I am a Chinese tourist (and I love Mao)
SHAOSHAN, Hunan — To most outsiders, one contradiction in Chinese society stands high above the rest: The people’s adoration of Chairman Mao. Ask a Westerner about Mao Zedong and you’ll hear about more than 20 million dead and the dismal failure of the Great Leap Forward. You’ll hear about millions more dead and the draconian Big Brother policies of the Cultural Revolution. Ask a Chinese about Mao and you’ll hear about a great leader. You’ll hear about the founding father of modern China.
The official word around China is that Mao was 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong. We can — and should — quibble about that ratio. But, whatever the wrong portion is, the youth of China seem to know or care little about its details. And many who lived through the wrongs have somehow forgotten, been “re-educated” or just keep their thoughts to themselves. Sometimes you’ll hear indirect references — like my Chinese instructor lamenting the fact that the government forced her to stop studying English back in the 1960s — but never does anyone come right out and blame Mao. That would be blasphemous.
Mao has assumed a sainthood of sorts. To speak ill of him is unimaginable. It is sacrilege.
A trip to Shaoshan, Mao’s hometown in Hunan, has become a pilgrimage for many Chinese. In the 1960s such trips were “encouraged,” and the government had a paved road and railway line built to connect the small village with Changsha, Hunan’s capital. Now, folks flock to the site voluntarily. Got to pay your respects to the supremely beloved Chairman Mao.
I decided the best way to visit Shaoshan would be the way most Chinese visit Shaoshan (or any other tourist attraction, for that matter) … I joined a Chinese tour group.
Now, to me, tour is a four-letter word. I hate tour groups. I hate being told what to see and when to see it and how long I am allowed to stay there. I hate groupthink, group meals and group potty breaks. I hate megaphones, name tags and karaoke VCDs. I hate being trapped: in a tour bus, in a schedule, in a group of people where it’s almost a statistical certainty that at least one person will annoy the hell out of me. Tour groups just seem so claustrophobic.
But, as one of this site’s commenters once said, “When in China, do what the Chinese do.” While I generally think that is a dangerous motto to live by, I thought it was fitting for Shaoshan. China loves Mao. And China loves tour groups. There are reasons for this. Travel is still a relatively new concept in China, and there is safety in numbers. Tour groups can also be cost-effective (this one was) and an efficient use of time (as far as I could tell there wasn’t much in Shaoshan worth dedicating extra time to).
And anyway, my Hunan host Dana (Huang Hong) is a tour guide. This is the way it was meant to be.
The tour began early in the morning, as tours always do. As Dana and I expected, mine was the only non-Asian face in the bunch. Later, I learned that one girl in the group, a student visiting from Beijing, was Japanese. And an elderly Chinese man, originally from Guangzhou, was visiting from Toronto, where he has lived for the past 10 years. I asked him why it was important for him to come to Shaoshan. “Everyone knows Mao,” the man said. “Everywhere in the world, Mao is famous.”
The Japanese girl confided in me after our group lunch. “Really,” she whispered. “I’m just here to observe the other tourists.” I smiled, looked both ways, and whispered back, “Me too.”
To my long list of sounds I don’t want to hear at 8 a.m., I can now add a new one. It’s the tinny, karaoke microphone that seemingly comes standard with every bus in China. It’s all reverb and feedback, and makes anyone who speaks into it sound like Peter Frampton.
I always feel sorry for tour guides. They recite the same lines every day. They are constantly counting people. They are kindergarten teachers for grown-ups. Tours are the class trips. And the students never pay attention. For tour guides, life is all hellos and goodbyes — and in between, you talk to yourself through a shitty microphone.
For reasons of my own — I could understand about every 17th word — I zoned our tour guide out, too. That is, until she started singing. Yes, singing.
“Why is she singing?” I asked Dana.
“As a gift to us,” Dana replied with no hint of sarcasm.
Later, our guide led us through the Chinese version of “If You’re Happy And You Know It.” I am not making this up. Dana, like many others, clapped and stomped her feet. She was happy. And she knew it.
Dana is a sparkplug, a spitfire, a bundle of energy. If she grew up in America, she’d be a football cheerleader, the one that stands on top of the pyramid and gets tossed around a lot. She is tiny.
Dana is 26. She is a former “pop singer” — she used to perform at local clubs, and vows to “get back on stage again” — a part-time tour guide and a full-time tourist. She is trying to do more work as an individual tour guide — group guides get paid only RMB 50 ($6) a day — and has been working hard to fine-tune her English skills to attract foreign clients.
Dana lives with her retired parents in Changsha, a city of 5.5 million. Her 62-year-old father, Huang Guang Xing, used to work for a frozen foods company and now spends most of his time playing mahjong and tending to his garden just outside the family’s comfortable — and air-conditioned — five-room, first-floor apartment.
Mr. Huang was gracious, but all gestures and grunts with me. If we wanted me to sit, he’d grunt and point to a chair. If he wanted me to do a shot of yao jiu — lethal stuff — he’d grunt and put the glass in my face. At least he didn’t make me try the “snake wine.” (Dana told me later that what I took for grunts, may very well have been words from the Changsha dialect. I didn’t understand anything Dana’s parents said to me the entire trip.)
Dana’s mom, Feng Pei Lin, 53, was a worker in a flour factory. She too plays mahjong religiously, the game consumes most of her afternoons. Dana said her parents’ other primary couples activity is watching television. And yes, we watched TV during dinner, which we ate from atop the coffee table. The show that happened to be on during most of our meals featured two wily Chinese boys outsmarting the bumbling Japanese army.
In the 1960s, Dana’s mom, like many young Chinese girls, worked as a nurse for the Red Guard. Dana told me this during the bus ride to Shaoshan.
“What do most Chinese think about the Red Guard?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s a good thing,” Dana said. “People are proud of it.”
“Really?” I said, somewhat surprised. “Most Westerners view the Red Guard as a band of murderous thugs.”
“No,” Dana said. “I don’t think so.”
(Dana, a bit befuddled by my comment, later called her uncle and asked him about the Red Guard. “He said it had both good and bad parts,” she said. Case closed.)
Dana — who sneaked into the world just before China’s one-child rule went into effect — also has a 30-year-old sister, Huang Ping, who, Dana made sure to tell me, is somewhat of a local celebrity in Changsha. She had a popular children’s radio show for several years and is now a manager at the radio station.
Like Dana, Huang Ping has a bubbly and chatty personality. Unlike Dana, Huang Ping does not speak English. What I now know to be Huang Ping’s genuine friendliness, I originally mistook for flirtatiousness. One evening, I was working on Dana’s computer and Huang Ping came in and started chatting away, all smiles and charm. I had no idea what was going on. Later, Dana explained that something very good had happened to Huang Ping at work and she thought I — the new fixture in the home — brought her good luck. Dana said her sister wanted to give me a big hug. Another night, as I was preparing to go to sleep on my surprisingly comfy makeshift bed on the Huang’s living room floor, Huang Ping offered to spray the area with Calvin Klein cologne.
It took me a couple days to learn that Huang Ping is married, but spends the summers at her parents’ home because her mother-in-law’s place — where she and her husband usually stay — is too hot.
The family also has a dog. And they never plan to eat him. (Although they do eat dog. Dana: “Dog is good for our health. In winter, it keeps us warm.” Me: “How can dog keep you warmer than beef?” Dana: “Because of the way we prepare it. In a hot pot.” Me: “Can’t you just prepare another meat the same way?” Dana: “Yes. You are right.”)
Dana’s uncle, a retired farmer, lives with his second wife in a much simpler apartment a few doors down from the Huang’s. The aunt is a Christian … and wasted little time in letting that fact be known. She repeatedly told me that I needed let God into my life.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you need to believe in something,” she said.
I used to believe in something. I used to believe that leaving the Bible Belt for China would stop annoying encounters like these from occurring in my life. From now on, I believe in nothing.
Or maybe I’ll start to worship Mao. On our bus, the VCD player was blasting tunes that praised our dear leader. Dana translated one of them — “Beijing De Jin Shan Shang” — for me. Part of it went something like this: “There is a gold mountain in Beijing and Chairman Mao is the gold sun on that gold mountain.”
Some believe, in fact, that Mao, even in death, can control things like the sun. Our guide was telling stories of strange, supernatural occurrences that happened around the 10.1-meter Mao statue that was erected in Shaoshan in the late 1980s. Shortly thereafter, flowers started to bloom off-season … and the moon eclipsed the sun! Now, that can’t possibly be a coincidence.
Our first stop was Mao’s childhood home, a simple adobe brick peasant home, but as nice or nicer than the homes of many present day Chinese families — about a full century after Mao’s childhood here. A great leap … nowhere. (Despite the relative prosperity found in urban areas on China’s eastern coast, a rapidly growing urban-rural gap has left the vast majority of China’s population far behind in the country’s economic boom. The scale of this problem is being compared to the alarming disparity found in parts of Africa.)
Tourists, including me, lined up for the obligatory I-once-stood-in-front-of-this-famous place photo. Chinese often look so bored in these photos — standing expressionless, arms hanging straight at their sides — perhaps because they take so many of them. Not sure if it’s any worse than a forced smile, though. (Some tourists actually got creative with their poses.)
In Mao’s former bedroom, a sign told me that the budding Chairman “used to read by the light of an oil lamp, often late into the night.” In the “firewood house,” I learned that, “When young, Mao Zedong used to get firewood from mountains and put it here.” (Later, we went for a ride on a ski lift over those very mountains. That was after we walked through a park filled with stone monuments engraved with famous Mao quotations. As exciting as it sounds.)
Near the house, a sign comforted us with news that “favourable souvenirs” were on sale. And, wouldn’t you know, that’s where my tour group was herded off to next.
I must say that I was not blown away by the selection. Not much that I couldn’t find in Shanghai at a cheaper price. And not even one Mao shot glass! But still, anyone caught up in Mao mania could have filled a shopping cart quite easily. There were Mao stamps, Mao plaques, Mao stars, Mao posters, Mao statues, Mao hats, Mao bells, Mao paper weights, Mao keychains, Mao busts, Mao lighters (and Little Red Book lighters), Mao playing cards, Mao pins, Mao pictures, Mao buttons, Mao necklaces, Mao watches, Mao pens, Mao tie clips, Mao CDs, Mao clocks, Mao plates and Mao gold wallet cards.
Oddly, there was no Mao thong underwear, no Mao frisbees, no Mao lunch boxes, no Mao coffee mugs, no Mao boxer shorts, no Mao mouse pads. Thankfully, you can buy all of those products here.
No Mao swim trunks anywhere, I’m afraid. Although, Mao was an avid swimmer, according to Dana, an avid swimmer herself. Dana told me that Mao always dreamed of swimming in the Mississippi River.
“I suppose he never got to do that,” I said.
“Yes, that was his only regret,” Dana sighed.
“That was his only regret?”
“His only regret concerning swimming.”
I should say now that this tour wasn’t nearly as annoying as I thought it would be. Sure, we went to some places I wouldn’t have chosen on my own. But that was kind the whole point. And this group of Chinese tourists was a rather comatose lot. No one said or did much of anything. Imagine being able to say that about a group of American tourists. Impossible. There are few things more obnoxious than an American tourist.
You’ll always have the tour group clown, the guy in the Big Johnson t-shirt who regularly announces his unsolicited witticisms to the crowd. There’s the tour group know-it-all, the guy with the rock collection who always tries to one up the tour guide in terms of trivia. And then there’s the group crazy guy — he travels alone, only speaks to himself, wears a zip-up hooded sweatshirt (hood up), glasses with photochromic lenses and may or may not end up eating the person seated beside him.
(You notice I didn’t mention any females. Watch out for the ones in the track suits.)
After the gift shop, we went to a museum, which was actually a gift shop disguised as a museum. But I was most excited about our final stop in Shaoshan: that all-powerful statue. On this day the Mao-controlled sun made the temperatures reach 40 degrees Celsius (that’s more than 100, for you Americans out there).
But that didn’t stop two young women in black dresses from clasping their hands together and bowing to the big bronze Mao in prayer as if it was Buddha himself up there on that pedestal.
Actually, I didn’t see quite as much idol worship as I expected on this trip. Part of me expected Shaoshan to be like pre-war Iraq, the leader’s visage in view from every possible angle. Frankly, I think I’ve seen more Mao images in some people’s homes. But — it occurred to me on the bus ride away from Shaoshan — not at Dana’s.
“Do you have Mao anywhere in your home?” I asked Dana.
“No,” she said. And then, without missing a beat, she added, “We have him in our hearts.”
Click here for photos.
11 Comments
Dan, I’m a little confused by your statements that all of China loves Mao. I’m sorry, but that simply isn’t true. I spent my first year in China in Changsha, and I distinctly remember about half the people who ever bothered to mention Mao telling me they loved him and the other half telling me in no uncertain terms, out loud, in public, how much they hated him.
Having said that, it’s an interesting post and a good story. I’m looking forward to more from your trip.
Hello Dan,
I agree with chriswaugh_bj. There are a lot of Chinese people who don’t like Mao at all, specially for those who have experienced the Culture Revolution.
Most Chinese people nowdays just don’t care about Mao or politics in general. They warship their new God: Money.
Keep up the good writing! if you ever get these stories published, I will run to the nearest bookstore and buy it. :-)
“I used to believe in something. I used to believe that leaving the Bible Belt for China would stop annoying encounters like these from occurring in my life. From now on, I believe in nothing.” —— Hilarious!
I have been in the Bible Belt for a year, they finally got me. Well, they got my girl friend first, and now I have to go to bible study with her. Well, I have to say I do like the brownie usually served before the study.
Oh, I’m sorry guys. I meant to say all Chinese people love maozi, not Mao Zedong. All Chinese people love hats.
Seriously though, that’s refreshing to hear chriswaugh_bj. I guess I just don’t talk to the right people in Shanghai.
But I can say that during my recent swing through the south, Mao’s presence was palpable. Maybe he is not always loved. But he is most definitely looked at.
Dan
As someone who also left the bible belt to come to china and get away from all that, now i have to be worried about seeing it here too…
I did laugh out loud at that part though…hilarious…
Hi Dan,
Fantastic stories, I really enjoy reading your fristhand experience with the zhongguo ren, as I affectionately refer to them.
But about Mao, I found my time spent in Shanghai to be similar to yours, in that people were generally afraid to speak about him in ways anything less than reverent, whether they believed it internally or not.
In fact, one of my vivid memories was in a roundtable discussion with local Chinese students organized by a local teacher. We were supposed to be discussing mild cultural and political topics, but the whole thing quickly spiraled in a patriotic self-validation fest. One of the main points I remember being brought across by Chinese students then was how crazy it was that Americans did not pay their leaders proper respect - many expressed disbelief that Americans could and would publicly humiliate their President over a sex scandal.
Perhaps it’s a combination of some level of historical respect for Mao (i.e. it’s difficult for many Americans to disrespect JFK, irrespective of any of his policies, and he’s a speck in shaping the relative history of the US when compared to Mao and the history of China), but also partly a reluctance to openly question leadership that is always supposedly working for “the good of everyone else”, as I often heard it explained to me.
After people knew the real history, he would be respected like that any more, actually many Chinese people have blamed him as a devil.
Dan,
I just finished reading your story on Shaoshan! Hilarious! Keep up the good writing!
I too agree that the “few” people you talked to on your tour gave you a false impression of how we CHinese nowadays think of Mao. As a college student, I personally consider him as a big dictator and those red guards as “a band of murderous thugs”! So far as I have observed, the youngsters in China today prefer Deng Xiaoping, and they hold most of our premiers ( Zhu, Zhou, Wen) in respect.
“Although they do eat dog. Dana: “Dog is good for our health. In winter, it keeps us warm.” Me: “How can dog keep you warmer than beef?” Dana: “Because of the way we prepare it. In a hot pot.” Me: “Can’t you just prepare another meat the same way?” Dana: “Yes. You are right.””
Haha, brilliant! This is one of the best examples I have read of that day-to-day misunderstandings that we get here. Good luck Dan (from Nick, ex-Shanghai Uni Teacher)
Hi dear friends!
I am so happy to read Dan’s story in my vocation.
more interestings I know from your visiting.But only one thing I think it’s so funny that you meet trouble about Dog’s hotpot in China. You konw there is a famous dishs in Guizhou that is BaoYe people’s dog hotpot:)/:)/:).I am sure you are scared to get more views about eating Dog’s hotpot in here.more shops can sale Dog meat.
ha ha ha…..This is local culture about minority.
Best wishs to you.I am waiting for you Dan ,come into Guizhou soon.
Henry He
hahha, I love the part where you said He would grunt and point to the chair… :)
About Mao, I personally think 70:30 ratio is about right, if the 30 part is not too high. When people gets old, they do stupid things. Anyway, he is a brilliant war stratigist. He single handedly brought up the People’s Army. If you leave aside the ideology that Communist are nothing but negative, he is brilliant. Without him, there would have not been a China we see today, despite whether it’s good or bad.
Treating him as a God-like figure? Nahh..that’s a little too much. I don’t think there are still many people think that way today.
I definately see a lot of culture shock in this writing and mixed with a lot of mis-translation/interpretation. There is no way you can understand the Chinese culture using Western beliefs and views. Just like when I first came to the U.S. from China, many things people do, I thought, were laughable…
…but I am aboslutely enriched and thrilled by being in both cultures half of my life each. I am going to revisit China, hopfully soon. I am sure I will experience somewhat culture shocks too, just because I have been in the States for so long. But I recognize that I was a part of it, and am still is. :)
In the end, let me tell you, we are all people, everything is reasonable, anything can happen there can happen here, or anywhere for that matter. Even though we have so much differences in the culture, but there are minute similarities links us together as humans :)