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James Kidd

The Sisters Mao by Gavin McCrea, pub. Scribe
Gavin McCrea had literally just finished work on his excellent second novel, The Sisters Mao, when he was viciously attacked in his hometown of Dublin, Ireland. In February 2020, the much-heralded author of Mrs Engels (2015) had just left the university library, and had phoned his uncle to tell him the good news about completing the book.
A gang of teenagers began shouting homophobic insults, then assaulted McCrea, breaking his nose and cheek.
“It was totally familiar,” the 43-year-old says from Berlin, Germany, where he currently lives and works teaching literature and creative writing. “It was reliving an experience. The words were the same. The [attackers] looked the same. I was 42, but they were the same age as before. Total déjà vu.”

Listening to McCrea describe, with such calm precision, the cowardly attack feels more than a little disconcerting, and never more so than when he concludes: “[The attackers] gave me a tremendous gift. I wasn’t dealing with so many things. The gift they gave me was I had to deal with them now. And the only way, for me, was to put it down on paper.”
Tempting as it is to discuss the resulting, soon-to-be-published memoir, which explores sexuality, childhood and McCrea’s relationship with his mother, the reason we have gathered today is The Sisters Mao.
Cultural Revolution, 50 years on – the pain, passion and power struggle that shaped today’s China
He nods in agreement when I suggest, a little nervously, that his account of the assault sounds eerily like an extension of the novel’s themes: violence as an expression of personal hatred and political tumult, history as a series of ever-repeating cycles, and art as the means to make sense of all of the above.
The Sisters Mao dramatises all this in two intertwining plots. The first is narrated by Jiang Qing, the most enduring of Mao Zedong’s four wives. The bulk of the action takes place during the chairman’s final days, and focuses on a command performance of a ballet, Red Detachment of Women, to honour first lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos’ imminent state visit to China.
The second plot takes place in London during the tumultuous events of 1968, and switches between sisters Iris and Eva, whose troubled personal lives play out through their agitprop political theatre.

It is not hard to draw parallels with McCrea’s highly praised debut, Mrs Engels. That novel also revolved around sisters, the real-life Mary and Lizzie Burns, and told the neglected story of the woman behind a great revolutionary leader: Mary was the long-term partner of Friedrich Engels, co-founder with Karl Marx of communism itself.
“When I was writing Mrs Engels, I suddenly became fascinated with the idea that maybe there are more wives of communist leaders who had a larger presence, and wanted to see what that would be like.”
Enter Madame Mao, otherwise known as Jiang Qing, otherwise known by her Shanghai stage name Lan Ping. It was love, or at least fascination, at first sight. “I read a little about Mao and saw his wife was an actress. That was it. I didn’t need to know any more. An actor who became extremely powerful and was in control of the culture of the country – that was my way into a novel.”
The more McCrea read about Jiang, the more he liked her. Having met Mao as a young actress, she spends much of her life in his shadow, only to emerge “into the light when she is given this massive role to lead the propaganda machine of the Party – basically to decide what’s art, and what isn’t art, for the communist regime”.
Nevertheless, McCrea says he was wary of becoming typecast as “the guy that writes Mrs Engels and Mrs Mao. I can’t be a one-trick pony”. His response was to broaden the horizons of his debut. “I started to think about telling the story of the 20th century in that way,” he says. “Mrs Engels was a communist before communism ever occurred on a national or international level. Madame Mao spans the period of successful revolution more or less to the end of communism.”

McCrea’s Madame Mao makes a forbidding figure, going toe to toe with rivals in love and politics, such as Zhang Yufeng (Mao’s private secretary and mistress) and her Westernised alter ego, Imelda Marcos. While she is routinely ruthless, violent and capricious, she is also portrayed as all-too human: a wife, a mother and a frustrated artist with memories, regrets, desires and fears.
“Jiang Qing was the most powerful woman in the world, but in my novel she was also just living a life,” he says. “Before I even started, I had already decided that Madame Mao can only be a character as important as a whole cast of other characters, most of whom have no historical presence. The egos, desires and failures of the people without her power were just as big to them.”
At the heart of this character is performance – which extends from Jiang’s unspoken nostalgia for her acting days, the public displays of defiance she stages to survive the comrade-eat-comrade world of Maoist China, or the way she audaciously reimagines the ballet for Marcos as a feminist odyssey.
McCrea explains all these different incarnations as united by her fierce commitment to Mao’s ideology. “Jiang Qing is in search of the authentic expression of the revolution in art. Now we can say, ‘Well good luck with that!’ But she earnestly believed there was a way to make Chinese and Communist art synonymous, to make it beautiful and to make it truly revolutionary.”
That Madame Mao ultimately failed in her attempt, frustrated by jealous rivals, sudden political shifts and China’s ironically conservative patriarchy, only added to McCrea’s empathy for his heroine. “I am very close to Jiang Qing. I have no idea about the actual woman. But I understand my fictional character on a very deep level.”

Reading between the lines, one might guess that he is drawn to her status as an outsider. “She was a flawed woman who was held back from the limelight by the political party for a very long time. As an actress, can you imagine?”
She suffered illnesses both physical and mental throughout her life. “Her only trip abroad was to go to a Russian hospital to be treated for depression.”
Even when Jiang finally does step into a public role, she continues to encounter resistance “because she is a woman, because she is Mao’s wife”.
But one suspects that her primary attraction is as a de facto artist – who sought to breathe new life into existing forms, whether by fair means or foul. This brings us full circle, or almost, to the challenges McCrea set himself at the start of The Sisters Mao. “How do I make my book different? How do I make it stand out? How do I make it political, or non-political?”
That he has confronted these questions with such daring, intelligence and compassion makes The Sisters Mao one of the novels of 2021.


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The more he read about Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, the more Gavin McCrea liked her – ‘the most powerful woman in the world, but in my novel also just living a life’

Mao Zedong with his wife Jiang Qing in 1946. Jiang is one of the subjects of Irish writer Gavin McCrea’s novel The Sisters Mao, set in the last days of the Chinese Communist leader’s life and amid the political tumult of 1968 London. Photo: Getty Images

The Sisters Mao author Gavin McCrea. Photo: Gavin McCrea

Chinese premier Zhou Enlai meets Imelda Marcos, first lady of the Philippines, during her visit to Beijing in 1974. Photo: Getty Images

The cover of McCrea’s book.

A Chinese postcard from a set published in 1970 about revolutionary ballet Red Detachment of Women, a staging of which The Sisters Mao reimagines. Photo: Getty Images

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The Sisters Mao takes as one of its themes violence as an expression of political tumult, and interweaves the lives of Jiang and actress sisters in 1968 London
Gavin McCrea, who also dramatised the life of Friedrich Engels’ wife, explains what drew him to Madame Mao, a ‘frustrated artist’ who wielded untold power



The Sisters Mao by Irish novelist Gavin McCrea interweaves the experiences of Mao Zedong’s actress wife with that of two thespian sisters in 1968 London. He explains what drew him to Jiang Qing’s story.


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