MAO - A Biography [antikvár]

Prologue Mid-parted black hair over a calm face, delicate hands, a gaze that bored into its target. Curiously flat-topped ears which gave stability to the head. Mole on the chin which was almost a relief from the broad pale face with no wrinkles. "A typical big Chinese," one Burmese who knew him and other Chinese leaders summed up. "Not handsome, like Zhou Enlai, but benign." Over 82 years Mao Zedong's appearance changed a bit but not much. The youth looked slightly anxious. The leader in office seemed pretty well satisfied with himself. He grew fat and lost the air of an earnest intellectual. The hands found it easier to know what to do with themselves. "He looked like a sea elephant," said a Thai leader who saw him in the last years, "all very broad and splendid." Always the same was the sense of a man in focus. Self-contained. Giving the impression of thinking of six things at once. Mao never lost the duality of being a taut wire of pure mind, yet also sensual as a cat. Dry enough to bamboozle a visitor with a classical quotation or fry him in the heavy oil of silence. Earthy enough to startle another visitor by reaching into his baggy trousers to deal with lice. Top half of the face suggested an intellectual: immense forehead, questing eyes, longlsh hair. Bottom half was that of a sensualist: plump lips, chubby nose, round and childlike chin. Mao did not move with grace; he was a lumbering type of man. Agnes Smedley, an American feminist whose passions were both political and personal, tried to get Mao to sing and dance in the 1930s—as she readily got other Communist leaders to—but gave up in disgust. "Pride prevented him from trying to dance." Sanzo Nosaka, a Japanese Communist-in-exile who knew Mao in the same period, said his dancing looked like someone doing exercises. The rhythm in Mao was not physical. Mao's outward jerkiness was not misleading. The balance in his being, if it existed, came from a clash of opposites. He was part tiger, he said of him- 1