`BEWARE THE TEENAGE GIRL'
Bay Area writer Vanessa Hua delves into Chinese history through the eyes of Mao's mistress
In 2007, journalist Vanessa Hua saw a documentary about China that included images of former leader Chairman Mao Zedong surrounded by adoring teenage girls. There was little in the historical record about these girls, who had been plucked from rural villages to entertain and work for Mao and his top officials, and that historical gap piqued Hua's curiosity.
“I couldn't get that idea out of my head, so I wrote a short story set at one of their dance parties,” she says, adding that Mao had been taught ballroom dancing years earlier by an American journalist. When even that didn't satisfy Hua, the Stanford graduate entered UC Riverside's master of fine arts program that fall and began expanding it into a book.
In “Forbidden City” (Ballantine, $28) we meet Mei; she's living in San Francisco and looking back at a crucial moment, both in her life and in China's history, between Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward and his destructive Cultural Revolution. She recounts her story as an intelligent but naive 15-year-old peasant girl who yearns for the opportunity to live a fulfilling life and to become a part of China's ongoing revolution.
She gets all that — and much more than she bargained for — when she's selected first to be part of a dance troupe of girls who are trotted out to please senior officials, and then when she's selected by Mao to be his next mistress. Mei manages to ensconce herself in Mao's life, gaining small measures of power but also the enmity of scheming rivals.
“Forbidden City” took 14 years to complete, during which Hua gave birth to two sons, lost her father and wrote two other books.
“There was also the rise of #MeToo, seeing what happens when demagoguery stirs up hate, and the debilitating effects of loneliness from the pandemic,” she says, all of which shaped her thinking about the story.
Hua, an East Bay resident, spoke by video recently about the history and why it still resonates today. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Q
As a journalist, you're telling stories that you can research and corroborate. How different was this for you? A History tends to be the account of powerful men. It's less often about a young woman like Mei, who is emblematic of so many women who throughout time have shaped history without even meriting a footnote. This is a way of hopefully shining a light on this untold story.
I was interested in everything that happened behind closed doors that wasn't documented. My imagination could fill in what went beyond the facts. I approached the character through the visceral, through the body. When I was in college at Stanford, social dancing was the most popular class, so I understood what it was like for Mei and the chairman to be a body in motion. I also loved swimming and picked it up more seriously in my 20s, so I knew what peace it offered me and what it might have offered the chairman, who, in historical fact, spent many hours of the day in the water.
Q
Was Mei's fate predetermined by history? Did you struggle with how much she would suffer after you had fleshed her out and she started to feel real?
A
I've read accounts from that era — there's a whole genre known as scar literature about just how painful it was in terms of the violence and the social breakdown during the Cultural Revolution, where there was no one you could trust. I love her: She's resourceful, quick-witted, a striver and a fighter. But I'm sorry, I can't cut her a break; this is the journey she is undertaking.
Q
I think Americans know less about the horrors Mao inflicted than we do about Hitler or Stalin, but he was responsible for more deaths than either man. Estimates range from 40 million to 80 million on his watch, especially during his Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, which also created huge divisions within their society.
A
There are those out there who would still valorize him. He is captivating, a poet-emperor-rebel leader, but the tragedies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are not fully understood in this country.
I've had readings and radio show call-ins where non-Chinese people say, “Didn't the ends justify the means? Wasn't there higher literacy and a better life after Mao?” There are a lot of phrases attributed to Mao that look good on a T-shirt: “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” “Revolution is not a dinner party.” So that gets repeated but it minimizes the full story and tragedy.
I've heard people say, “I was Googling the whole time I was reading,” and I love that — that's the power of fiction. It can be an entryway into history.
But while there are many horrific examples in the historical account, my interest was in Mei's journey — what it's like to grow up believing someone to be a god and then being in his inner circle and learning the truth. I wanted to convey what it was like back then but also the cost of survival. I wanted to show her youthful idealism and her journey to disillusionment and her reckoning of the soul.
Q
Despite their unique circumstances, Mei and the other girls in the dance troupe remain typical teenage girls — there's compassion and alliances, bitterness and rivalries and plenty of impetuous behavior.
A
I spent time as a reporter in China and interviewed factory girls, who traveled thousands of miles because they wanted a different life than what would have been handed down to them. Life was hard — they worked long hours six days a week — but they still went to a bar and played this dice game (I never actually figured out the rules), so as difficult as life was, and I'm not romanticizing it, they still had a measure of freedom. That inspired my writing, this idea of: What are the external or internal factors that drive someone to leave home?
So often, young women's concerns are dismissed as silly or inconsequential, but you see how the rivalries within the dance troupe play out in the Cultural Revolution. It is life or death, and things done during the Cultural Revolution were done to settle scores — neighbors turning on each other, children turning on their parents, students on their teachers. Beware the teenage girl.
Q
How did #MeToo shape your story and how much was embedded in there naturally? Because these issues are nothing new.
A
I didn't approach it thinking I wanted to get this concept into the book. It was all based on character and circumstance. But the last few years have caused writers and readers alike to take a step back and consider the systems of power and oppression that we are embedded in. It's not something Mei is going to expound upon, but it was a point of view that emerged for me as a writer.
People keep talking about the resonance today with the issues of bodily autonomy and reproductive access that are reminiscent of the discussions playing out in headlines today.
Q
Speaking of which, Mao is an older man with an eye for younger women; he thrives on creating chaos among his advisers; he is willing to do tremendous damage to his country to maintain power; and he believes his own lies, as do his rabidly loyal followers. Were you thinking of modern parallels?
A
It was not intended as an allegory but it's interesting how many readers have said the book feels timely in that way. The issue is longrunning and intractable. That's one of the pleasures of historical fiction — it's a way of learning about a different time period but also of reconsidering our own present.