Red Azalea

not bear to sit in the maddening house. She needed to work, to balance herself. She demanded to be with her people. But her mouth was shut by the Party’s central bureau. She was sent to Moscow under the guise of recuperation. She never liked Moscow. The cold froze her breath. She ordered Hollywood movies shipped to Moscow. She watched the movies until the last winter leaf fell on the ice. She sang her favorite old operas to get through the white nights. She never stopped petitioning. Year after year.

One day in the early 1960s she was allowed to go back to her motherland. But her husband refused to see her. He did not care how her nights went. He did not care whether she would go mad. He did not care. He told the Party that she was mad and he had nothing to do with a madwoman nor should any other members of the Party.

How did her nights go by? The Supervisor repeated the question with a voice of frightening sarcasm. The red spiders shrank in his eyes. It was like being buried, the Supervisor smiled, buried alive. But she did not accept what fate had brought her. She believed she was a heroine. She would crawl out of the grave with her bare bloody hands. Her one-time comrades had become her enemies. In fact, they had never liked her. They had never liked the actress from Shanghai. They could never trust that woman. She was too wild for them. She was never tame, never quiet; she bothered Mao after she had seduced him, they said. She had seduced China. The country was at war with her. She was attacked but she never surrendered. She did not know how. She refused to vanish. She was a reed shooting up under a heavy stone. She learned the art of war. She began her public speeches with the phrase “I am bringing you greetings from Chairman Mao.” She held the Little Red Book and shouted, “A long, long life to Chairman Mao! A long, long life to revolution!” She played it well. She was the greatest actress of her time.

The Supervisor lit another cigarette. His mind was far away. His hands were as cold as death. His voice swept through me and I was carried away. He continued: Time went by and an iron bar was shaped into a needle. It was hard for her to tell then whether she was a living human or the living dead, nor could she tell if she was a man or a woman. She just played the roles and changed colors like a chameleon. She was alive and dead. She had mansions all over the Middle Kingdom, but she was scared to sleep in one bed, in one place, for too long. Each night she lay on the bed and was chewed up by deep loneliness. She was drowning. The waiting maddened her. She sharpened her teeth and she was ready to kill. She could wait no longer. She was truly mad. The operas she sang sounded shrill. She cursed. She prayed. She laughed. She cried and she was transformed.

One morning Mao woke up and realized that his political bureau had become a capitalist’s headquarters. The dragon had become a bodiless creature. At an annual Party meeting his five-year great-leap plan received no support because his communes had starved thousands to death. His old cadres were going to throw him out. He was absolutely foundationless.

It was in this condition that he turned to her. When he had no one else to turn to. She said yes to him. She had her own plan. Both of them appeared on the Heavenly Peace Gate on a golden September day, in green army uniforms, inspecting millions of screaming Red Guards. It was here, at Tienanmen Square, that she felt her life come back to her. The old dragon was in madness. It was something she had been praying for. Mao was feverish once again, trying to make Communism a reality in China. Now the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution would reunite her with her past. She asked for his support. She created eight grotesque model operas. The operas of heroines. The operas of her deep emotions. She told him that they would secure his red kingdom. She made the population of billions watch the same operas for ten years. She made the children recite the lines and sing the arias. She allowed them to watch nothing but her operas. She tamed them, she had to, and they became her pets. Because she represented Mao. She was pleased to hear a popular slogan in Szechuan that said: Better to sing a model opera than to have a body full of bullet holes. A generation of youngsters attached themselves to her. She was almost voted in as the Chairman of the Communist Party of China. The masses, the millions of fans, worshiped her opera heroines. And her. She had become their religion. The masses started to say, Long live Comrade Jiang Ching! in their morning ceremony before working. She was the morning star hanging over the rim of the nation’s world.

Mao became ill. His shaking tongue almost fell out of his mouth. Comrade Jiang Ching was the Yellow River overflowing. She stopped at nothing, destroying whatever was in her way. Mao’s empire was shaking. It had become his party and her party. She rose above his men. When she disliked a man, he would be jailed and his family tortured. The old sun was setting helplessly. Mao appealed to the congress. He wailed, “Unite and do not split, be open and aboveboard, do not intrigue or conspire.” In his Forbidden Palace he gathered his men and issued an open telegram to the public. His appeal was desperate. Watch out, comrades, I am not in her eyes, stated Mao. Jiang Ching wants to be the Party Chairman. I am not in her eyes. She respects no one. She will stir everyone’s peace. After I die, she will cause the country trouble. She will. I am warning you, my beloved countrymen. I want you to know that she does not represent me. She does not.

For half a century Mao ruled her. But she was stubborn. She was foolish that way. But she was such a heroine. Although her loneliness was thicker than the cocoon of a silkworm, she had no intentions of giving up her ideal. She wanted to see it passed on, even if one day she would turn to ashes.

It must happen her way, for the people, the Supervisor said. Mao is over eighty-three. The mud is reaching his neck. His lower jaw hangs and his hands shake. We do not have any time. We must hurry. Comrade Jiang Ching is in a hurry. She must relieve the pain of her love for the people. We must lose no time. We must resurrect Red Azalea. You. The heroine. The fearless, the diabolical, the lustful, the obscene heroine. Red Azalea.

He drew away from my face with a nervous toss of his hair, then came again, darkly, near. The heat from his mouth touched my earlobe. As if in touch with a great power, his red-spider-like eyes glittered. Give yourself to the people, he whispered. Give yourself to Comrade Jiang Ching.

I never used to believe that the Supervisor lived only to worship Comrade Jiang Ching. Now I believed it. He was her spiritual lover. I believed his obsession with her, because she represented his female self. Because she allowed him to achieve his dream-to rule China’s psyche.

I saw no line between love and hate. That night there was no line between love and hate, between him and me.

The Supervisor had charged me with his lust the night before. I was like a bullet lying in the chamber of a gun. I still felt his warmth inside me. My ambition multiplied my strength. I looked at myself in the mirror in the makeup room under fluorescent lights. I saw Red Azalea. In her Red Army cap. Spicy eyes. Equipped. Perfectly in control. She carried Yan’s determination and the Supervisor’s spirit. I believed my makeup. I believed that I was who I was supposed to be. I was creating history.

I am Comrade Jiang Ching and the Supervisor’s physical substance. I display their thoughts. I am my ambition. There is an energy that comes from heaven and earth and unites in me.

Tomorrow the name Red Azalea will be in the mouth of every person.

I am the embodiment of Red Azalea. I am my role.

The crew had been waiting. I was in costume and makeup. The lights were on and the camera was in place. We had been waiting for our director, the Supervisor, to show up. But he did not. My makeup was put on and was taken off.

The crew kept waiting. The maple leaves were still, as if listening to the unusual quietness. The members of the crew grew suspicious. Gossip started. The lighting crew made excuses to take off before the appointed closing time. The makeup crew followed. Then other departments began to make excuses. People said they had waited long enough and their waiting should be respected. I sat by the camera, waiting. The cameraman had been napping since lunch. No one was in charge. The atmosphere was strange. The way people talked-heads glued together, as if biting each other’s ears.

The studio went silent. Then the streets. The city and then the country. A sign of danger emerged with the Supervisor’s absence. I tried not to feel the surroundings. I was an ant crawling on a heated wok. I tried not to notice that the explosion was near. I asked myself to remain in control.

Then the news of the century came. It was September 9, 1976. The reddest sun dropped from the sky of the Middle Kingdom. Mao passed away. Overnight the country became an ocean of white paper flowers. Mourners beat their heads against the door, on grocery-store counters and on walls. Devastating grief. The official funeral music was broadcast day and night. It made the air sag.

Like everyone else, I was given white paper flowers to wear. I wore them the way all the other women did, tied to my braids, on my blouse and shoelaces. We looked like moving cotton plants. The studio people gathered in the main meeting hall to moan. The sound of sobbing stretched like a hand-cranked gramophone at its spring’s end. I had no tears. I cupped my face with my hands to hide my face. Through the space between my fingers I saw Soviet