​This is an English translation of Mao’s “Little Red Book”.
Inside the front cover, I’d written:
                       Julia Clarke, Bristol, 1968.

​Fifty years later,  I took the Little Red Book with me to China. It wasn't until we got to Chengdu, capital city of Sichuan province, that I found someone to give it to.

Our friend, guide and interpreter Qianqian brought us here to meet San Lang and her 76 year old mother.  ​On the 16th floor of a building whose lower flowers are occupied by a luxury hotel, San Lang has created a kind of sanctuary. In one corner there is a Buddhist shrine.​ San Lang is a dentist, and this room is next to her surgery.  Patients can read, relax, meet or play here before they go for treatment.

While her mother was quietly meditating in another part of the room, San Lang showed us this photograph of her parents.  ​San Lang’s father had been a soldier in the Red Army all his life.  He died less than a year ago. San Lang didn’t want her mother, Liang Fang, to see this photograph, because it always made her cry.  It seems that weeping is seen as something that should be done in private.

​With Qianqian interpreting, San Lang told us that her paternal grandfather (Liang Fang’s husband’s father), was a successful stone carver, a master craftsman, and quite wealthy, with a beautiful house. Following an arranged marriage, his young bride poisoned herself.  Her parents were so angry they locked him up with her dead body for a week. As a result, he never wanted to marry or have a relationship with a woman again. So, in order to create his own family, he adopted a son and a daughter, each from different local poor families, and when they grew up, they married each other and one of their sons was Liang Fang’s husband.  

But the wealthy stone carver became addicted to opium and spent all his money, so they were poor and Liang Fang’s father-in-law didn’t get his first pair of shoes until he was almost an adult, by which time his feet had become twisted through exposure in the bitter cold of winter. (I think this photo is San Lang and her two brothers and parents, so the old man is the adopted son of the stone-carver and the father of the man standing behind him).  San Lang has been back to the village and met the birth families from which her paternal grandparents were adopted.  The old house is now lying empty.​
​
San Lang told us another story, about Liang Fang’s mother (?), who also attempted suicide, by throwing herself in the river.  But she was rescued and lived to raise 14 children, including her own. The other children’s mothers had to work on the farm to provide enough food for them all.  

​At this point Liang Fang joined us and spoke to us about the China of her childhood, before the revolution, when women had to wash their husband’s feet, serve him and his parents with food and retreat to the kitchen to eat alone.  ​​It was Chairman Mao’s opposition to such forms of oppression which inspired Liang Fang and so many others to follow Chairman Mao and inspired her young husband to join the Red Army.

​I asked Liang Fang about her education.  She told us that she was much younger than her brothers and when they all left home, her parents kept her home to care for them.  But when she was 14, her older brother insisted that she should have an education and she went to live with him.  It was a long walk to and from school but she loved learning, studied hard, and achieved the grades for admission to the best of 3 local middle schools.  However, when she had only been at the middle school a short time, Mao called for people to go and work in the factories and, believing in the importance of developing China for the benefit of the people, she volunteered. 

​Liang Fang worked for two years in a factory, hard work and long hours, but then she was criticised because she had only lived in the town and wore good quality clothes, so she was told she should go and work in the countryside.  Liang Fang worked on a farm for two more years and found it hard because she’d never done farm work before.  But she had happy memories of laughing and chatting with her friends when they went to wash their clothes in the stream.

 Liang Fang said she always believed in Mao’s vision, but as he got old, he lost control of its implementation in practice and Lin Biao drove things in the wrong direction.  Liang Fang did acknowledge, however, that responsibility for the 'mistakes' of the cultural revolution lay with Mao Tse Tung. ​The current government line is that Lin Biao, who was responsible for publishing the Little Red Book, was a counter-revolutionary. 

This poster from the 1970s, exhorts people to criticize both Lin Biao and Confucius. Liang Fang, while supporting the party view that Mao was 30% mistaken, regards Mao’s opposition to Buddhism and Confucianism as the primary source of his mistakes. 

Mao's rejection of Buddhism is denied by the author of a Buddhist-Marxist alliance web site and when I gave Liang Fang my Little Red Book, although she couldn’t read the English, she was delighted when I showed her Lin Biao’s preface in the front.  She glanced at her daughter, as if seeking approval, and took the Buddhist prayer beads from her wrist and gave them to me. 

We shared our stories of love and loss and family and religion (or lack of it).  I told Liang Fang that I’d bought the book in 1968, when we were protesting against the American war in Vietnam.  I asked her where she was in 1968 and she told me that was when her youngest child, San Lang, was born.  Her five year old brother had been charging around and bashed into her, which brought on the labour 2 weeks early, so there wasn’t time to get to the hospital, but someone was able to drive off and fetch a doctor to attend to the birth at home.   

I had been afraid that Liang Fang wouldn’t want to say much, but she said a whole lot which it was impossible for Qianqian to translate in full.  I’d like to have recorded some of it, to translate later, but didn’t want to interrupt or inhibit the conversation.  Also, she talked so much, and by the time Qianqian had summarised what she said, we sometimes lost the flow and I failed to check my own understanding or ask more questions.  So I may have got a bit mixed up in the family saga.

But there was no misunderstanding about the depth of human connection here. In response to comments about Ian and I travelling so far at such a great age, we often attribute our courage to the experience of losing my son Saul (in 2004) and Ian's daughter Sara (in 2015). They both loved life and fought tenaciously for every day and hour of it, leaving us determined to live our own lives to the full. When Ian told a story about Sara’s last days, Qianqian, who was interpreting the entire conversation, was terribly apologetic about her inability to hold back her tears.

We really enjoy going out and getting lost in a city, and a few years ago we wrote a song about it.  So I've used this as a sound track for a collection of images from our trip.   In all the cities we visited in China, we found cheap public transport and we learnt to negotiate our way across roads teeming with electric scooters, bikes, cars and pedestrians all over the place.  Communication was often a challenge with our limited Mandarin, and very few people we met could speak English or read a map.  But people always wanted to help and would sometimes go out of their way to take us where we wanted to go.