History has cast Madame Mao as an enthusiastic instigator of many of the “excesses” of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Tried as a member of the “Gang of Four” in 1980, Jiang Ching, aka Madame Mao, ex-actress and driving force behind the proletarian operas and films that inspired millions, was sentenced to life imprisonment for her part in the murders, imprisonments and desecration of culture that characterized her husband's rule of China. I don't recall hearing of a Mrs. Mao during Mao's reign and, even today, little has been written about her. Apart from Ross Terrill's highly regarded biography, Madame Mao: The White-Boned Demon, which attempts to present her as an archetypal woman warrior, most accounts agree that the woman who no longer appears in Chinese history books was a most unpleasant, vindictive and opportunistic creature with few, if any, redeeming qualities.*

Despite having such a reviled subject as her main character, Lau Siew Mei skillfully manages to avoid the question of whether Madame Mao was as bad as all that. Instead, she presents her in many contradictory roles played by an actress in Singapore who eventually takes over the character and the writing of her script. Playing Madame Mao is a novel about life as theatre with an intensely personal narrative set against a larger than life but not nostalgic history of dynastic China. The reader is presented with a sequence of appearances and illusions created by the shifting perspectives of the key players; actress Chiang Ching, her dissident husband Tang Na Juan, and her journalist friend Roxanne (a character based on Roxanne Witke, author of Comrade Chiang Ch'ing). The movement between each first person point of view is mediated by third person narrative, and this enables a merging of history and legend, myth and fiction to create a world filled with uncertainty and change that is reflected in the characters' lives.

Despite its focus on such an enigmatic figure, Lau also avoids delivering the sort of autobiographical text that Australian audiences have come to expect from diasporic Asian women writers. In Playing Madam Mao, identities and any politics that attach to them are undermined by Lau's fascinating foregrounding of the complexities of representation itself and its role in oppressive social and political practices. Chiang Ching, an actress who struggles to see herself in the mirror, acts the part of ex-actress Madame Mao. Tang has difficulty recognizing himself in his roles as husband, dissident writer for a Catholic newspaper and political activist. Roxanne's ambition, mirrored in her husband's treachery to Tang, similarly strives in her roles as well-respected and well-paid journalist and one-time friend to Chiang Ching. One of the many strengths of this narrative noir, therefore, lies in its highly literary enactment of each character's search for freedom and love against an impossibly constrained and regulated political and social world.

Playing Madame Mao is also a novel of insinuation. The line between the real and the imagined is blurred as Ching struggles to retain a sense of self that is set apart from the woman that she plays each night. They share many similarities apart from their names, as Ching appears to adopt some of Madame Mao's idiosyncratic behaviours, and as she becomes increasingly aware of the mirror people; the same vengeful creatures of the underworld that once influenced the thoughts and actions of Madame Mao. While Madame Mao was exiled in prison, Ching is exiled in Sunnybank Hills, Brisbane, in what seems an ironic choice of location for her demise as the reviled Madame Mao.

Given the extraordinarily large thematic tapestry that Lau has chosen; freedom, oppression, political intrigue, betrayal, change and stasis, the real and the imagined, it is perhaps not surprising that this first novel from an undoubtedly talented writer has some minor flaws. While surface observations beautifully reflect the inner worlds of each character, I found some of the symbolism a little obscure. For example, during Roxanne's final visit, Ching accuses her of smelling of fish. As fish are associated with perfection and the presence of the mirror people, it is unclear what conclusion to draw from Ching's accusation. While slipperiness is itself an important part of this narrative, sometimes there was not quite enough (for me) to grasp. But perhaps this is the point and Lau has simply drawn a line under any more tiresome explanations of Chinese cultural customs. In view of this I suspect that this novel will not attract the kind of popularity that many other novels by young Brisbane-based authors enjoy and it may not make its way onto university reading lists. Rather than lending itself to readings based on purely on the politics of identity, Playing Madame Mao provides a more complex examination of power, politics and the personal in its finely crafted appraisal of how representation is an inherent component of political and social oppression.


Shirley Tucker is a lecturer in Contemporary Studies at the Ipswich Campus of The University of Queensland.

* Hecate readers, as usual, will have been better informed, in this case by Susan Gardner's article '"The Enemy of Women's Liberation": A Response to Roxane Witke's Comrade Chiang Ching,' Hecate 4.1 (1978): 25-46.