Tragedy in Crimson by Tim Johnson

Author:Tim Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2010-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

IN MY FIRST FORMAL INTERVIEW with Renji at her compound, she agreed to talk about her life while flipping through photo albums. Her father had married her mother after emerging from nearly a decade of imprisonment, and he was yet to be rehabilitated when Renji was born in 1983. But the government returned to him the trappings of power, including the coterie of attendants and the chance to revive friendships with senior party leaders. So Renji grew up in a privileged setting. After her birth, she had three monks and two women who attended to her needs. “I had a person who was my driver, another who was my chef, and my personal ‘play with me’ person,” she recalled. “Whenever I’d go out, there’d be people carrying my silverware.” Someone else would trail along carrying a special container for Renji to pee into when the urge struck her.

At a party to celebrate the hundredth day after her birth, she was given another nickname, one by which she is still known among senior party cadres. Deng Yingchao, the widow of former Premier Zhou Enlai, the number 2 to Mao Zedong, picked the name upon seeing how chubby the girl was. She called her “Tuantuan.” Tuan in Mandarin has two meanings, one of which is “round,” and the face of the Panchen Lama’s daughter fit the bill. Tuan also means “to unify,” and the name Tuantuan came to symbolize the hope of party leaders that ethnic minorities would feel unity with the Han Chinese. The name still sticks among older party members who have known Renji since her childhood.

During her early years, the Panchen Lama’s compound had as many as fifty or sixty people in residence, including visiting senior lamas, leaders of other religions, relatives, and others. Renji’s most intimate times with her father came at dawn. “Every morning, he’d get up at 4:30 or 5 o’clock at the latest to do his morning chanting.” After a short period, attendants would wake Renji and bring her into the shrine hall, where she would listen to his chanting. On Saturdays, the Panchen Lama would hold audiences for the public, and throngs of people would show up, crowding the hutong outside to the point that the public latrine would be overrun. During warmer weather, the Panchen Lama would take his family up to the Western Hills outside Beijing, where the party allotted him a recreational villa with a menagerie of horses, deer, a bull, monkeys, and dogs. Also living in the Western Hills was the family of Xi Zhongxun, the senior cadre whose son is approaching the top party leadership. Madame Deng, the widow of Zhou Enlai, was also a regular visitor. Madame Deng was a power in her own right, playing a key role in affairs of the Panchen Lama’s family.

Renji quickly slipped into the colloquial English she learned as a teenager in Southern California as she flipped pages of the photo albums. “These are us just chilling,” she said, looking at one photo of a picnic.

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