Li Zhisui's memoir of his years as Mao's personal physician tells how the doctor went from admiration to disillusionment with the Chairman and the Communist Party. The book's theme is laid out in the opening chapter that describes the death of Mao and the machinations attendant upon his passing. Fear and face saving mixed while the party elite pondered how to preserve Mao’s body. Over all hovered Jiang Qing, the Chairman’s widow and leader of the Gang of Four (I used to have one of their albums), who was riding for a fall. A fascinating backstairs look at absolute power.

This is a view from somebody who saw Mao all the time and knew his habits. There are many books on Mao that focus on his affect on China's, and even world history, which was profound. But this book shatters the myths. Spoiler alert - even in private, he wasn't a very nice man.

Riveting look at the absurd, corrupt, & paranoid machinations of Mao and his communist party from the standpoint of his Western-educated personal physician of 22 years. Well written.

This book was really good at showing how insane Mao truly was. It was so long and very dry but very thorough. I feel bad for Dr. Li. The last lines of the book are “I devoted my professional life to Mao and China, but now I am stateless and homeless, unwelcome in my own country. I write this book in great sorrow for Lillian [his wife] and for everyone who cherishes freedom. I wan it to serve as a reminder of the terrible human consequences of Mao’s dictatorship and of how good and talented people living under his regime were forced to violate their consciences and sacrifice their ideals in order to survive.”

It's astonishing to know many details, for example, the decadence of Mao's sexual life. How everyone in the high rank including him is so anxious and insomnia. This made me remember Kang Sheng in his last year 1973, that he barely slept and always sat on the couch one night by another. Kang chose to see no one and not eat anything, and the paranoia that someone had tried to poison him was so severe. Even Jiang Qing only lets him eat before she eats.

Cuốn sách này đến với tôi một cách tình cờ. Qua một số trích đoạn, của một tiến sỹ về kinh tế tôi follow trên Facebook.
Lẽ dĩ nhiên, trước khi đọc cuốn sách này, tôi đã dự cảm trước những thứ tiêu cực về người lãnh tụ của Trung Hoa.
Tuy nhiên, tôi lại vô cùng ngạc nhiên với nửa đầu cuốn sách, tác giả không hề nói xấu Mao như tôi tưởng, ông không nghề ngần ngại bày tỏ sự ngưỡng mộ với Mao.
Đọc về đời tư của Mao, giúp tôi có một cái nhìn khách quan hơn về lịch sử Trung Quốc trong những năm tháng đầu tiên của cách mạng, đâu đó, tôi thấy dáng dấp của nước tôi.
Tuy nhiên, chúng tôi may mắn hơn vì đã không có Đại nhảy vọt, không có cách mạng văn hóa, mà chỉ có cải cách ruộng đất. Một sai lầm khiến chủ tịch Hồ Chí Minh phải rớt nước mắt khi xin lỗi toàn dân.
Còn Mao, ông chẳng xin lỗi nhân dân lấy một lời.
Mao là một nhà cách mạng, một nhà chính trị kiệt xuất nhưng lại là một nhà kinh tế tồi.

I came to this book looking for a credible, respectable, fly-on-the-wall account of Mao Zedong's life. It ended up only partially meeting one of those three basic criteria; it was neither respectable nor was the source very credible, and for large portions (especially the later years, when Dr. Li had admittedly fallen out of favor with Mao) we did not even get eyewitness accounts.

A bizarre warning comes in the very introduction when Dr. Li, who has just given a thorough explanation of his journaling practices (ostensibly to support the credentials of the ensuing account), then explains how he eventually burned all his notes but still remembers verbatim conversations with Mao almost 20 years later "(b)ecause Mao's language was so colorful and vivid and deeply etched in my brain" and, "My survival and that of my family had always depended on Mao's words; I could not forget them." (p.xvii) My thoughts after reading that passage went something like this: "Oh, okay, that sounds reasonable enou--- waaait a second. . . does that. . . umm. . . yeah. . . so that means he kept notes but didn't use them for this and just relied on his seventy-something year-old memory for events that happened 20-30 years ago?. . .okaaaaayyy. . . that actually sounds like complete bullshit."

Credibility, meet your undoing.

Dr. Li's credibility is further damaged by the way he narrates certain events. His accounts are conspicuous for their absence of meaningful self-criticism. Sure he occasionally says he should have done something differently, but he doesn't ever seem sincere. Here's an example:

I am grateful that I did not understand Mao at the time, did not know how widespread his purges were, how horribly my fellow intellectuals were suffering, how many people were dying. I had tried to escape from Mao's circle so many times, and always Mao had pulled me back. Now I was trapped, with no hope of leaving. There was much that I could have seen then but did not. What if I really had known clearly what was happening outside my protective cocoon? What if I really had understood the depth and extent of the purges? I could never have accepted it, but I would have been powerless to do anything, either. I would not have been able to leave the circle and I would not have been able to live within it.

The Chinese have an expression, nande hutu, which means that it is difficult to be muddle-headed -- but lucky. It is an expression reserved for situations like mine. Looking back, I know that I was muddle-headed during those years. I had to be. It was the only way to survive.

So to sum up: Excuse, excuse, justification, excuse, rationalization and half-hearted self-criticism. The overwhelming takeaway from a passage such as this is Dr. Li's timidity and conventionality. And of course how much can we really trust the account of such a person? Are we to just assume from the absence in his memoir that he did not actively participate in any of the persecutions, that his actions did not result in the "purging" or condemnation of anyone else? He depicts himself a little too cleanly to really believe. And just from reading the passage above you would never guess that the "so many" escape attempts were really just him asking a superior to transfer him to another post. It's sort of an insult to people who actually were courageous at that time and committed much more drastic actions.

The respectability of the proceedings runs into problems when Dr. Li spends an inordinate amount of time speaking of the sexual and physical characteristics of his subjects. On p.100 he needlessly describes how he masturbated Mao, and later on in the book he commits what to me seems a pretty huge transgression when he uses a patient's reaction to physical crisis to comment on his lack of courage. This came across as both unethical and immoral, regardless of whether the then-patient is currently living or not.

Finally, the scope of the book was disappointing in that it was not quite as advertised. A good portion of the book, maybe half, doesn't have to do much with Mao's "private life" at all, but rather deals with the situation in China as a whole and its effect on Dr. Li. Perhaps it could have been more accurately called "The Private Life of Dr. Li Who Occasionally Glimpsed the Private Life of Chairman Mao." Especially in the later years, as I already mentioned, Dr. Li wasn't even really around Mao, so he (somewhat self-consciously, it appears) has to fill up pages with minor details about Politburo factions and in-fighting. He doesn't necessarily seem to be glorifying his role in the proceedings, but a more cynical person than myself might read it that way (I'm told such people exist but have not yet confirmed it). Also, the book gets repetitive and tedious at times.

Overall, I did learn much about Mao the man and his era in Chinese history. I now want to rewatch the movie "To Live" to see again the sumptuous recreation of the Cultural Revolution. I just wish Dr. Li would have kept the focus of the book tighter and maintained more professional discipline in what he chose to divulge. I also wish he wouldn't have passed it off as perfectly-recreated dialogue even after burning his notes, as that just defies belief.

Not Bad Reviews

@pointblaek

Long, but detailed and very personal look into the life of Mao. A bit terrifying.

“We have so many people,” he would say. “We can afford to lose a few. What difference does it make?”
“He wanted to borrow from the West without becoming subordinate to it, to create something new that was neither Chinese nor Western but a hybrid. ”
“Confucianism had stifled creativity in the past, and Marxist dogma was stifling it today.”
“Taiwan keeps the pressure on us. It helps maintain our internal unity. Once the pressure is off, internal disputes might break out.”
“The people” were nothing but a vast multitude of faceless, helpless slaves.”
“Mao’s insistence that classes persisted even under socialism effectively silenced the voices of reason, voices of potential dissent.”
“I like to deal with rightists. They say what they really think—not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.”
“Mao was as excited as I had ever seen him the day Nixon arrived. ”
“The Chinese people had been rallied to support one political movement after another since 1949, and each movement had been more deadly and debilitating than the last. ”

Damn It Feels Good To Be A Dictator!

I liked House of Cards, but I love this book! Breathtaking power struggles filled to the brim.

It would not be a cake walk for a non-Chinese to fully appreciate this book, but it should definitely be no harder to read than the Lord of the Rings. Only the traitors more traitorous and monsters more monstrous. And upon finishing this book, the reader would finally truly fully understand why the Ring, or Power in this book, is so PRECIOUS.

It's easy to take the moral high ground and pass judgement on Mao here, but I think I could easily have done worse had I had held the Ring myself.

Li Zhisui served as a personal physician to Mao Zedong for twenty-two years. And yet he doesn’t have much to say in his 700-odd page memoir that could be considered worthwhile.

Zhisui in fact warns the reader in the introduction about his political naivety, so there's that. And it also doesn’t help that he wrote this memoir entirely by recollecting the incidents from memory.

Zhisui actually comes-off as a reluctant memoirist, which I consider unforgivably oxymoronic. For example, he finds sex to be a really offensive subject and so, he shies away from it as much as he can at every turn. He says that he was never interested in politics, but then he rants endlessly about the piddling conflicts perennially happening between Mao’s bodyguards and nurses. What he should have said – for accuracy’s sake - was that he was not interested in state politics. He was all for inconsequential office politics. In other words, he was apathetic to things that mattered, but not to those that did not, which makes this book as interesting as a 700-page long doctor’s prescription, where he dedicates more than half of the pages to write about men of Mao’s inner security circle and their petty politics to earn Mao’s favor, or in most cases, to avoid his wrath.

Though, he begins the first chapter interestingly enough with Mao’s death. Zhisui candidly talks about his lack of knowledge about the embalming process, and how, due to that, at one time Mao’s face becomes bloated to almost double its size due to the injection of excessive embalming fluid. At the least, that is one little, interesting tidbit you won’t find anywhere else except in Zhisui’s book.

What little I did learn from this book was - that Mao was some sort of “half-nudist” (he seldom wore enough clothes), who never washed, never brushed his teeth (Zhisui used to remove layers of plaque from his teeth twice a year) or left his bed for a considerable amount of time. He also liked to seduce young and innocent girls and knowingly used to infect them with a venereal disease he carried. He only used to take sponge baths, occasionally. Only time he ever got himself immersed fully in water was when he decided to swim in a river for hours on end to show his “manliness” (no wonder the river dolphins went extinct).

But what I consider his biggest mistake is that he missed a really good opportunity to provide us a peek into the mind of one of the worst dictators the world has ever seen. You see, Mao liked Li. And so he used to talk with Li frequently from midnight till dawn. Only if Zhisui would have been kind enough to tell us what actually they talked about. Not once does he feels inclined enough to recount any of the countless conversations he had had with Mao. He would just say something like, “We talked till dawn and then I returned to my whatever.”

This book should be re-titled “The Petty Internal Politics of Chairman Mao’s Bodyguards”.

Fascinating but frustratingly limited look into the last 22 years of the private life of Mao from the perspective of his personal doctor Li. Considering how little I knew about Mao, this was very interesting, but a bit shallow when trying to see the big picture about Mao. I will need to read another book for that perspective.
This book did help me to better understand how the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Resolution developed. But again, too broadly addressed to really understand the full depth of these horrific events that killed millions. The scale of these disasters were not well defined.
Amazing to read about the endemic paranoia and political maneuvering of the Politburo. Of course Mao's sex life was interesting. The story of the Gang of Four was also very illuminating. It was difficult to understand why Mao tolerated his Dragon Lady wife and ringleader of the Gang of Four. But Doctor Li's limited insights were very revealing.
So many historical events were only briefly touched upon like the meetings with Khrushchev and Nixon. Doctor Li's extremely detailed medical details and minutia was a bit much, but then again, he was Mao's doctor.

I wish to have a chance to know more about the inside story of Chairman Mao.
This book gives a lot of general information, which we can easily find out on Google.