Tag: Communist China

On Making Amends

The older man had to go to the store for some simple supplies. So, as he usually did, he decided to take his bicycle. As he made his way to the local store, an older woman stepped from the curb into the street and in front of his bike. He couldn’t stop in time. The man crashed into the woman, and they and the bike collapsed in a heap. The woman was injured, and an ambulance was called. The man was distraught to the point of tears. He would never intentionally hurt a fly–almost literally.

Now, you should know that this man’s name was Puyi. He lived in China, and this accident with the older woman and his bicycle occurred in the early 1960s. That was a time when Chairman Mao was working to restructure Chinese society into the “ideal” communist utopian nation. And Puyi was one of those people in the older generation with whom Mao’s ideology didn’t quite take hold. He, like many of his age bracket, had undergone re-education to first “unlearn” the old ways of thinking and be taught Mao’s new, communist way. But Puyi was a special case. He was a kind man, and, in many ways, a simple man. Sadly, he didn’t understand much of the changes that Mao and the communist party had brought to China.

Puyi was almost as forgetful as he was kind. He would sometimes leave the water running after he washed his hands, for example. He would enter the house and forget to shut the door behind him. His wife, Li, whom he had married when he was 56, despaired of him sometimes. She threatened to leave him because she grew tired of going behind him and fixing what he forgot to do. “It was like living with a child often,” she would later say. Yet, what kept her in the marriage was Puyi’s incredible kindness and humility. But, that humility also was a double-edged sword. Puyi would allow everyone else to board public transportation before him in a true show of his humility. Yet, that act often resulted in Puyi missing the bus or train entirely as he waited for others to board.

But back to the woman and the bicycle accident. Puyi made it his mission to visit the woman in the hospital every day. He would bring her flowers and sit, often for hours at a time, talking to her and seeing to her every need. He was, it was reported, more attentive than her own family, even. But that was who Puyi was. He wanted to make amends. Even when the woman recovered and released from the hospital, Puyi would still go to her home to check on her. That was the level of concern he felt, the depths of the responsibility for his actions he had.

From the early ’60s until he died in 1967, Puyi worked as an editor for a communist party publishing house. He and Li lived modestly and as happily as they could. His body was cremated as was typical in China at the time. And he was mourned as a man who spent his later life trying to make amends for his mistakes–as demonstrated by his care for the woman he injured with his bike. Anyone who knew him when he was younger would have been amazed that Puyi was like that at all.

You see, Puyi had been born into wealth before China became communist. In fact, at the age of 2, he had been declared Xuantong, the last Emperor of China.

On a Mama’s Boy

No one questioned that he was a mama’s boy. That much was obvious even to the most casual observer because the boy and his mother were inseparable. Some commented that the umbilical cord was still attached between the two.

Soon after his birth, the mother took the boy to several monasteries to receive blessings from the monks there. She wanted to ensure that he would be raised with all the love and spirituality that she could muster. That attitude differed from that of the boy’s dad.

The father, a small landholder, saw in the boy security for himself in old age, and he rode the lad hard to be disciplined and educated. The mother protected him from the father. To counter this, the boy was sent away at age 8 in part to sever this strong bond. Later, he would say that he saw this phase of his early life as a competition between him and his mother against his dad. As an old man, he remarked that, if he could, he would have tortured his father.

But the dad argued that it was practical for the boy to get an education to learn how to manage the estate so that, when they retired, he could care for them. The boy, unsurprisingly, rebelled at being sent away from his beloved mother. At school, he developed a reputation for getting into fights. When the mother heard this, she was greatly disappointed. She was a Buddhist by religion and therefore was a pacifist. The son, learning of his mother’s disappointment, repented in tears to her and vowed to behave. He did not want to disappoint her ever again.

It is therefore a foregone conclusion that the boy loved his mother with such a white-hot intensity that he showed towards no one else in his life. Her tolerance and the gentle way she dealt with him—she never hit him and often indulged him—was something he carried with him his entire life. It was understandable in one sense because the lad looked like her side of the family, from the shape of his mouth to his eyes and the shape of his head. Others saw nothing of the dad in the boy’s features.

In his own words, he told listeners in his old age that he “worshipped my mother … Wherever my mother went, I would follow … going to temple fairs, burning incense and paper money, doing obeisance to Buddha … Because my mother believed in Buddha, so did I.” But that changed. His mother died when he was 26, and he was devastated. The enmity between him and his father plus the death of his mother (and also that of his first wife) threw the young man into a spiral of sadness and melancholy. He increasingly turned to political activity, a subject that had piqued his interest in school. In fact, he would go on to lead a major revolution in the world’s largest nation.

You know him as Mao Zedong.