SRS6--"Native Victory: Jiang Qing Madame Mao by Chuck Malenfant"

Native Victory: Jiang Qing Madame Mao
by Chuck Malenfant

Mao’s fourth wife, Jaing Qing, changed her name twice during her life. Although it was expected that she would be executed after Mao’s death for her role in the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping sentenced her to life imprisonment in her own home instead. Towards the end of her life, sightings of Madame Mao were reported throughout Beijing, as if she were Elvis.

1. Pure and Simple

This is a thread

wound up to make a target

wounded by arrows. In that dark

tension the shaft must

scrape through like music.

The threads inside

forced open by the arrowhead

snap back and crush

the feathers the way

a child is struck

like a handful of money.

In 1912, the tigers yawned

and stretched in the long

civil wars, bearing

the next empress

into the striped light

of a broken house

and the back of her father’s hand.

Such children speak in the confederate tongues

of a shadow, which is light

bruised by the things of this world.

2. Blue Apple

On the screen,

a lone woman

keeps house in the snow

against wolves.

In the Shanghai cinema,

the actress Lan Ping

is pleased her new film

is considered revolutionary.

The woman stands for China,

the wolves, for foreign invaders.

The film is Shanghai’s part

in the great national struggle

for liberation.

At a later showing,

Lan Ping slips behind the screen

to see her skin in the blue of the movie light.

Moving with herself on-screen from behind,

mouthing her lines with the film,

she rehearses the part until,

believing her herself,

she leaves Shanghai for another

change of name and war.

3. Green River

"Did I say a thread?

I meant water.

My name is a drop of water

falling into the center of gravity,

away from the actress,

away from the child Pure and Simple,

straight as string

in the binding of a book,

or a carpenter’s square

marking for the saw.

And so far am I blameless.

"What is waste wood for

if not to warm the workmen’s hands?

"What is the use of a past

that casts doubts on the future?

"Among wolves, did I not

have the right to be

a wolf? And to best the wolves?

Because politics is theater,

my childhood gives me

the right to stardom.

Now enemies of the people

have taken the stage,

but I mean to have

my last soliloquy:

"From the wooden millions of China,

my husband and I

built a gateway to Paradise.

If the Chinese, then,

are unwilling to enter,

that also is not my fault.

"Tell my executioner

it was not my idea

for the Maos to take rooms

in the Forbidden City."