WHEN a package arrived in the office one recent afternoon and the contents were held up for inspection, there was a collective sigh of envy. 'I want one of those,' said three people (two men and a woman) simultaneously. The object of desire was not so very obscure for those who read fashion magazines; it was a Vivienne Tam T-shirt and on the front there was a portrait of Mao Zedong. He was wearing two pigtails and a lace collar and had the look of a benign cheerleader. Neatly sewn across this ridiculous visage were 720 transparent sequins which twinkled jauntily under the office fluorescent lights.
OK, I admit it. It is a nice feeling to have an item of clothing which everyone else covets. Never having been a trend-setter, I was pleasantly aware that New Yorkers had gone bonkers over these T-shirts when Tam had shown them on the runways last year. I'd watched a video of the collection with a fashion editor who breathed 'I want one of those' every time Mao - in lipstick or in pigtails or with a bee on his nose - appeared twinkling across a supermodel bosom. They were hot. They were hip. People said they were witty. They even inspired witty editorials: the Los Angeles Times headline said 'Mao, Mao, Mao - How Do You Like It?' Rather a lot, answered the fashion folk.
They are also very, very expensive. They retail here at $880 which is a staggering amount of money, you will agree, for a T-shirt. When I went off to a dinner party a week later wearing mine, I felt like carrying a placard saying Have You Any Idea How Much This Cost? Fortunately, my hostess opened the door and immediately said (I'm not joking): 'I want one of those'. I was the last to arrive, because I couldn't find a taxi, and as I sat down one of the other guests remarked, with a laugh: 'I'm surprised you got any taxi driver to pick you up wearing that.' Which was what I had thought myself. Because a mental transformation had taken place between leaving my flat and arriving at dinner. As I walked down the street where I live, in Sai Wan Ho, a doubt which had been pecking at my brain for a while began to take on the insistent level of a jack-hammer. And what it said was: is Mao funny? THERE is a bit in Jung Chang's Wild Swans where she describes the death of her father. It's in the chapter entitled 'If This Is Paradise, What Then Is Hell?'. By 1975, the cult of Mao had unleashed cruelty and madness, double speak and denunciation throughout China. 'I thought of my father's life, his wasted dedication and crushed dreams ... his death seemed so inevitable,' Chang writes. 'There was no place for him in Mao's China because he had tried to be an honest man.' A lot of the older generation in Hong Kong, I thought (hunching my shoulders and grasping my bag to my chest as I sidled through Sai Wan Ho) came here precisely so that they wouldn't have to deal with Mao, pig-tailed or otherwise. I would hardly wear a T-shirt with Hitler blazoned across it in Europe, and I wasn't sure that it was morally right to parade an equivalent expensive joke around Hong Kong. Or indeed anywhere.
A couple of questions instantly spring to mind, the most obvious being: is Mao the same as Hitler or the current popular baddie, Saddam Hussein? Well, presumably not. Hitler killed himself, Saddam Hussein, although he doesn't seem to know it, also lost a war, but Mao's portrait still hangs in Tiananmen Square and he died in his bed and was mourned by his people. Is it an entirely Western perception to think of him as a monster? I sent a fax to David Tang who was in New York. Shanghai Tang sells those Mao watches upon which the Great Helmsman appears to be Sieg Heil-ing to the masses. A German girl expressed her disgust for this concept to a friend of mine who happened to be wearing one, and you can see her point. But they are, like the Tam T-shirts, extremely popular, not to mention, at $350, a good deal cheaper. Tang who was on his way to Cuba (can the Castro watch and T-shirt be far off?) sent back the original fax covered in terse scribbles.
Reading, literally, between the lines, such comments emerged as 'Mao is not nearly as politically unacceptable as the others' (i.e. Hitler and Hussein) and 'No difference [sic] than say Henry VIII, Boadicea or Napoleon who were all pretty cruel'. Nobody had ever objected to him about the watch which he wears on his travels: 'They love it.' Another sentence amid the thicket read: 'Using an image is hardly glorification. Also, the image emphasises the artistic icon of Mao (like what Andy Warhol did?).' I liked that question mark. It reflected my own state of mind.
Then I spoke to Vivienne Tam, also in New York, who told me that the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh had requested a selection of her Mao T-shirts. She had had great difficulty getting the T-shirts printed in Hong Kong. 'The factories didn't want to do it, so I finally went to some friends and they helped me,' she recalled. 'The original computer reference number was 6497 - June 4, 1997. It was weird, we couldn't believe it. The factory didn't want that number, especially after a light bulb broke, so they changed it ...' Tam has just appeared in People magazine's May issue, as one of The 50 Most Beautiful People In The World, wearing a Mao dress - which is a long march from what the rest of us might perceive as the grey austerity of the Mao era. 'The reason I'm doing it is that he's a spiritual leader, an icon and I want to loosen up his image,' Tam said. 'Have you seen the T-shirt with the bee on his nose? It's called Ow Mao. It's the left wing and right wing. You know, he didn't like democracy. But it's about the humorous side of Mao, about liberation. I'm very happy with it.' And that leads to another question: does humour defuse misery? I have some Jewish friends who tell me that their favourite film is The Producers. For those of you who haven't seen it, the plot revolves around a musical called Springtime For Hitler, and in a key scene a high-stepping chorus line of storm troopers yodel the lyrics: 'Springtime for Hitler and Germany/Winter for Poland and France ...' I'm relieved my Jewish friends find that hilarious: it's like receiving the official dispensation to laugh.