right: From Harvard Yard to Tiananmen Square, My Life Inside China's Foreign Ministry, Ji Chaozhu, who was born in China and at age nine moved to New York, tells of his experiences returning to China in 1950 and working as an English interpreter for the country's top leaders.

My tour of duty getting "clean" down on the farm ended abruptly one crisp fall morning. I was sitting atop a pile of straw on a horse-drawn cart, trundling down a dirt road on the way to the fields. My commune brigade leader, a middle-aged peasant, came running up behind the cart and breathlessly said, "Come right away. You're to report back to the Foreign Ministry immediately. There's a car waiting. Hurry!"

After grabbing my grubby extra clothes and a picture of Xiangtong and me, I was whisked away at high speed, dust billowing behind us, rolling over the fields where the peasants were bent at work. I asked the driver nothing and he said nothing. For good reason, the rules were strict. My movements could be used by an assassin to determine the movements of Premier Zhou. I never discussed my work affairs with anyone outside work, even keeping most of it from Xiangtong. What she didn't know couldn't get her in trouble.

I could only guess that my sudden summoning had to do with the big celebration being held that day, October 1. A huge parade was to mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. In any case, I couldn't show up at work looking as if I'd just climbed down off a hay wagon.

The driver sped to the compound, where I raced into the lean-to, tore off my farm clothes, and dug out my good tunic, pants, shoes, and shirt. Xiangtong was at work. Using thermos water, I did my best to wash my face and hands, then scraped the stubble from my face, combed my hair, and double-checked to ensure that I had remembered to take the hanger out of my jacket. My shoes even matched!

The driver raced through the city, taking a long route around to get to the Foreign Ministry and avoid the crowds and the traffic blockades for the parade. I was given a quick set of instructions, and soon found myself standing right where I had seen Mao all those years ago from a great distance. I was atop Tiananmen Gate, overlooking Tiananmen Square. The square had been transformed into a rippling sea of about a million people, with just as many red flags. There were thousands of marching soldiers, and military rolling stock of every description. The roar of the crowd was deafening.

Gathered here were dignitaries from all the socialist countries: Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, Kim Il-sung of North Korea, as well as representatives of the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. They mingled with the top leaders of China on the front porch of a pagoda-style, double-roofed hall, which itself was perched atop the high wall surrounding the Forbidden City.

Tiananmen Gate was and remains the emotional center of modern China. Here, in 1919, the Chinese Communist Party had its roots, followed by a bloody, miserable 30-year struggle to expel all foreign influences and exploitation.

Heavenly Peace Gate was also where Mao Zedong had stood on October 1, 1949, to declare the founding of the People's Republic. I had been at Harvard when I read his speech, my eyes overflowing with tears of joy. "Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation," he had said. "We have stood up."

And then, in the flesh, Mao arrived in a grayish blue Zhongshan suit. He stood at the rail, waving his hand in a calm and relaxed way to a sea of humanity stretching as far as the eye could see. Premier Zhou was there, as were Foreign Minister Marshal Chen Yi; Liu Shaoqi, Mao's heir apparent as head of state; Deng Xiaoping, general secretary of the Communist Party; and a number of other veterans of the early revolutionary battles, men who had risen into leadership roles.

These were the founding fathers of modern China. I would have been in awe except that I am not given to feeling awestruck in the presence of important people. Seeing the skull of Peking man would probably leave me speechless, but not a living human. Still, I was nervous. Time to go to work. Or, as Mao would say, time to serve the people.

My job, along with several colleagues, was to assist all these leaders in their conversations with English-speaking heads and delegates of other nations. I was to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, and at all costs prevent any misunderstandings or incidents. I was there to work, not gawk. I transformed myself into my usual talking foreign doll, standing at attention to the right of the Chinese officials, between them and their guest. This is a Chinese tradition. At a banquet, for example, the guest always sits on the right of the host.

And then there I was, the man on Mao's right. I was a little taller than Mao - who was himself both tall and bulky - and self-consciously bowed my head to appear less visible. I had no idea with whom he was speaking, and what was said was trivial, long forgotten now. But when I leaned toward the chairman's right ear and repeated the visiting dignitary's first phrase, Mao flinched and gave me a dark backward glance. "You're very loud!" he declared.

In my effort to be clear and distinct, I had turned up the volume on a voice I'd been told was quite loud to begin with. I gulped, then adjusted myself without further incident. Not then, or in the next dozen or so years that I frequently interpreted for him, did Mao acknowledge me as anything other than a talking machine. He was not cruel, but he was as oblivious to my presence as Zhou had been attentive.

"Serene" was the word many people used to describe Mao in person. He was a chain-smoker but not in a nervous way. He moved slowly, regally, and I noticed how our other leaders seemed to imitate him. His eyes, often half closed, made him seem mentally far away, at peace. His enormous forehead suggested intelligence, and his skin was, for a man nearing 70 years of age, very smooth, except for the famous mole to the left of his chin. He seemed, as one foreign writer would later observe, "molded of different stuff from those surrounding him, impervious to human passions."

That day's hosts and guests occasionally retreated to a lounge inside the pagoda, out of sight, to smoke, for something to drink, to sit and rest. I had a few moments here and there to steal glances at the spectacle to end all spectacles, the most magnificent parade imaginable. In between the river of shiny military machines and the crisp, high-stepping soldiers were elaborate performance troupes. Mountainous floats depicted heroic Chinese peasants gathering in a bumper wheat harvest, or heroic workers producing farm implements and industrial goods. The China that would be seen around the world that day was a powerful, prosperous country full of happy people who loved their leaders.

It was a splendid, magnificent display. Standing there with donkey dung under my fingernails and the dust of yellow earth in my nostrils, I was for the first time truly worried about China's future. Would we have to survive on cornbread and pickles forever? If I'd known the whole truth, I would have been horrified. The 1958 harvest had been overstated, and now the 1959 harvest was turning into a disaster. Hundreds of millions already didn't have enough to eat, and a long, cold winter lay ahead. It would be especially harsh in northern China, which is on the same latitude as the northern United States.

Malnutrition leading to edema was common in many areas, and deaths among the rural population increased. According to official statistics, the country's total population in 1960 dropped by 10 million over the previous year. That was the most disastrous result, the most serious lesson of the failed Great Leap Forward and people's commune movement.

Few people present, I least of all, knew of this looming catastrophe as we stood on a lovely fall day atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Still, watching that lavish display, I had the strongest urge to speak out about the discrepancy I knew from personal, recent experience.

Back in the office after the parade, I could contain myself no longer. I blurted out to several colleagues that I knew for a fact that on the commune where I worked farmers were spreading plain earth on the fields but reporting it as manure and other forms of fertilizer. "Those people are already hungry all the time," I said. "How are they going to increase production without fertilizer?"

My friends listened with polite expressions. I quickly recognized that I'd crossed a line. Soon afterward, I was called to account by the Party committee at the Ministry. I was informed that I needed to be "helped" to correct my right-deviationist thoughts.

I had to submit to a group-criticism meeting. In a hall at the Ministry, I stood before a crowd of my colleagues, who grilled me: Who was I to challenge the wisdom of the chairman and the Party? Did I think my judgment was greater than his? Wasn't I guilty of revisionist thinking? The struggle, or "helping," meeting was civilized compared with some I'd heard of, particularly the one I saw against the landlord when I was a student. My Party membership was not at issue. The criticisms were relatively mild, and the "helping" involved encouraging me to acknowledge my mistakes and promise to correct my wrong thinking.

I swallowed my pride and criticized myself, blaming my mistaken thoughts on my bourgeois background and my failure to diligently study Chairman Mao's writing. That was it. I was let off easy. Less lucky were tens of thousands of other dedicated cadres who also dared to speak their minds after being on the front lines of industrial and agricultural production. These "deviationists" were sacked and driven into exile. Meanwhile, the country went through three years of brutal deprivation that ultimately affected everyone. During the "three difficult years" between late 1959 and 1962, there were no fat people in China, not even in government.

In 1960, Xiangtong and I were finally able to move indoors, into an apartment house of one-room studios for Foreign Ministry cadres. We had no kitchen, but we did have our own Western-style toilet, the pinnacle of luxury. After living in the lean-to for three years, and after my commune experience, having a proper roof over our heads was a guilty pleasure.

At the office I was as busy as I had ever been. I was summoned almost daily by the premier to do interpretation work, and to accompany him on overseas visits. My relationship with Zhou Enlai, and my respect for him, deepened. I came to understand that when he corrected me it was not a threat to my career but a reflection of his concern that China - as represented by those of us who were on the international stage - must put its best face forward.

Once, while I was interpreting a discussion with a foreign leader that touched on Latin America, Zhou mentioned several countries whose names I stumbled over. He chastised me afterward, in the presence of some of my colleagues. "You are a Foreign Ministry official and you cannot pronounce the Latin American countries," he said. "You have to be able to recite all of them from memory." The premier then proceeded to rattle off every single Latin American nation, pronounced perfectly.

Now that I was firmly embedded in the Foreign Ministry and showing great promise, my bosses decided that it would be a good idea to raise the foreign doll's political consciousness. I was told that I should study Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. I was sent to a Party school for middle-ranking cadres. Officially, I was a low-ranking cadre, and it was an honour to be selected to study among those of higher rank.

Excerpted from THE MAN ON MAO'S RIGHT by Ji Chaozhu. Copyright © 2008 by Ji Chaozhu. Reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group.

 

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