SHAOSHAN, China — You expect hero worship. You expect dogma and doctrine and patriotism-streaked pleas for the workers of the world to unite. You even expect emotion. But not this.
Cigarette dangling, a man sits on a stool outside Mao Tse-tung's childhood home. Kneeling on the rutted asphalt, a teenage boy silently buffs the man's shoes to a shiny cordovan.
In the parking lot of the house-turned-museum, this much is clear: The class struggle launched by the most famous revolutionary that Hunan Province ever produced has ended up in a place that the chairman could never have envisioned.
China's adolescent capitalism -- its "socialist market economy" -- has reached the rural heartland. But unlike the bursts of garish acquisitiveness in the cities, here it takes a more subtle form.
Aside from the national park-like tourist attractions -- Mao's 1893 birthplace and, up the road, a three-story statue and a museum of his life and times -- Shaoshan seems a standard Chinese small town. That doesn't mean that it's gray and communist, though: Even as the Chinese make an icon out of Mao, they are racing to leave behind most of what he instructed them to do.
You could exhaust your last breath walking around Shaoshan and noting the everyday ironies that mock the man who denounced the profit motive and sang "The East Is Red." Look at the billboard of scarlet sky and golden sunrise -- an ad for "East Is Red" cigarettes, urging people to smoke their way to prosperity.
On another billboard, basketball star Yao Ming talks into a cellphone. An ad for Unforgettable Menswear depicts a Chinese businessman toasting his white counterpart with -- horrors! -- chardonnay. Motorbike stores sell shiny Hondas -- a product of Japan, still denounced regularly as China's imperialist invader. And at ground zero of a man who considered restaurants a tool of the bourgeoisie, a prominent corner features the Oriental Karaoke Hall.
"The country has changed," said Zhou Bo, a man in his mid-20s from just up the road. "But Mao, he's still in people's minds."
So they come. Even on a chill winter morning, more than 200 people meander around the patch of lush land that holds Mao's surprisingly spacious boyhood home.
Near the front gate, in a miniature strip mall, a passel of "Mao Family Restaurants" serve up the chairman's favorite, fatty pork. Touts dart into the street, madly flagging down cars and yelling the joys of their braised meat in staccato Hunanese.
