APPENDIX: INTERVIEW WITH MAO TUN

In September 1977, I heard that my visa application to China to see Mao Tun had been approved. At that time, none of my friends believed that Mao Tun would consent to see me. He had not received any foreign visitors since the mid-1960s and there was no reason why he should want at that juncture to divulge his rigorously guarded secrets about his early life and political activities to a stranger. I, however, held on to my conviction that no writer of Mao Tun’s stature would want to have his most important works forever misunderstood. If his early novels and stories were about the Chinese Communist movement, then he would want to have that fact known.

I arrived in Peking on September 17, 1977. At first there was no news on my request. Then one evening when I was having dinner at my brother-in-law’s house, a message came that I should pack to leave for Ta-chai early the next morning, but before I left, I should leave behind in writing the questions I wanted to ask Mao Tun. I was quite tipsy when I got the message, having drunk more than half a bottle of the er-kuo-t’ou (a strong liquor distilled from sorghum) my host had procured as a particular treat for me. I had no idea that Mao Tun himself would read my questions. I assumed that his assistant or some security officials would do the screening.

When I got back to the hotel that night, it was already past eleven. I had no paper with me so I tore several pages out of my Chinese diarybook. As I was writing my questions, it completely escaped my mind that Mao Tun had served since 1949 as Minister of Culture. I only remembered him as a writer of the 1920s, the author of the Eclipse trilogy and The Wild Roses. What I wanted to know from him more than anything else was if he had in his early fiction been writing about his active participation in Party affairs and if, for instance, Miss Huan in “Suicide” was a different projection of Shih Hsün in Pursuit. My husband thought that my drunken handwriting was a disgrace; he took over the pen and wrote over some of the less legible characters.

After I came back from Ta-chai, I was told that Mao Tun would see me at 2 pm. on September 29 at Conference Room 4 in the Political Consultative Conference Building. Three of us went—myself, my husband, and an escort. As we approached the designated room, I saw three people standing in the doorway. Mao Tun was at the center, a walking stick in his hand. He handed me four pages of written response to my questions. I looked at the pages and saw the neatly written lines. Later during the two-and-a-half-hour interview Mao Tun told me that he was almost blind in his left eye and that the vision in his right eye was very much impaired. He had to use a magnifying glass to do his reading and writing. I thought about my unruly scribbles and felt utterly ashamed.

That day Mao Tun did not directly admit to anything about his political activities in the 1920s. But from what he told me about the company he had kept in those critical months in 1927 (for example, he would say that he conferred with Tung Pi-wu in Wuhan and “ran into” Li Li-san in Nan-ch’ang), I knew that he was the very high-level Party propagandist I had earlier postulated him to be.

In June 1979, my article on The Wild Roses was published. In the same month, I had a chance to forward to Mao Tun a copy each of my three studies of his “Autumn in Kuling,” The Wild Roses, and the three historical tales. In September of that year, Mao Tun began to publish his “Memoirs.” I never learned what connection, if any, existed between the publication of his “Memoirs” and his covert activities as a Party coworker having already been exposed to an irrefutable degree in the West.

The questions I wrote in September 1977 and Mao Tun’s answers were his first exchange with an outsider on the covert content of his early fiction and may be of historical and biographical interest to scholars in the field.