MCLC: chairman's underage lovers (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Delia Davin <D.Davin at leeds.ac.uk>
Subject: chairman's underage lovers (1)
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Dr Mirsky's article first appeared in the Spectator not this year (as
shown in the recent posting) but in 2011. Did it get reprinted? [My fault.
I pulled this from another listserv, and assumed, without checking,
That the date of publication was 2013. Sorry--Kirk]

Dr Mirsky says that Ms Chen (Chen Huimin) was 57 when he met her in 1997.
This would have meant that she was born in 1940 and would have been 22 in
1962 when she met Mao, rather than the under-age 14 year old of this
account.

On the other hand, Hong Kong journalist Jin Zhong (金鐘) in his article
'Confessions of a Concubine' (毛澤東情人自白錄), published in Kaifang (also
in 
2011), records that when he met Ms Chen in 1997 'according to her own
subsequent telling', she was 49 years old which would fit with her being
14 in 1962.

We don't know the truth of Ms Chen's age. It seems at least possible that
like many women in societies that are particularly ageist towards them,
she had begun to reduce it in the stories she told by 1997. In any case it
is clear that Dr Mirsky has failed to do his arithmetic.

Delia
University of Leeds