Book of the Month: Mao: the Unknown Story (Jung Chang & Jon Halliday)

“Mao Tse-tung [sometimes called Mao Zedong in the West], who for decades, held absolute power over the lives of one quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth century leader.”

Thus begins Mao: The Unknown Story, the biography of Mao, written by Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, and her historian husband, Jon Halliday. The opening also leaves little doubt in readers’ minds what is going to follow. Hitler and Stalin, the two dictators of the twentieth century, have long since fallen from grace, both within their countries as well as outside. It was only a matter of time before someone did a hatchet job on the reputation of the founder of the People’s Republic of China. Almost thirty years after his death, Chang and Halliday have done just that. And it is not a Cook’s Tour of the life of one of the extraordinary men of the twentieth century: it is a liberally referenced and painstakingly assembled eight hundred pages behemoth.

In seventy seven chapters this biography, which the Communist Party of China dare not allow to be published in that country, traces Mao’s life from his birth to his death, and, in the process, attempts to shatter every legend and myth associated with his life.

Born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, in the Shaoshan valley in Hunan, Mao was the eldest of three children. He apparently had a close and intense relationship with his mother—probably the only person whom he genuinely loved in his life—and a very uneasy relationship with his father. The father and son hated each other and frequently clashed. Many years later, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, Mao remarked, “My father was a bad man. If he were alive today he should be ‘jet-planed’ (an agonising position in which the subject’s arms were wrenched behind his back and head pushed downwards)”. Mao was a rebellious student and was expelled from a few schools for being headstrong and disobedient. At the age of fourteen he was married to a woman—this was an arranged marriage—four years older than him. This was the first of his four marriages, and his wife, who had no name—she was called ‘woman Luo’, Luo being her family name—died within a year. This early marriage turned Mao into a fierce opponent of arranged marriages. Mao mentioned his first wife only once, at least in official interviews, in his life.

After the death of his wife Mao left the valley and arrived in Changsha, in 1911, on the eve of the Republican Revolution that was to bring an end to the rule of the Manchu dynasty, also ending, in the process, two thousand years of Imperial rule in China. Mao’s early writings, quoted in the biography, during this period, give an inkling of the course he was to follow. “The nature of the people of this country is inertia,” he wrote. “They worship hypocrisy, are content with being slaves, and are narrow minded.” He then went on to propose that all the collection of prose and poetry in China after the Tang and Sung dynasty should be burned in one go. Uttermost proclamations of a hotheaded youngster? Chang and Halliday try to show that these remarks of Mao, made when he was barely twenty, harbingered the theme that epitomised his rule that lasted for more than quarter of a century: complete destruction of the Chinese culture.

These early speeches and writings also throw into sharp relief Mao’s views on morality. “I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be benefiting others,” he wrote. “Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others. . . People like me want to. . . satisfy our hearts to the full. . . Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me. People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we do not have duty to other people. I am responsible only for the reality that I know, and absolutely not responsible for anything else. I do not know about the past, I do not know about the future. They have nothing to do with the reality of my own self.”

As regards history, this is what Mao had to say: “Some say one has a responsibility for history. I don’t believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself. . . I have my own desire and act on it. I am responsible for no one.”

Throughout his long life Mao saw no reason to deviate from the position he had explicated in his younger years.

Mao also revealed his fascination in upheaval and destruction early on. Upheavals and destruction, for him, were desiderata of the world. “Giant wars”, he believed, “will. . never become extinct.” He firmly believed that enduring peace was “unendurable to human beings.” “Tidal waves of destruction will have to be created”, he warned, “to end this state of peace.” He readily admitted that when he read history, he “adored the times of war”, and when he got to the periods of peace and prosperity, he was bored. Like Hitler, Mao did not do anything, when he finally wrested control of China from Chiang-Kai-Shek, that he said he would not do.

Chang and Halliday try to lay to rest other myths associated with Mao. Contrary to the official version of the Chinese government, Mao was not a founding member of the Communist Party of China (CPP). The formation of CPP, Chang and Halliday claim, was engineered by one Gregory Voltinsky, a representative the Comintern sent after the Bolsheviks took Central Siberia, in cahoots with some Chinese Marxists, most notable amongst them Chen Tu-hsiu, the undisputed leader of the Chinese communists. Mao, at this time, had become close to the charismatic Tu-hsiu, and was himself known as a radical. He opened a bookshop which had the following declaration which he had penned himself: “There is no new culture in the entire world. Only a little flower of new culture has been discovered in Russia on the shores of Arctic ocean.” It was around this time that Mao formally expressed his communist beliefs. In a letter written to a friend he declared that he “deeply agreed” with the idea of using the “Russian model to reform China and the world.”

The Communist Partyof China (CPP) was formed by Moscow as a Trojan horse to manipulate the much bigger Nationalist party (founded in 1912 by the merger of a number of Republican groups). Stalin ordered the local communists to join the Nationalist party, but all the senior leader refused, having very little regard for Sun Yat-Sen, the leader of the Nationalist party. It was at this stage that Mao, who until then had found it impossible to reach the higher echelons in the CPP, mostly, the authors say, because of his ineffectiveness at organising labour and recruiting, was brought by the Russians to the party HQ. Mao, who at that stage, did not believe in the prospects of the CPP, promptly joined the Nationalist party. The outward enthusiasm shown by the pragmatic Mao for the Moscow line of cooperating with the Nationalists shot him into the core of the party. Mao became very active in the Nationalist party which drew fire from the ideological purists in the CPP. He was criticised as ‘opportunistic’ and ‘right wing’ and kicked out of the CPP. He returned to his home village of Shaoshan equipped with over 50 kg of books, claiming he was ‘convalescing’. He became more active in the Nationalist party after his friend Wang Ching-wei became the leader of the Nationalist party following the death of Sun Yat-sen, although he (Mao) still remained essentially a member of the CPP. At the top of the Nationalists’ agenda was anti-imperialism, so this became the theme of Mao’s activity. At this time Mao showed, for the first time, an interest in the question of Chinese peasantry, which, Chang and Halliday claim, came on the heels of an urgent order from Moscow and not out of any personal conviction or inclination. His position in respect of the peasants, when the Russians had first ordered the CPP a few years earlier to pay attention to this question was: “On the peasant question, the class line must not be abandoned, there is nothing to be done among the poor peasants and it is necessary to establish ties with landowners and ‘shenshih’ [gentry]. . .”  Mao was appointed by the Nationalists as a founding member of the Nationalists’ Peasant Movement Committee. When, two years later, the Nationalists tried to bring about a Russian style revolution in the Hunan region, violence and total mayhem erupted. Mao was invited by the Nationalists to his home province to give guidance. It was during his stay in Hunan that Mao discovered in himself a love for violence and bloodthirsty thuggery. He said, later, “Not until I stayed in Hunan for over thirty days till I completely changed my attitude.” This enjoyment which bordered on sadism preceded his affinity for Leninist violence and sprang from his character. He mentioned in his reports to the Nationalists at the time that he experienced “a kind of ecstasy never experienced before. . . it is wonderful!” Mao, in later years, went out of his way to cover the fact that in the initial years of the CPP he was extremely keen on the Nationalist party (albeit at the behest of his Russian masters) which became the chief enemy of the CPP.

Many in the Nationalist party were unhappy at their leaders’ decision to become bedfellows with the communists. In 1927 the Peking government raided Russian premises and seized a large cache of documents which showed the close links between the CPP and the Soviets. It was at this stage Chiang Kai-shek, the commander of the Nationalist army broke links with the communists: he began ‘cleansing’ the Nationalist party of communist links, and issued a ‘Wanted’ list of 197 communists in which Mao’s name was second. The chief of the Nationalist party, Wang Ching-wei, Mao’s mentor in the Nationalist party, decided to sever ties with the Communists. Mao was faced with a choice; and he decided to stay with the Communists. This was his political coming of age.

When Chiang Kai-shek broke with the Communists, Stalin decided to pull out all the ‘Communist units’ out of the Nationalist army which were to move to the South coast of China to collect arms shipped in from Russia and set up a base. He also ‘ordered’ peasant uprising in Hunan and adjacent provinces with the goal of taking power in these regions. Mao wholeheartedly agreed with the Russian scheme, and, in the emergency party meeting, made a statement, which was to acquire international fame: “power comes out of the barrel of the gun.” The ‘Autumn Harvest Uprising’ in Hunan, which, according to the official Communist party version, was a peasant uprising led by Chairman Mao, was thus not an authentic peasant uprising, orchestrated as it was by the Russians. Over the next several months Mao manoeuvred to take control of the ‘Red Army’ and set his base in the outlaw ‘Bandit’ country, in the Jinggang Mountain range, so called because it was out of reach of the authorities because of difficult terrain and was mostly controlled by outlaws. From here Mao organized looting sorties into neighbouring counties, grandly called ‘du tu-hao’, literally ‘smash landed tyrants’. The term ‘rich’ was very relative and ‘smash’ covered a range of activities from robbery to ransom to killings. At this stage Mao requested the CPP mandate as the supreme of the Red Army. The request reached Stalin in the middle of CPP’s sixth Congress, which, in keeping with the Communist obsession with secrecy, was taking place in secret just outside Moscow. Mao fitted Stalin’s bill: he had a base and an army at his disposal. Stalin, the old bank robber, probably saw his younger self in Mao: he (Mao), according to Stalin, was “insubordinate but a winner”. All of Mao’s demands were met. When fifteen months later Mao left the ‘Outlaw’ land—Chiang Kai-shek, having brought most of China under his control, setting his capital in Nanjing, had turned his attention to the Communists and was preparing to attack Mao’s base—he left behind a trail of destruction. A party inspector wrote to Shanghai: “Before the Red Army came. . . there was quite an atmosphere of peaceful and happy existence. . . since the Red army came, things were totally changed.  . . because after great destruction no attention was paid to construction the countryside is totally bankrupt and collapsing by the day.”

Mao then set his base in the province of Jiangxi, near Hunan. The local Reds revolted and, not for the first time, Mao resorted to terror, ordering public executions, to achieve his ends. Around this time Stalin gave him the ultimate promotion and declared him the head of the future state. Mao then embarked upon large scale purge, the first of the many he carried out in his bloody reign, getting rid of all those who opposed him, labelling them ‘Anti-Bolshevik’. A circular sent by the local Reds to Shanghai, the headquarters of the CPP, describes Mao’s style of functioning that changed not a jot over the next few decades: “He is extremely devious, and sly, selfish, and full of megalomania. To his comrades, he orders them around, frightens them with charges of crimes, and victimises them. He rarely holds discussions on party matters. . . Whenever he expresses a view everyone must agree, otherwise he uses the party organization to clamp down on you, or invents some trumped-up theories to make life absolutely dreadful for you. . . . Mao always uses political accusations to strike at his comrades. To sum up. . . not only he is not a revolutionary leader, he is not a. . . Bolshevik.”

Chiang Kai-shek, in the meanwhile, was slowly strangulating Mao’s new base, and was preparing to attack Jiangxi when a stroke of luck, yet again, saved Mao: Japan invaded Manchuria and occupied its many cities, including the capital Shenyang. Chiang suspended his plan of ‘annihilating the Communists’ and appealed for a United Front against a common enemy, an offer Mao wasted no time in rejecting—for him the Nationalists and not the Japanese were the real enemies. When Chaing pulled out his troops to fight the Japanese, the Reds, like vultures, attacked and recovered the lost territory.

The most startling part of Chang and Halliday’s discovery, made possible no doubt after the secret Soviet archives and files were made available to public after 1994, is the sustained role Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin to be more precise, played in fomenting Communism in China. Communist Party of China and its leadership were, for decades, parasites of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Without the generous help of the Soviets—involving astronomical sums of money and weapons— which continued well into the first decade of Mao’s rule, Chang and Halliday would have us believe, CPP would not have been able to survive. For years, the CPP and Mao did the bidding of the Russians who bank-rolled the Red army. Indeed, it was Stalin himself who singled out Mao as the leader of the Chinese communists. It is probable that the ‘Red Tsar’ saw in Mao’s drive, ruthlessness, and lust for power glimpses of himself, but there were other pressing reasons, which had to do with Stalin’s vision of expanding the Soviet empire into China—he had decided to invade Manchuria and wanted the CPP to create diversionary military pressure on the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek— as well as his desire to have a leader in China who had no connection with his bete noire, Trotsky, whom he had just exiled, behind Stalin’s decision. Mao, of course, was aware of his (and CPP’s) utility and milked the Russians relentlessly, promoting, on the sly, at the same time his agenda of personal aggrandizement. And he was prepared to sacrifice the sovereignty of China in order to achieve his goals. In 1937 Japan, whom Stalin had publicly identified as the principle menace, attacked and occupied Northern China. This posed a very real threat to Russia as Tokiyo’s huge armies were now in a position to turn North and attack Russia anywhere along a border thousands of kilometre long. With newly available evidence Chang and Halliday show that Stalin activated a ‘sleeper’ in Chiang’s army and triggered an all out war between China and Japan, which the Japanese, apparently, were not aiming for at this stage, and which Chiang wanted to avoid as he wanted to concentrate his forces on wiping out Communists. Stalin’s aim was primarily to get Japan entrenched in a war involving large parts of China. When an all out war broke out, Stalin moved with alacrity, signed a non-aggression pact with Chiang and supplied him with money and weapons, the aim of which was to sustain the war and delay, if not completely neutralize, the threat Japan posed for Russia. Mao reaped immediate benefits when all out war broke out between China and Japan: Chiang was forced to accede to the Communists’ principle demand—that the Red army could keep its autonomy. The CPP were allowed to open offices in key cities and publish its own papers. This was the beginning of the end of Chiang’s grip over China. Mao treated the war not as a conflict in which all Chinese fought together, irrespective of their political and ideological differences against an external aggressor, but as an opportunity to drive further his own agenda. And he was prepared to be belligerent and deviate from the command of his Soviet masters. Stalin wanted a united China to fight against the Japanese and bog them down. Mao repeatedly found ways to sabotage Stalin’s command that the CPP should join hands with Chiang. His ploy was to use the war as an opportunity to expand his own base while Chiang, with the help of the Russians, fought the Japanese and got weakened in the process. The war, for Mao, was an opportunity to destroy Chaing, which he was incapable of doing himself. At the same time he knew very well that he had no capacity (or strategy, even) to drive the Japanese out of China. For this he depended on the Russians, as he knew that Stalin would never allow the Japanese conquer China, as the Japanese would pose, with the whole of China under their control, even greater threat to the Russians. This is exactly what happened. The Sino-Japanese war lasted eight years, cost 20 millions Chinese lives and weakened Chiang enormously, both politically and militarily. Within five years of the war ending Communists drove Chiang out and Mao had achieved his ambition. Years later he remarked to his inner circle that he had always regarded the war as a three-way affair: “Chiang, Japan and us.”

The picture of Mao that emerges is, to say the least, not endearing. Devoid of emotions such as empathy and affection he treated those near him, including his wives children and brothers appallingly. Yang Kai-hui, the daughter of Mao’s erstwhile teacher, became his second wife. The two married in 1920, and within months Mao was having an affair with her cousin. Kai-hui, a remarkable woman (judging from the diaries she left behind), a feminist who wrote an essay on women’s right, nevertheless remained faithful to Mao. She wrote: “Anyone who has no physical handicap must have two attributes. One is the sex drive, and the other is the emotional need for love. My attitude was to let him [Mao] be, and let it be.” Incredible as it may seem she must have been madly in love with him. Mao had three sons from his second marriage. Beyond giving his first son a grandiose name, An-ying, meaning ‘an outstanding person’, Mao did not involve himself in any way, as, indeed, he did not in respect of any of his other children from future wives, in their upbringing. Seven years later he left Yang Kai-hui for Gui-yuan, who became his wife number three. Three years after the abandonment, Mao’s political machinations brought tragedy to Kai-hui. By this time Chiang Kai-shek had formed the Nationalistic government, based in Nanjing, with a nominal authority over China. Mao, who had formed a rag-tag Red Army, all of whose ammunition came from Stalin, led siege to Changsha, where Kai-hui was still living with their three children. The siege was unsuccessful; the fiercely anti-Communist governor of Changsha arrested Kai-hui and offered her a deal: her freedom if she made a public announcement divorcing and denouncing Mao. Kai-hui, whom Mao, in the previous three years since leaving her and their three young children, had not written so much as a letter, refused, and was executed by a firing squad. Mao could easily have saved her during his assault on and retreat from Changsha, as her house was on his route to the city where he stayed for three weeks. He did nothing to extricate her and their children. Tse-min, Mao’s younger brother, arranged for the three children to travel to Shanghai where they entered a secret CPP kindergarten. Mao took no interest in what happened to them. Gui-yuan, Mao’s third wife, fared no better. She worked for Mao as his interpreter after he decided to make the ‘bandit country’, south of Jinggang Mountain range on which Chiang Kai-shek had no control, as his base. Mao did not know, and never bothered to learn, the local dialect. The beautiful Gui-yuan, with ‘large eyes, high cheekbones, and an almond-shaped face’ fancied Tse-tan, Mao’s ‘handsome and lively’ youngest brother, but married Mao for ‘political protection’. As events in subsequent years showed, she was mistaken in this belief. Gui-yuan had several pregnancies during the ten years she and Mao were together. She had to leave most of her children behind as Mao fled from Chiang’s army. The second of these was a boy named Little Mao whom she entrusted to the care of her sister who was married to Mao’s brother, Tse-tan, whom Mao had ordered to stay behind and defend the Red territory, which, as he himself knew  to be a hopeless task (that’s why he fled). Mao had essentially condemned his own brother and son to a certain death. Soon Nationalists took the Red territory, and Tse-tan moved Little Mao secretly. However Tse-tan was killed in the battle in 1935 before he could tell his wife where he had moved Little Mao. For years, long after she had ceased to be his wife, Gui-Yuan searched for Little Mao. In the 1950s a young man was found who Gui-yuan was convinced was Little Mao. However another Red Army widow identified him as her missing son. Mao, who had complete control of China, having driven out Chiang Kai-shake in 1949 and declaring China a Communist state, refused to intervene; indeed he never showed any interest in what might have happened to his own flesh and blood. Gui-yuan was Mao’s companion, albeit a reluctant one—she had become disillusioned within a year of their marriage, and had tried various ways to separate, all of which were thwarted by Mao—during the Long March. During the Long March Gui-yuan gave birth to their fourth child, a daughter, whom, like her other children, she was forced to leave behind with a family as Mao fled southwards. Mao’s response, when Gui-yuan informed him of what she had had to do was: “You were right, we had to do this.” Not only did he show indifference to Gui-Yuan’s plight, Mao also cracked jokes about her painful pregnancies with other women, saying giving birth for her [Gui-yuan] was as easy as dropping an egg. Gui-yuan was to have two more children with Mao. By this time the marriage, for all practical purposes, was over, and Mao was openly sleeping with other women. This, however, did not stop him from repeatedly impregnating Gui-yuan. Their fifth child was a girl, Chiao-Chiao, the only one to survive to adulthood. When, a year later, she fell pregnant for the sixth time, Gui-yuan plunged into depression. Mao arranged for her to go to Russia, in 1937, in the middle of Stalin’s purge, ostensibly to get rid of painful shrapnel lodged in her body from the time of the Long March. In Moscow, in the middle of a harsh winter, Gui-yuan gave birth to their sixth child, a boy whom she named Lyova and who died (without Mao ever having laid his eyes on him) six months later of pneumonia. Mao, who by this time had married for the fourth time, to Jiang Quing, the notorious ‘Madam Mao’, sent her a letter declaring the dissolution of their marriage in one sentence: “From now on we are only comrades.” Mao specifically prohibited Gui-yuan’s return to China. Their daughter, Chaio-Chiao, lived full-time in the elite’s nursery, as Mao never came to see her. A grown up Chiao-Chiao remarked that in those days she was an orphan who was not exactly an orphan. At the age of four Chiao-Chioa was sent to Russia to live with her mother, who, by this time, was beginning to lose her grip on reality. Young Chiao-Chiao suffered the brunt of her mother’s increasingly unpredictable behaviour and irrational rages. Soon Gui-yuan was ‘committed’ to an asylum in Moscow and Chiao-Chiao became an orphan yet again. Mao met Gui-yuan only once more in their lives, in 1959. By this time both Gui-yuan and Chiao-Chioa had returned to China, and Mao occasionally allowed his daughter to see him. He was seized with a whim to see Gui-yuan, who, he was warned by their daughter, was in a fragile state of mind and could well ‘collapse mentally if she got too excited.’  After they met briefly Mao ‘promised’ to see Gui-yuan again ‘tomorrow’. However, the next day, Gui-yuan was forcibly taken away on Mao’ orders and suffered a severe relapse of her mental condition. Jiang Quing, Mao’s fourth and last wife, remained married to him for the remainder of his life, albeit only in name. She became notorious as the leader of what Mao referred to as the ‘Gang of four’ during the Cultural Revolution. When arrested after Mao’s death for her crimes during the cultural revolution Jiang Quing said, “I was Chairman Mao’s dog. Whoever Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I bit.” Madam Mao was most probably telling the truth—it was Mao, and Mao alone, who unleashed the Cultural Revolution; Madam Mao simply did his bidding—and her comment summarises the nature of their relationship. Chang and Halliday suggest that an increasingly insecure, politically weak, and moribund Mao bartered ‘Mme Mao’ and the others in the Gang to his would be successors for his own safety, telling them they could do what they wished to her after he died

Chang and Halliday next go about destroying the myth (as they see it) surrounding Mao’s Long March on which the historical  legitimacy of the communist rule in China rests. Did Mao and his comrades showed incredible courage and inventiveness in escaping the Nationalist army that was threatening to close in on them? No, say Chang and Halliday. Mao was allowed to escape by the Chiang (no doubt an error of judgement by the generalissimo for which he paid a few years later). Chaing’s control on the Southwestern province was very shaky at this time and he was not keen on antagonizing the warlords who controlled the region. The Long March of the communist was in fact facilitated by the Nationalist. When the warlords, unsettled by the entry of the Reds into their province, appealed to Chiang for help, the Nationalists, at the invitation of the warlords, entered the region to drive the communists out. Mao did not even walk through the Long March. Years later he remarked (as per Chuang & Halliday):  “On the march, I was lying in a litter. So what did I do? I read. I read a lot.”

Chang and Halliday are reluctant to see anything that Mao did that was not out of his desire of personal aggrandizement. Thus, when Mao, in 1927, facing political crossroads, decided to stay with the Communists (and in effect put his life at risk, as Chiang had begun to kill Communists), it was not because he had the courage of conviction but because he had developed a taste for brutality in Hunan which he was loath to give up by joining the Natioanlists. He used the Korean War essentially as an opportunity to kill the soldiers belonging formerly to the Nationalist army. Some of it is familiar grounds. Most (at least in the West) now acknowledge that Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ was an unmitigated disaster for the Chinese population and millions perished. Chang and Halliday quote Mao instructing the officials to “educate” the starving peasants that they eat less.” The State, Mao advised, should try its hardest to prevent peasants eating too much. At another time Mao is supposed to have remarked that while working on all of his projects “half of China may well have to die.” Chilling words.

Mao, according to the biography, was utterly ruthless and unforgiving towards those who he felt threatened his control over the CPP and China. The biography is awash with examples of political rivals, several —so Chang and Halliday would have the readers belive—more moralistic and worthy than Mao, who were murdered by Mao. Even those who stayed loyal to him, such as his long serving prime minister, Zhou Enlie. In the 1970s when Zhou was suffering from cancer, Mao blocked the treatment that might have prolonged Zhou’s life. Zhou himself is portrayed as Mao’s slavish lackey and not the erudite world leader and diplomat he was known to be in his life time.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Chang and Halliday have spared no effort to portray the founder of the communist China as a murdering, machinating, power-hungry psychopath who had absolutely no regard for human life and spent most of his long, wicked life heaping misery on the benighted populace of the country he ruled for more than twenty-five years. He was not a particularly impressive orator, nor did he have the charisma of some of the other dictators of the twentieth century whom he matched, probably even surpassed in craziness. He was vicious; he had low-level cunning; he utterly lacked empathy; and was prepared to go to any length to stay in power. That’s what Chang and Halliday would like their readers to believe.

Is it true, though? There seems something inherently imbalanced about this humongous biography. Chang is of course the author of Wild Swan, a chronicle of the three generation of her family that suffered under Mao’s rule. Mao: the Unknown Story seems to have been written out of an intense revulsion, bordering on hatred, for its subject. Almost every chapter of the biography is devoted to demolishing some or the other ‘myths’ related to Mao. If you hold the view that historical biographies should have an element of neutrality then Mao: the Unknown Story might rankle. That is as may be. It might be argued that it is difficult to write a neutral biography of someone whose list of crimes runs longer than the treaty of Versailles.  

The point the reader might wish to satisfy himself about is: how well researched is the biography? Are the sources quoted authentic? This question becomes all the more important if the biography is making startling claims—as this one does—about its subject. If you are going to make startling revelations about the treasured recent  history of a country that is  viewed by many as the real superpower, such as the Long March, you’d better back it up with bulletproof evidence. I of course lack the expertise to critically analyse the sources quoted by Chang and Halliday. It has to be said, though, that on the face of it the list is impressive. The biography was allegedly in the making for more than ten years. Chang and Halliday painstakingly interviewed hundreds of subjects in more than 30 countries. Some of the interviewees are well known personalities such as former US presidents, a former African dictator etc. But there are many others who, even to my unprofessional eye, seem difficult to check. The same goes for at least some of the sources quoted by Chang and Halliday, which apparently cannot be verified and therefore must be considered as highly speculative. One of the more detailed criticisms of the methodological issues of the biography can be found here.

Mao Tse Tung—who led a long and remarkable life and who undeniably came to exert influence not only on the country he ruled but also the world— may well have been the brutal and sadistic monster Chang and Halliday accuse him of being, but when you come to the end of this long and very readable biography, you may be excused if you have hesitation in sharing the conviction of its authors.

Book Group

Imagine a restaurant on a Friday evening. Let’s give it a name: Millennium.  It is a restaurant that claims to specialize in modern British cuisine, but serves mostly burgers (made of bread that has the taste and texture of a wet log of wood) to the accompaniment of hand-cut chips (which, you discovered, after reading The Sense of an Ending, are not really hand-cut on the premises).

In one corner of the restaurant is sitting a gaggle of men. At the head of the table is sitting a giant. He is—what’s the acceptable term these days for physically impaired people?—handicapped. You have no idea, however, of the nature of his disability. He walks waving a walking stick, and you are not sure what purpose the stick serves other than to beat people with. His voice is deep and stentorian, not unlike that of the police officer brother of Raymond in the hit American sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. As it happens this man is American; but he has lived in the UK for decades. He however likes to say, whenever he can introduce the subject (roughly once every half an hour), that he is not overtly fond of the English; that he is not an Anglophile (which rather begs the question what the f**k he is doing in this country for years). He is the oldest in the group; his age could be anywhere between 65 and 139. He is probably an intellectual. In the past (distant past, judging by his looks), taught English in some polytechnic which became University in the years when Labour were in power.  He has a straggly beard. He is by far the biggest, if not the fattest man in the group. He is Bob.

At Bob’s end of the table is sitting a man wearing sensationally offensive pair of ears. The only two beings whose ears can compete with this man’s ears are the British television actor Martin Clunes and the Hindu God Ganesh. This man—Dick—does not work. He used to run an organic greengrocer’s shop which he sold a few years ago for a quarter of a million pounds (the rumour goes). Since then he has not worked; he now spends his time lecturing unsuspecting victims on why Britain these days lacks in entrepreneurship, to the accompaniment of a generous dose of moaning about how the man who bought the shop from him gyped him. Bob’s wife is rumoured to be very bossy and Bob is rumoured to be very henpecked. Perhaps for that reason he is the bossiest in the group. He did a creative writing course a few years ago, but has either not managed to write a novel; or has managed to write a novel but not find anyone willing to publish it (probably because it is crap); or he is still writing this novel and will carry on writing it till he dies. The man takes pride in his literary tastes; he fancies himself as a reader of high-brow fiction and is always bandying about phrase like such and such a writer ought to take more risks, such and such a writer has experimented boldly with the form etcetera.  He then looks around as if he is expecting a round of applause. Dick is a bit of a bore. Not a bad sort, mind, just the sort who, once he gets going, would make you, within two minutes, dart desperate glances towards the nearest exit.  

Opposite Dick is sitting a short, unattractive man sporting a five-day stubble and starving looks of a vampire. The phrase ‘sporting stubble’ is generous; the truth is the man’s personal hygiene is questionable and he has in all probabilities not bothered to shave in the previous month.  It is not known what this man did for a living; he may well have been a waste-disposal manager in the local council. He is retired now, and has developed a predilection for visiting Istanbul in winter, picking blackberries in the graveyard next to his house, and reading novels. He is Dracula.

Next to Dick is sitting a man who looks as if he is inflated by a bicycle pump. He has the unhealthy look of a man who is in the early stages of liver cirrhosis, brought on by, you are convinced, excessive alcohol consumption. According to Dracula this man has mental health ‘issues’. Dracula is not sure about the exact nature of the man’s difficulties: it could be chronic fatigue syndrome or recurrent depression or memory lapses. Whatever it is, you suspect, alcoholism is not helping the condition. He is in his late thirties or early forties. He used to be in the advertising and entertained clients in posh London restaurants (apparently), which is where, you think, he cultivated his alcohol habit. When he was made redundant, he became a taxi-driver. That ended when he crashed his taxi (probably while under the influence of alcohol). He told the group, once—although no one had shown the slightest curiosity—that he was once threatened by a drunk who took offence when he asked for the cab fare. (Maybe it’s PTSD he suffers from.) That was the last time he worked. After that his disabling mental condition made it impossible for him to work. You don’t know how the society dealt with the inadequates in the past.  Maybe they got carted off loony bins where they weaved baskets; these days they frequent modern British restaurants, eat crap food, and give crap opinions on novels.  The (ex)taxi-driver does not strike you as a man of broad culture. If he is looking happy, it would, in all probabilities, not be because he has finished reading the first volume of Jean Christophe. If you asked him which book Salman Rushdie won the Booker Prize for, he would glower at you as if you’d asked him a trick question, and would spit out, ‘Satanic Verses. Everybody knows that.’  We shall call him Robert De Nero—not because he looks anything like De Nero but because he was a cabbie and has mental health issues.

There is a foreigner in the group, an Indian. Come to think of it there are two foreigners, if we include Bob. The Indian is in his thirties. He is bald as a coot (make it two coots), and, in keeping with recent style, has shaved his head completely. He probably applies some cream or lotion to the dome of his bald head which always looks sweaty and shining. He is either a doctor or a corner-shop owner. Listening to the Indian is a strange experience. He speaks fluent English (his English is probably the best in the group) in the chirpy, singsong accent of the subcontinent (very pleasant to hear, you have to admit), but without any expression on his face. Listening to him is like listening to a literary audio book.

Finally, there is you.

You are here because Dracula invited you to the meeting. To discuss books. This is a book group. Not just any other book-group, but ‘men only’ book group. Women are not welcome to this group. The book-group has no interest in discussing Time Traveller’s Wife, thank you very much. Women—according to Dick—insist on meeting at each other’s houses, and are more interested in gossiping (and each one is preoccupied with showing that she is a better host than others in the group) than in discussing books. (How does Dick know? He knows: his wife was a member of two ‘women only’ book-groups, both of which fell apart: one because the members disagreed vociferously and viciously about the book choices; and the other because the members fell out rancorously on account of what some or more of the members of the group were alleged to have said to some or more members of the group about the culinary skills—rather the lack thereof— of some or more members of the group.)

The book to be discussed tonight is Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue. Why was this book chosen? You have no idea. You like Sharpe; you have read half a dozen books by him, one of them was Porterhouse Blue, which you read many years ago. Porterhouse Blue was chosen because it was the only Sharpe novel of which several copies were available in the local library. Most of the book-members, except the Indian and Bob, refuse to spend money on books. The book-group has opened an account at the library in Dracula’s name. Dracula then distributes the books amongst the members. The Indian rarely borrows books, saying that he has the book in his ‘collection’, which, you think, is a tad pretentious and smug. (No doubt he calls the corner in his bedroom where he stacks up books as his library.)

“Let’s talk books,” Dick orders.

“I didn’t like the book,” Robert De Nero declares.

“It is a bit dated,” Dracula agrees.

Just then the waitress comes to take orders. She is wearing tight black trousers.  Which is unfortunate, as she has a big behind. 

“How are you darling?” Dick asks. If you didn’t know better you’d think he was flirting. “Busy today?”

The waitress nods and gives a five minute talk on the hectic evening in the restaurant which is having a deleterious effect on her muscle strength. “I need a roller-skater,” she concludes.

Bob looks sceptical, no doubt thinking that’s what waitresses are supposed to do. If you are in the army you don’t moan about bullets flying past you.

Everyone orders. Except Robert De Nero. “I will just have tea,” he says to the waitress. The waitress narrows her eyes and gives him a look most these days reserve for Lib Dem politicians, but does not say anything. Maybe De Nero is poor. He can’t afford to spend money in pretentious modern British restaurants serving tasteless food in minuscule quantities you need a bank loan to pay the bill of. Maybe De Nero is on benefits.

“OK,” Dick brings the conversation back to the book. “What did you not like?”

“I just didn’t find the book very funny,” De Nero begins. “OK, there were a few occasions when I chuckled; but I didn’t laugh.” He looks around to gauge reactions of bookgroup members. Bob looks at him, his facial expression suggesting that he is wrestling in his mind with the possibility that he might be in the company of an idiot. The Indian’s head is wobbling; it is impossible to know whether he is agreeing or disagreeing. Dracula is scratching his stubble and looking thoughtful. May be he is trying to think whether there were any passages in Porterhosue Blue which induced in him a belly-laugh; more likely he has got itchy skin. “Take Wodehouse,” De Nero continues, “When you read Wodehouse, on every page there is something that is terribly funny, or there is a nice turn of phrase. There was none of that, here. It was OK. But nothing more than that.”

“Why did you think it was dated?” Dick turns his attention to Dracula. Dracula looks a bit scared. “Umm . . .,” he begins. “Umm . . .,” he continues. Then his face brightens. “The setting seemed a bit dated. Cambridge, 1970s. That sort of thing . . .”

There is silence. Then Bob says, “Well, Cambridge universities are a bit dated. They have been around for hundreds of years.” You are beginning to like this guy, his faux-disability notwithstanding.

“Also,” you point out, “I don’t think the period of the novel is clearly defined. For All you know, the novel is  set in the 1950s.” 

“That would make it even more dated,” Bob says, with a twinkle in his eyes. Dracula looks at Bob, suspicion clouding his face that Bob is taking the Mickey.

“Also,” Dracula continues, “it’s not an authentic view, is it? It is a view of an outsider who didn’t know much about our culture. Wasn’t Tom Sharpe South African or something?”

The Indian looks at Dracula as if Dracula insulted his grandmother. “Tom Sharpe was very much English,” he informs Dracula. “He did spend a decade in South Africa when he was in his twenties. That does not make him South African any more than living in England for twenty years makes me English.”

“What is the South Africa connection, then?” you ask.

“He was a Photographer, I think,” Indian says, “when he lived in South Africa. He was deported from South Africa for anti-apartheid activities.” The guy has obviously devoted a great deal of time studying Tom Sharpe’s biography.

“OK,” you say. “Ravi has established beyond doubt that Tom Sharpe was born in this country, although he also spent many years in South Africa. Does that,” you turn to Dracula, “mean you might change your mind about the book?”

“I’d still say that I didn’t much like it.”

“What about the authenticity?” you ask. “Would you still say it is an outsider’s view?”

“No, obviously not, if you are saying . . . em . . . that he was English.”

“I am not,” you say, “saying that. It’s Ravi’s claim that Tom Sharpe was English.”

“I read it in WikiPedia,” the Indian gives his reference.

Three and half minutes have passed since Dick last spoke. That is clearly intolerable. “Let’s not digress,” he says. “What about you?” he asks you.

At this point the waitress reappears with the orders. She says loudly the name of each dish in the manner and tone of an auctioneer. “Enjoy,” she orders. “Does anyone want pepper?” The Indian does, as he would, on the outside chance that pizza is not spicy enough. The waitress sprinkles pepper on his pizza, hovering over him while he tilts his bald head to one side so that it does not press against her boobs which suspend mid-air—tantalizingly, you think—over it.

“So?” Dick looks at you. He hasn’t forgotten. “What did you think?”

“I liked the book,” you begin. “I thought it was very funny.” You look at Robert De Nero. He is staring at the cup of tea in front of him. “I don’t know how authentic it is,” you continue, “because I didn’t go to Cambridge. But it strikes me that Sharpe does not have much of sympathy for any of the characters in the novel. No one comes out well, really. The only character for which you might have a smidgen of sympathy, Zipster, is bumped off half way through the novel.”

“The episode with Zipster is hilarious,” Bob agrees. His uncontrollable lust for the fat woman—what’s she called?” Bob pauses.

“His bedder,” The Indian promptly provides the information.

“Yes. Bedder. I didn’t even know that that’s what these cleaning ladies were called in Cambridge,” Bob chuckles.

“I won’t be surprised if they are still called that,” you say.

“Yes. Anyway, Zipster. What a name! Like Scullion. Anyway, Zipster’s fascination with the fat bedder and his attempts to obtain condoms were very funny.”

“You really think so?” Dracula looks at him. “I thought it was vulgar.”

“Bawdy,” the Indian suggests a compromise.

“Also, I thought Sharpe dragged the whole thing for too long. The condom episode, I mean,” Dracula complains.

“Sharpe’s humour is not for those who are easily fazed,” Bob informs Dracula. Dracula’s face hardens. He obviously thinks the American is patronizing him, which, you think, he is, deliberately, to make Dracula feel like a fool, which, you think, he undoubtedly is. Dracula opens his mouth as if to rebut, but decides against it; he knows he lacks the intellectual wherewithal to argue with the American.

There is silence around the table. The stage is set for Dick to give the final verdict. He clears his throat and begins by telling the group that he went to Cambridge himself in the 1970s. Not only that, he went to the same college, Pembroke, where Tom Sharpe was educated. (So the f**ker knew all along that Sharpe was English.) However, he would like all of us to remember that he did not come from a privileged background; he went to Cambridge on a scholarship. There was a clear division between the posh students and the scholarship students, apparently; and many in the college held views that would be considered as appallingly racist in these days, but these guys, were ingénues, really; they had no clue—“absolutely no clue, I tell you”—about the outside world. Majority of them were bachelors and had lived all their lives in the college. A very sheltered existence “I tell you.”

“Like E.M. Forster,” the Indian prompts. No one has bothered to ask him what he thought of the novel. Is that racist, you wonder. But the Indian does not seem to mind; or at least he is not showing it in an obvious manner if he does. He seems content to spend the whole evening supplying trivial information no one has asked for and which has no direct connection to the novel being discussed. 

“E.M. Forster?” Robert De Nero asks. “Was he from Cambridge?”

“E.M. Forster lived all his life in Cambridge,” the Indian informs him.

“Is that what WikiPedia says, Ravi?” you ask him.

The Indian looks at you. “I haven’t checked recently,” he tells you with a straight face. “But I won’t be surprised at all if it does.”

“So these guys,” Bob says, “these guys who lived these sheltered existence. Were they also homosexuals?”

“Now, then, Bob,” says Dracula, “careful.”

Dick continues with his disquisition of the culture in Cambridge colleges in the 1970s, which—he is sad to say—was elitist, snobbish, and class-ridden—a world of tendentious insinuations, covert bitchery and ruthless backstabbing—; he would not want to go through it again; once was enough. He believes, based on his own unhappy years in Cambridge, every word of Sharpe’s novel. “It is a high comedy. But very authentic, I tell you,” he finishes.

If Dick was expecting someone would ask him what he meant by high comedy, he is disappointed. No one does, probably thinking that they would rather poke themselves in the eye with a rusty fork than suffer ten more minutes of Dick’s pomposity.

“Time to vote,” Dick declares. Everyone votes. Robert De Nero and Dracula give the novel a miserly five. You and Bob give a high eight. Dick and the Indian give seven.

The waitress comes back to the table. “Can I interest you gentlemen,” she asks, “with desserts?” Jesus. How do they get recruited, these girls? No one wants desserts. “Just the bill, then?” the waitress asks, her tone suggesting that this is our last chance to enjoy the pleasures of a sticky toffee pudding; however, if we were determined to miss out, it is our choice.

“We need to think about the next book for the meeting,” Dick says. Bob suggests “any book” of Faulkner. Robert De Nero suggests a book by Carl Hiaasen. Carl Hiaasen, De Nero informs the group, is a very popular American writer who has cult following. "Very funny, too" he adds. Dick suggests Trumpet by Jackie Kay. “It is an unusual and bold novel,” he informs the group. Dracula says he is game to read anything so long as it is not too long. You suggest Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. No one asks the Indian his choice.

Dracula promises to check with the library the availability of "titles” and we agree to meet next month.

Book of the Month: A Beginner's Guide to Acting English (Shappi Khorasandi)

Hadi Khorsandi was a well-known Iranian political journalist. His satirical political columns for an Iranian newspaper were very popular. He was their rising star. In 1976 Khorsandi was posted by the newspaper to London. He arrived in London with his wife and two children: his son, Peyvand, and three-year old daughter, Shaparak. This was supposed to be a two-year posting, at the end of which Khorsandi was intending to return to Iran. Little did he know at the time that what was supposed to be a time-limited stay would extend to a life-long exile.

Hadi Khorsandi had socialistic leanings. Coming as he did from an impoverished background, he held the then ruler of Iran, the Shah (whom he lampooned mercilessly in his columns), in withering contempt for various reasons, the prominent amongst which were the Shah’s Sybaritic lifestyle (even as much of the population led an hand-to-mouth existence) and the Shah being a stooge of the Imperialist Western (America and Britain) powers. Around the time of Hadi Khorsandi’s posting in London the winds of revolution began to blow in Iran. The revolution had a spiritual leader, whom the Shah had exiled to France: Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeni. Hadi Khorsandi was overjoyed when the Shah was finally thrown out of power. However, his joy turned to horror when the revolution that had overthrown the Shah came more and more to be dominated by religious zealots. It seemed that Khomeni was not content in being merely a spiritual leader of the country; he was not prepared to do the decent thing and step aside once the Shah abdicated—as Hadi Khorsandi had hoped—; he wanted to actually lead the country, and take it away from the corrupting influence of the decadent West  (which had given him a sanctuary during his years in exile) towards pure Islamic ideals. The revolution was an Islamic revolution. This was not something Hadi Khorsandi, the satirist, was expecting. And he soon found out that the new rulers were far less tolerant of the opposing views than the regime of the much-maligned Shah. Fast becoming disillusioned with the new Iranian regime and the direction in which it was forcing the country, Khorsandi started satirising the new rulers in his columns. When, after two years, he returned to Iran, he discovered that there was a mob of two hundred people wanting to lynch him for his unpatriotic, anti-Islamic columns. Khorsandi managed to avoid the baying mob and returned to the UK, where he applied for a refugee status. The UK would become the adopted home of his family.

Almost three decades after the Islamic revolution that swept Iran and consigned the Khorsandi family to the life of exile, comes the bitter-sweet memoir of Shappi Khorsandi, the younger daughter of Hadi, who came to this country when she was three.

A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English is an engaging, affectionate, and heart-warming account of growing up as a stranger in a strange land. With great eloquence and (you suspect creativity) Shappi Khorsandi describes the goings on in the extended family of her maternal grandmother and the life in the lower middle class area of Tehran where the family resided, a life full of doting relatives—Shappi Khorsandi had several maternal uncles and aunts, the youngest of whom was only ten days older than she—she left behind, when at the age of three she came to England. In England, her family, it would appear, immersed itself totally in the treacly world of the Iranian Diaspora. Not an evening went by when Shappi’s parents were either not entertaining a minimum of fifty guests or were not being entertained (along with hundred other guests) by family friends and acquaintance. The men discussed, loudly and passionately, politics—that is Iranian politics—and, at times, had violent disagreements as to whether Shah was a menace, a saviour or lesser of the evils; the women cooked scrumptious and tasty Iranian dishes in the kitchen that would send your cholesterol levels surging into outer stratosphere; and the children played games in the bedrooms.  The children—this will come as a shock to the English—had no set bed-time and frequently played with other children late into the night, for as long as the get-togethers went on. The family might be physically living in London, but they might as well have been in Tehran. The emotional links to the mother-country were strong. They were living an Iranian life in England.

The family’s fortunes changed after Hadi Khorsandi lost his job with the newspaper for his anti-Ayatollaha views. Not being very fluent in English and unwilling to pursue anything other than a journalistic profession, his job opportunities were always going to be limited. He decided to publish his own paper—which he called ‘Asghar Agah’, the name being representative of the common man (‘Asghar Agah is everybody and nobody’, Hadi Khorsandi explained to his young daughter)—in exile, in which, he reasoned, he would be able to publish his poems—which no newspaper in Tehran was willing to print—on his own terms. This paper, which Hadi Khorsandi produced in the living room of his flat, would then be posted to its subscribers in England and America. The family moved from their rented flat in Kensington—this was when Hadi Khorsandi still had a job—to Ealing, and then to a rented flat near Ealing Broadway. With great warmth Shappi Khorsandi describes the lives the family led in these rented accommodations. Hadi Khorsandi, her father, would appear to have a great knack for accumulating friends. He was a generous and hospitable man, and did not let the decline in the family’s wealth and fortune—of which the reader gets an occasional hint—to come in the way of his socializing lifestyle—the evening entertainments continued. Blessed with vivid memory and imagination, Shappi Khorsandi describes the play-ground intrigues at school, the neighbourhoods where they lived, the two-yearly visits of their Iranian relatives, the growing pains of teenage years in a foreign country (which would appear to have resulted in her elder brother going a tad wild in his adolescence) and the ever-increasing friend circles of their parents. She imbues these quotidian happenings with magic.

Shappi Khorsandi is particularly deft at portraying lineaments with acuity, and depicts memorable characters. Of these, the most unforgettable is her father, Hadi Khorsandi, who emerges from these memoirs as a gregarious, larger-than-life person I would love to spend an evening with (although not several evenings in a row, which would tire me out), guffawing over, I don’t know what—my knowledge of Iranian politics is about as deep as that of the young Shappi Khorsandi of these memoirs—; but I wouldn’t worry about it; Hadi Khorsandi is bound to think of something to bring a smile to my face. In a particularly hilarious episode—hilarious because it is described in the memoirs in that way; it must have been very tense for the elders in the family—the Scotland Yard detectives contact Hadi Khorsandi, as they have been made aware of a threat to his life, posed by the mercenaries paid (allegedly) by the extremist regime in Iran. The Khorsandi family is advised to go underground for a while and lie low. Hadi Khorsandi takes his family to a B & B in Windsor, where, over the next week, to the bemusement of his English landlady, he proceeds to invite all of his friends, who convert the B & B into an Iranian courtyard. When a week later, the detective from the Scotland Yard turn up to see how he is getting on, they find him going out on a picnic with several dozen friends. Khorsandi not only assures the concerned detectives that they are his friends who, he is sure, are not going to kill him, he also inveigles them into joining the picnic!  Another memorable character is Shappi’s paternal grandmother, ‘Moderjaan’, who comes across as a woman of great, sardonic wit whose worldview is infused with a healthy dose of scepticism.

I have reviewed earlier on this blog Becoming British: the Making of Mr Hai’s Daughter, the memoir of television presenter, Yasmin Hai, the daughter of a Pakistani immigrant to England. Hai, who was born in England, grew up in the same decades—the 1970s and 1980s—as Shappi Khorsandi. While the experiences of the two girls, as they grew up in the multicultural, multiracial Britain, couldn’t have been more different, there is one common link: the casual racism to which they and their families were subjected in this country. Both were routinely called ‘Pakis’, a diminutive of ‘Pakistani’, which was used (and is still used) to refer to, with racist connotations, anyone who had brown skin. Hadi Khorsandi might have been an erudite journalist in Iran and a respected member of the Iranian Diaspora in London; but to those who are inclined to view other races with disdain, he was just a ‘Paki’. It is to the credit to both Shappi Khorsandi and Yasmin Hai that they did not allow these repeated unpleasant experiences to which they were subjected to engender bitterness. Indeed Shappi Khorsandi describes them with a degree of humour.

It is the good temper of the narrative together with acute observations and the ability to perceive and express the humour in seemingly disparate situations that makes this memoir eminently readable. At times, though, the attempt to bring forth the innocence of young Shappi does not quite work as well as that. For example the letters (printed in italics) that Shappi writes to Ayatollah Khomeni come across as self-consciously ingenuous, thereby detracting from the emotions (presumably sympathy) Shappi Khorsandi is hoping to get out of her readers.

The title of the book seems to have been thought of with tongue firmly lodged in cheek (Shappi Khorsandi is a well-known stand-up comedian in Britain). Although the book is titled A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English, throughout the length of the book neither Shappi nor her convivial family makes any efforts to fit in with the main-stream culture. True, the children force their mother to give them neatly cut ham sandwiches and fish-fingers (instead of the delicious Iranian food, which the other children in their classes think is smelly) in their lunch boxes; but these are superficial adjustments. In their hearts, with regard to their leisure activities, dealings with the extended families, celebration of festivals, the family remains staunchly Iranian. And that is how it should be. Incorporation of different influences will make a culture broader and richer; the bedevilment of other cultures and practices is a symptom primarily of peoples’ own insecurities.

Both Shappi Khorsandi and Yasmin Hai did not have religion (in both their cases Islam) central to their lives when they grew up; but there was a difference. Islam was very prominent in the milieu in which Yasmin Hai grew up, and her father, who once upon a time was a member of a Communist party, felt he had to take special steps to banish it from the life of his daughter. With Shappi Khorsandi, one gets the impression after reading her memoir, that the process was perhaps simpler not only because her immediate family was not religious, but also because the Iranian Diaspora which formed a big part of her life when she grew up, viewed themselves as Iranians first and foremost, and not Muslims. Both her father and his friends would appear to have been cognisant and respectful and even proud of the pre-Islamic past of Iran. This is what Shappi Khorsandi, you get the impression, is repeatedly trying to convey in her memoirs. At a time when Toni Blair, the ex-British prime minister, identified radical Islam as the biggest threat to the world peace (a bit rich, this, from a war criminal) and Iran as the country exporting fundamentalism, it is worth keeping in mind that it would be a grave folly to paint almost a billion people with the same broad brush. If there is a message at all in this very entertaining and  gratifying memoir, it is that. 

Bruges

You are sitting in a café in the Markt, or the Market Square. You had to rush into it as it had started pouring, and now, ten minutes later, there is bright sunshine. There is a word for this, a well-fed Belgian with luxurious growth of facial hair (technically it was a moustache, but it covered three fourth of the surface area of his face) had told you earlier, in the local, Flemish, language. The Belgian was very friendly and made heroic efforts to speak English. You had nodded from time to time trying to convey the impression that you were appreciative as well as grateful for his troubles, jumping on occasions out of the reach of his flailing arm to avoid your eyes getting poked. You think he was giving you general directions of the interesting places you could visit, but he could well have been telling you the recipe of Waterzoostje and the relative merits of adding to it Belgian beer instead of wine; you did not actually understand much of what he was saying. Anyway, the Flemish word for the weather where rain and sunshine play hide and seek sounded like Jebure. You like the sound of the word; you don’t think there is an equivalent word for it in English.

You have travelled to Bruges in the morning from Brussels, and it took just under an hour. On your way you had browsed through the tourist guide. It had compared Bruges to Cinderella—the city was left behind in its “medieval rags” while the other Flemish cities “joined the ball of industrialization in the nineteenth century”. But, like Cinderella, Bruges, eventually, in the twentieth century, found its prince charming: tourism. It is apparently the most visited city in the whole of Belgium (which, admittedly, is not a very big country). Indeed, as you walked from the railway station to the Markt, which, the tourist guide suggested, was the best place to start, there wasn’t much of the promised charm of “stagnant waters and mouldering walls”; and the streets, on which hordes of tourists—you were one of them— marched, were anything but “quietly melancholic”. The Markt essentially is a wide space beneath the mighty Belfry, although you wouldn’t suspect that, chock-a-block as it is with stalls of multicoloured awnings, selling an assortment of articles. And noisy. You hear lively arguments and clever bargaining all around you as you walk amongst the grubby stalls. It is a bit like, you imagine, working for the United Nations; almost no one speaks English. However, judging from the guffaws emanating all around you, the folk, here, are sharp-witted (unlike those in the United Nations).

You look around yourself. The Café is very Flemish in its style (As is only to be expected; the Flemish culture is for sale here). At the entrance is a stylish wooden porch. From the ceiling and walls hang brass lamps, and the walls are painted yellow. Some of the windows are stained glass—mostly of dull brown colour, making patterns you cannot not recognise. The façade on the outside of the building, however, appears to be neo-Gothic, which, you think, is slightly at variance with the interior, Flemish, décor.

An impossibly tall waiter with a caterpillar moustache and a slightly mad glint in his eyes had shown you to your table. The leather-bound menu is longer than the Treaty of Versailles, with overrepresentation of chips and salads. The waiter comes to take your order. You order a Croquet Monseigneur and ask him what fruit beers they keep. At this the waiter becomes melancholic, brings his mouth so near to yours that you can, if I wish (which you don’t), count the pores on his face, and he (if he so wishes, and he might well be) yours, and informs you that they have only one variety: Framboise. You hastily assure him that that would do. The beer arrives quickly enough. Not having anything better to do you browse through the menu again and discover a brief history of the café . The building, the menu informs  you, is very old although the neo-Gothic façade (you feel pleased that you’ve identified it correctly) was added in the late nineteenth century (why?). In the 12^th Century, a horse faced countess of a minor principality had watched the parade of the troops in the Markt-square, sitting on the first floor of the building. In 14th century, an archduke was given a grand banquet in this building. The archduke obviously survived the excesses, and, in later life spent a great deal of time and money (than was necessary) perpetuating his own memory, and wrote several (romantic) versions of his life, and that’s how the cafe, once a grand private house, and now a café—owned and run by the same family for over four decades—found its tiny niche in the history.

You are sitting very near to the bar. An elegant middle aged blonde with a baggy top that hides (what you imagine to be) big breasts is standing behind the bar and giving what appears to be a good bollocking to one of the waiters who stands staring sullenly at his toes. She must be the proprietor (or proprietoress), you decide. A middle-aged man wearing a suit is sitting with an unopened newspaper in front of him, a glass of beer in his hand, staring at the opposite wall, apparently in deep thought, though not, you suspect, of any purposeful description. An old man—well oldish—enters the café with his daughter. They sit at the table diagonally opposite to yours. He whispers something into his daughter’s ear who giggles girlishly, and his hand begins exploring her inner thighs, slowly making its way—as if it has a life all of its own—towards her crotch that makes you reconsider your first impression about their relationship. You suddenly become aware of a stench coming from my right, which you realise, is coming from an old woman who is wearing the most crumpled clothes in the history since a trunk was salvaged from the Titanic. The smell is a combination of boiled cabbages, a sinkful of unwashed dishes, a dog, and tobacco. You debate in your mind whether the smell is emanating from her body or her clothes or from both the sources. You conclude that you are not going to be able to come to a definite conclusion unless you went to where the old womanis slurping her beer (the smell could have been coming from her mouth) and took a lungful of the foetid air, which, you further concluded, you are not prepared to do. A young—well, youngish— couple enters the café with their toddler in tow. You remember seeing them on the train from Brussels. The child, when it was not running towards the door of the carriage with suicidal intention, was talking incessantly, most of which was gobbledegook, and the mother, instead of restraining it, was responding in the kind of baby-talk that you find most annoying, encouraging more gibberish from the child. The father, who wore a faded-blue baseball cap that probably was on his head every day and night for ten years, looked as though he was just about restraining himself either from pushing the child from the train or outrunning it to the carriage door and jumping out himself. The couple makes its way to a table to your left. The father still has his baseball cap on. You have a theory that men who wear baseball caps all the time are either bald or wankers or bald wankers. The child has lost its earlier sunny disposition and is whining something which only its mother understands. It is probably hungry. The husband removes his baseball cap: he is bald. You become aware of a presence next to my table. It is the waiter (who was bollocked by the proprietoress)) squinting at you as if he would have liked nothing better than to wring your neck. He bangs the plate on my table with as much violence without actually smashing it, muttering something under his breath which you cannot hear properly. You aren’t sure if he is saying the name of the dish you’d ordered or casting doubt on the virtue of your female relations.

‘Excuse me?’ you say.

There is an exaggerated sigh, and he says, “Ham sandwich.”

‘Is that the same as Croquet Monseigneur?’ you ask.

Either the waiter thinks it is beneath him to clarify the matter or he has exhausted his repertoire of English. He stares at you; you stare back at him. The waiter who had originally shown you to my seat comes and clarifies that the stale white bread swimming in oil is indeed what you had ordered. You order another bottle of Framboise. You take a mouthful of Croquet Monseigneur, and, unable to admit how vile it was, take another one, which forces me to believe what you do not want to. You decide to wait for the Framboise. You begin looking around. A young blonde wearing dangerously low cut jeans enters the restaurant and begins chatting with a middle-aged tosser sitting near the entrance of the restaurant. A smart, slim, bald man emerges from behind the bar and joins them. As he speaks he rests his palm on the young woman’s derriere. As you are trying to figure out the nature of the relationship between the two, the middle-aged blonde with the baggy top steps out and makes her way towards the group. She stands on the other side of the man, who puts his other palm on her posterior. You notice that the bald father of hyperactive child is also admiring the young woman’s jeans from behind. You decide that the three of them are family, the young woman being the daughter of the other two. This hypothesis receives a boost when the three of them walk back towards the bar. The bald man stops to tousle the hair of the toddler, who reciprocates by spitting out whatever it is eating at his tummy. The old geezer and the young woman (who is most definitely not his daughter (or, if she is, they have a very disturbing relationship) are in the middle of a very long and passionate kiss. “They should just go home and get on with it”, you think. Your beer arrives, and you renew your attack on the Croquet Monseigneur. The sandwich has the consistency of a wet towel and the oil burns your mouth like sulphuric acid. You think of all those less fortunate people than you, in Africa and Asia, who would run miles to wolf zestfully much less savoury objects, and who would, no doubt, embrace the sandwich with open molars. It is no good. You can’t continue without incurring the risk of corroding your bowels. You decide to leave. Before leaving you want to check the first floor of the establishment where the loos are located. Urinals occupy the whole of the first floor, except one door marked ‘Private’. As you relieve yourself slowly and forcefully you wonder idly whether the horse faced countess had watched, several centuries ago, from that very spot, the parade in the Markt. You conclude that it was unlikely, as the urinal is not facing the square.

You come down; pay the bill without a tip, and walk out into the Market Square.

Book of the Month: Four Girls from Berlin (Marianne Meyerhoff)

On a May morning in 1939, an ocean liner named St. Louis left Hamburg, Germany. Its destination was Cuba. It had 937 passengers on board—all of them Jews, hoping to escape the tightening Nazi noose around their necks. St. Louis was one of the last ocean liners that the Nazis allowed to leave Germany with its cargo of Jewish passengers. Within months of St Louis’s departure from Hamburg, the Second World War would begin that would close all avenues of escape for the German and European Jews.

The passengers aboard St. Louis thought they were lucky. Many had sold what remained of their life-savings—first to line the pockets of the Nazis, intent on fleecing Jews before they were sent into exile, and then the Cuban officials who demanded extortionate fees for landing permits—in order to ensure steamship passage. Many of the refugees also had U.S. quota numbers which they hoped would enable them to go to America.

When St Louis arrived in Havana, its passengers were horrified to learn that Cuban government had invalidated their landing permits. Cuba refused landing permission unless each of its passengers paid additional $ 500 for the visa. The passengers—most of whom had been forced to sell their possessions and homes for a fraction of their values—simply did not have the money.

St Louis laid anchor in Havana Bay and negotiations between the money-grabbing Cuban officials and Gustav Schroder, the captain of St. Louis, commenced, while the passengers—homeless, penniless and unwanted—waited with mounting panic and agitation.

The Havana Harbour Patrol as well as US Coast Guard cutters began circling St. Louis, warning away the passengers—most of them women and children—from entering Cuban or American waters.  Running low on fuel, Gustav Schroder, the heroic German captain of St. Louis, refused to return the passengers to further persecution and certain death in Germany. (After the war Schroder was awarded the Order of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany; and, in 1993, posthumously, was named as one of the Righteous among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel.) Neither Cuba nor America was willing to accept the passengers who could have been easily absorbed as productive members of society of any country that was willing to accept them.

There then followed further squalid negations amongst Britain, France, Netherlands and Belgium about how they were going to divide the refugees, all of whom were Europeans. Finally, the European nations came to an understanding and the passengers were divided amongst these four nations.

As the theatre of war opened in Europe, only those passengers (a couple of hundred) who were granted asylum in England survived. Those who were accepted on the Continent most probably met the same fate as many of their co-religionists in Europe.

One of the passengers on St. Louis who was sent to Netherland and interred, first in Rotterdam and then in the Westerbork detention camp, was a German Jewish woman named Charlotte—‘Lotte’—Wachsner Meyerhoff. She was thought to have perished in the Holocaust. But she didn’t.

Four Girls from Berlin is the story of Lotte Wachsner Meyerhoff and her life in Germany, where her family had lived for almost two centuries, told by Lotte’s daughter, Marianne Meyerhoff. It is also a story of Lotte’s friendship with three other German, non-Jewish, women that survived the war.

Lotte was born in 1915 in Berlin, the first child of Fritz and Charlotte Wachsner. Charlotte died in childbirth and Lotte was named after her. She was raised by her mother’s best friend Paula whom her father married four years later. Lotte had a half-brother, Ernst, or ‘Mops’, who was five years younger than her.

Fritz Wachsner, a staunchly patriotic man who had fought for the Kaiser in the First World War, was a distinguished academician and held a professorial position at Berlin University. He was also a connoisseur of operas and Western classical music. In the 1920s not a week went by in professor Wachsner’s house when there wasn’t a concert. Lotte, his firstborn, was considered a prodigy: she was always first in all the subjects in the class. She also had a magnificent voice and her father –nicknamed Der Alte Fritz (Old Man Fritz) by ‘Mops’, which he pretended to take offence at—was determined that she would fulfil her potential. When Lotte turned 15, Fritz Wachsner deemed her ready to be groomed by a major teacher who would take her on for professional training. That teacher was Ilonka Von Patti. At Ilonka’s house Lotte met two other students: Erica Poch—who was a gifted pianist, and Ursula Bautze who aspired to be a painter. The three girls—all in their late teens—and their teacher, who was a decade older than them, formed a close bond over the next few years. This friendship would continue in the 1930s even as the atmosphere became vitiated by the anti-Semitic propaganda after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and the persecution and ostracization of Jews began. It even survived the Second World War. Or so Lotte thought; and her daughter, Marianne.

The memoir vividly brings alive for the reader the German Jewish life in the first of half of twentieth century. It also movingly describes the plight of this cultured, proud and patriotic family in the 1930s when the Nazis came to power in Germany. As one reads Professor Wachsner’s unflinchingly loyal views towards Germany even as draconian laws were in effect reducing Jews to sub-human levels one can only shake one’s head in disbelief at the misplaced patriotism. The writing was on the wall, but Fritz Waschsner refused to see it. His teenage son, ‘Mops’, unlike his father, knew where it was all heading. As early as 1935 he was exhorting his father to leave Germany and find a safe haven in another country. Fritz refused. It was inconceivable to him that he should leave the country he had called his home and leave behind a large clan that included his octogenarian mother and mothers-in law.  What was his advice to his son? "Keep your head down and don’t bring attention to yourself. This is a test of our patriotism and our country needs us now more than any time else." The response of professor Fritz to the horror unfolding in Germany is perhaps emblematic of the Jewish people of his generation: keep your head down, don’t make yourself too visible, and hope that you will be left alone. The trouble was the Jews were not going to be left alone; the new chancellor of Germany was determined to erase the Jewish race from the face of the earth, another thing professor Fritz and men of his generation simply could not envisage, even though Hitler had made his anti-Semite views clear in his autobiography a decade earlier. It was this passivity and inability (or reluctance) to think the unthinkable that saw thousands of cultured Jewish men and women march to their deaths; and in case of Frtiz Wachsner, also condemned the younger generation to wholly avoidable death.

Years later, while speaking to her daughter about that period (a rare occasion, as she avoided talking about it) Lotte said: ‘The Nazis took over and we began to feel in our bones Gleichschaltung. Mariane asked Lotte to translate the word into English. Lotte, who, despite decades of living in America had not quite mastered the foreign tongue and preferred to speak in her mother-tongue, German, had to consult German-English dictionary. She found that no equivalent word existed in English, and the closest translation was: ‘The forced and mindless joining in lockstep with the crowd.’

The sense of Gleichschaltung must have become acute for the Wachsners after the Anschluss and reports of widespread destruction of Jewish properties and synagogues in Vienna. And any doubts as to the intentions of the regime were removed on 9 November 1938 after Kristallnacht—when SA stormstroopers brought terror on the streets of Germany, wantonly destructing Jewish properties and synagogues. Fritz Wachsner was finally forced to confront the truth he was denying until then: the country he had called his home, where his family had lived for centuries, and in which Jews were fully integrated, the country for which he had fought 25 years earlier, was going to kill him and his family. But now it was too late, or almost too late. The once wealthy Wachsners were reduced to near penury, Fritz having lost his job. It was also clear that Fritz and his wife Paula would find it impossible to leave Germany because of their ages; in any case the family did not have enough money to pay for the fare of all of them. Lotte was hurriedly married to a German Jewish man named Russell Mayerhoff. The plan was: the newly-weds would leave Germany for Cuba and from there to America; from America they would arrange for the transport of the rest of the Wachsner family, including ‘Mops’ who  had wanted his father to leave Germany years earlier. ‘Mops’ was, by this time, 19. Of course it did not go according to plan at all, although Lotte managed to escape the detainment camp in Netherland (thanks to her father’s contacts and some brave Dutch who hid her in their house for several months), and arrived in America where in 1941 Marianne Meyerhoff was born. Her father, a restless soul, enlisted in the American army and returned to Europe to fight against what was until only a year earlier was his homeland. In the meanwhile Fritz and Paula carried on with their increasingly impoverished and precarious existence in Berlin, their suitcases packed—one for each—waiting for the knock on the door, which came one day in 1943. The last letter Lotte received from her beloved brother informed her that their parents had been ‘taken east’.  After that the correspondence stopped. Lotte died forty years later not knowing what happened to her brother. Marianne who, almost by accident, had found out the terrible fate of her uncle whom she had never met, simply did not have the heart to tell her mother.

Marianne Meyerhoff grew up in America, oblivious, initially, of her family’s history. A few months after the war ended they received a huge carton that had arrived from Germany. The carton was full of photographs, letters, and such personal belongings of the Wachsners as could be saved. It was then that Marianne Meyerhoff first became aware of the three Berlin friends of her mother. Soon the correspondence began between the old friends. Lotte Wachsner Meyerhoff, who was herself leading hand-to-mouth existence—her marriage to Russell Meyerhoff had broken down—sent parcels of food and chocolates to her friends back in Germany who were now facing starvation.

When she was in her 20s Marianne Meyerhoff visited Germany—a country where, in another reality, she might have been born and bred—for the first time, and met  all of her mother’s friends save Ilonka who had tragically passed on soon after the war. Upon arriving in Germany she fell acutely ill with life-threatening hepatitis and was nursed for several months by Ursula and her husband Bruno as if she were their own daughter. From Erica who was living in Berlin Marianne learnt how Ilonka and Erica—Ursula was in Africa with Bruno, who was a missionary, for the duration of the war—secretly visited her grandparents and supplied them with food on a weekly basis. The girls had taken a great risk in doing this, as by that time the regime had prohibited Aryans to have any relations with the Jews and the punishment for breaking the law was severe. She also learnt how Ilonka and Erica secreted out what they could from the apartment after the Wachsners were ‘taken East’ and ‘Mops’ went into hiding, and kept it hidden—another crime for which there were severe penalties—through the war. Thus started a friendship between Marianne and her mother’s friends. Erica had remained unmarried but Ursula had married and had several children. Marianne struck a close friendship with the wife of Ursulla’s youngest son, Jochin, which, in fullness of time, led to startling revelations about Ursula’s husband Bruno’s activities during the war.

The Four Girls from Berlin is a tragic tale of dreams shattered, family destroyed and people deracinated. Lotte Meyerhoff lived in Germany for the first 24 years of her life before she was violently uprooted and lost all her family. Months in the detention camp in Holland ruined her health, and this woman, for whom her academic father had great dreams, ended up leading an impecunious existence for most of her life. She eventually trained as a nurse; however health problems meant that she had to give even that up after a few years. She never sang again.

Lotte Meyerhoff never really felt at home in America, her adopted home for almost five decades where she breathed her last at the age of seventy. It was clear to her daughter that she hankered after the lost life in Germany; however she refused to return to Germany even for a visit even when her daughter urged her. The idea of returning to a country which was simultaneously a place of fond memories and indescribable sorrow and which ultimately had rejected her was obviously unbearable to her. She very rarely spoke about her life in Berlin, her family and friends, and such information as Marianne Meyerhoff gleaned was from other sources. Certain traumas stay with you for the rest of your life; the passage of time does little to heal the wounds.

It is also interesting that Marianne Meyerhoff was interested in finding out more about the mother’s side of the family and spent a lot of her adult life tracing those roots. Her father’s family, too,—his brothers and mother—perished in the Holocaust; however, beyond a couple of photographs of his father’s family in Germany and a paragraph which describes her father, as an American soldier in Germany, going back to the village where he was born and raised and discovering the horrific fates of his kin, there is no mention of the Meyerhoffs. One guesses that this has happened because the parents divorced when the author was very young; the father remarried (to a non-Jewish German woman whom he met in Germany) and raised another family; and, while he continued to live in America, was mostly absent when the author grew up. Lotte Meyerhoff did not remarry and, apart from her only daughter whom she raised on her own, had nobody. The author writes about her father (who, we learn, passed on a few years after her mother died) without bitterness; indeed she even goes to speculate that her parents were probably not temperamentally suited for one another and in ordinary circumstances would not have married.

A word about the prose style. As I began reading the book the prose seemed a bit flowery, self-consciously hyperbolic, and it jarred a bit; however, as I continued reading, I got into its rhythm and stopped noticing its peculiarities.

Lotte Wachsner Meyerhoff died in the 1980s. While clearing her house Marianne Meyerhoff came across a cache of letters Lotte must have received from her German friends at the end of the Second World War. Amongst them was a letter from her grandfather addressed to Marianne (which her mother had not shown her).  Fritz Wachsner was stranded in Nazi Germany when his only grandchild was born thousands of miles away in America. Fritz had two more years to live before he would make his final journey. As he wrote the letter Fritz would have known that he would not see his grandchild. It is quite extraordinary that the letter he wrote, under the shadow of death, was full of optimism for his grandchild’s future, and wished her all the happiness in the world. There was no mention at all in the letter of the appalling circumstances of his existence.

The quiet courage of Der Alte Fritz lingers in your mind long after you finish reading this moving memoir.

                                           The girl on the extreme right is Lotte Wachsner