FOR ONE BEIJING HOTELLER, IT'S LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION
Cashing in on Mao-stalgia
THERE IS SOMETHING CREEPY ABOUT cruising the darkening streets
of Beijing sunk in the velvet upholstery of Madame Mao's 1970's
Red Flag limousine. My feet propped up on the jump seat - just
as Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's third wife, liked to sit on her
own tours of the capital-lsip champagne, nibble caviar and not
as my 20-year-old tour guide, Maggie, recounts tales of China's
glorious communist past. As we pass Tiananmen Square and its
floodlit portrait of Chairman Mao, I've suddenly had enough.
Unable to take more of Maggie's garbled history, I interrupt
to ask: "Don't you find it strange to be riding in the
car of the most reviled woman in China?" Maggie shrugs,
"Why would it be strange? She's famous - just like Jackie
Chan."
Maggie obviously wears her history lightly. Not so her boss,
Lawrence Brahm, a 41-year-old American hotelier and restaurateur
who's founded a miniempire by excavating the bad old days, giving
them glamour and letting people revisit them-for a tidy price.
Brahm owns Jiang's limo and a treasure trove of other Communist
Party artifacts. They decorate his restaurant, the Red Capital
Club, and his boutique hotel, the Red Capital Residence, both
housed in 200-year-old courtyard compounds in Beijing's Dongcheng
District. Brahm has seized upon a romanticized notion of China
at the cusp of revolution and turned it into a luxury-entertainment
brand that appeals not only to visiting foreigners with a sense
of irony but also to young Chinese and old generals nostalgic
for the early days when life seemed simpler. Both the hotel
and the restaurant are usually packed. Call(86-10)64027150 for
reservations or to book a $200 tour of the capital in Jiang's
limo.
Brahm, a New York native, arrived in Beijing in 1981 as a student,
clutching a well-worn copy of Mao's Little Red Book and seeking
the revolutionary fervor he first encountered in Edgar R. Snow's
Red Star Over China. He was too late, of course: Deng Xiaoping
had already started his radical transformation of the country.
Undaunted, Brahm folded his romantic visions of a communist
utopia between the pages of his little Red Book, left it on
the shelf and plunged headlong into a rapidly modernizing China.
He apprenticed himself to a British law firm and from there
moved into consulting for multinational corporations trying
to get into China. His romance with the country deepened with
his marriage to the daughter of a Chinese general - a relationship
that has presumably made it easier for him to acquire rare communist
memorabilia.
Last year, seeking a change of pace, Brahm closed the books
of his Beijing based consulting practice to dedicate himself
to his new projects. Still besotted with his eerily romantic
image of a lost China, he has returned to his Little Red Book
and the nostalgia tucked inside. Ever the businessman, he has
used his China experience to turn a profit out of propaganda.
His first venture, the Red Capital Club, opened in 1999 and
was inspired by the comments of high-ranking Chinese visitors
to his renovated courtyard home. They were awed by his collection
of revolutionary furnishings, so he came up with the idea for
a restaurant that celebrated what he calls communist chic. "China
has modernized so much, so quickly, that Beijing now looks like
Los Angeles," says Brahm. "The people have lost the
kind of cultural spirit that used to drive the place. It used
to be that China was all ideology and no material goods; now
it is all materialism but no ideology. So the Chinese guests
seek some sort of nostalgia for how they thought it once was.
" At his restaurant and hotel, Brahm has succeeded where
even master propagandist Jiang failed: he has erased the tragedy
and rendered the revolution perfect. He points to an empty pack
of official Communist Party cigarettes glued to the wooden armrest
of a vintage easy chair. "What I am trying to do is recreate
a mood, a dream of the 1950s innocence when idealism was building
postrevolutionary China. I want to capture the essence of how
people lived then and how powerful people made decisions."
Despite Brahm's enthusiasm for the early idealism of China's
communist liberation, many of his vintage treasures - posters,
lamps, porcelain figurines depicting Red Guards and busts of
Mao-date to the darker days of the Cultural Revolution.
His second project, the Red Capital Residence, opened in 2001
and has five rooms outfitted with original 1950s furnishings
culled from the Cultural Revolution Reparatioins Committee stores(Which
stockpiled pieces confiscated by the Red Guards), as well as
items donated by Pary members and their families. Low-slung
leather chairs in the cigar lounge were used by members of the
Politburo; the green-shaded lamps came from the desks of ministers;
a think purple curtain in the reception area comes from Mao's
house in the exclusive government compound of Zhongnanhai.
The guest rooms are decorated along different themes. The Edgar
Snow Room features an old typewriter with a facsimile of a page
from Red Star Over China still on the roller. The two sumptuously
decorated Concubine Suites, complete with silk-draped, Ming-era
opium beds, are designed for guests who, says Brahm, "always
wanted to be a concubine - or have one." The Chairman's
Chrysanthemum Suite is modeled on Mao's library and bedroom,
where he received most of his visitors. The bookshelf above
the antique bed is stacked with the Great Helmsman's favorites:
Sun Tzu's The Art of War, Lo Kuan-chung's Romance of the Three
Kingdoms, Karl Marx's Das Kapital and several treatises on Chinese
political philosophy. Instead of a Bible on the bedside table,
there is a stack of Little Red Books. Photographs of Mao's various
wives and mistresses adorn the coffee table. And, yes, there
is even a Mao alarm clock.
Beijing has other eating joints that celebrate the Cultural
Revolution by serving up the hearty peasant fare that Beijingers
remember from their enforced exile in the countryside. Brahm's
approach is far tonier. His Red Capital Club boasts Zhongnanhai
cuisine - the preferred dishes of the Party elite who lived
in Beijing's government enclave. Mao's favorite meal, red roast
pork with bitter melon, is on the menu, as is Deng's family
recipe for chicken. (That dish comes garnished with black-and
white-cat sculptures-carved out of beets and turnips- honor
of Deng's famous economic axiom: It doesn't matter if the cat
is black or white, as long as it catches mice.) The culinary
allusions continue with the dessert offerings: yuan xiao, rice-paste
dumplings stuffed with peanuts and black sesame, are listed
as Chiang Kai-shek's balls. Elegance is combined with camp:
an antique telephone on a lounge table is wired to play a recording
of Mao's voice. The house wine, a French Bordeaux carrying the
Red Capital label, is described in the menu as "appropriate
for any party or mass gathering."
The residence's Qing-dynasty compound is rumored to have once
been the home of Kuomingtang General Fu Zuoyi and served as
both an infirmary and message center for the Communist government.
In the late 1960s, a bomb shelter was dug out from under the
courtyard on the orders of Lin Biao, Mao's then-heir apparent.
Brahm has turned it into the three-chambered Bomb Shelter Bar,
a lushly decorated wine and cigar lounge where you can sip red
Bordeaux while watching vintage films, such as The East Is Red
and Ballet of the Red Detachment of Women. Brahm has improved
on one of the most powerful propaganda campaigns in history.
Not only are his guests embracing his version of an uncomfortable
past-they're also buying it.
