Review | Novel gives voice to the girls Mao Zedong had sex with, in the powerful form of a confessional
- Vanessa Hua’s Forbidden City tells its story in the form of a confessional by the fictional Mei Xiang, pulled at 15 from a dance at China’s Zhonghanhai compound
- ‘Fiction flourishes where the official record ends,’ Hua writes, and, with sections that convey a powerful verisimilitude, her book mostly bears this out
Forbidden City by Vanessa Hua, Ballantine Books
“Like boxes within boxes, and puzzles within puzzles”: this is how one American writer described the layout of old Beijing. At the heart of the city’s nested squares sat the Forbidden City, where the emperor ruled and resided, his ceremonial halls set along the “dragon’s vein” that runs north to south through the centre of the city.
In 1949, the new leader, Mao Zedong, took up residence at Zhongnanhai. He had been sceptical of establishing himself and his government in the heart of imperial Beijing, but after a short stay in the Western Hills he was persuaded to move into a courtyard compound there. In 1966, he relocated to lodgings attached to the compound’s indoor swimming pool.
Zhongnanhai became the black box of Chinese politics; behind its high vermilion walls, the highest echelons of the party lived and worked beyond the sight and scrutiny of the people.
Accounts of life in Zhongnanhai are few. In 1994, the memoirs of Mao’s personal physician, Li Zhisui, were published, offering a detailed – though not uncontested – account of the politics and personalities at the top of the party. The book’s most lurid sections include descriptions of Mao’s sexual proclivities: in particular, his predilection for selecting young women at leadership dances in the compound, and leading them away to a specially prepared room containing a double bed.
