REMEMBERING THE HELMSMAN: Tang Ruiren says Mao should take the credit for her happy life Tang Ruiren, 76, a peasant-turned-restaurateur, has led a charmed life. The founder of Mao Jia Restaurant Development Corp., with 145 franchise restaurants in 20 provinces, she heads an empire that employs 20,000 people and last year paid more than 60 million yuan in taxes.
　　What"s so special about her restaurants? Mao Zedong’s favorite dishes. The restaurants serve such recipes as huo bei yu, or bitter-tasting fish baked with chili pepper, which Mao touted as helping people to think only about revolution, and hong shao rou, or braised fatty pork―Mao said that only by eating fatty pork can he get enough nutrition to his brain to win the battle.Tang, who opened her first restaurant in 1987, has tied her legendary business success to New China’s founding father.She often thinks of June 25, 1959, the day Chairman Mao paid a visit to Tang’s family home, which overlooks the pond where Mao learned to swim and beyond it the old residence of Mao’s parents.
　　She recalls that in a short conversation with Mao, the leader asked about her hometown and the name of the baby in her arms, her first-born son. Mao jokingly said, “I should call the baby uncle according to family hierarchy. The friendship between two families has run across generations.” In Chinese villages, traditionally everyone is somehow related, all of them descendants of the same family. Tang’s baby son was Mao’s uncle. According to Tang, the midwife who attended to the birth of Mao was the grandmother of her husband.This meeting in the village of Shaoshan, in Hunan Province, resulted in a sort of overnight fame for Tang.
　　A photo of a grinning Mao sitting with Tang’s family appeared on a poster that for a while decorated millions of homes around the country. People knew Tang only as a member of a farmer family the Chairman took time to inquire about and pose with for a photo.The brief meeting inspired Tang in her entrepreneurship half a century later. In 1984, Tang became the first private business owner in Shaoshan by selling zhou (a porridge-type dish also known as congee, its Cantonese name) to visitors of Mao’s old family home.
　　She said her intentions were to treat “Mao’s guests,” the visitors to his former residence, as well as to make money. Her initial investment in the restaurant was only 1.70 yuan, or $0.21.It was not until 1987 that Tang had enough money to start a restaurant at her own house. To name her restaurant, Tang went to Beijing to seek suggestions from Wang Shoudao, Mao’s former secretary who was also from Hunan Province.
　　Wang suggested the name of Mao Jia Restaurant, or Mao Family Restaurant, and wrote it in calligraphy for Tang. This reconnected Tang’s business with the legendary leader 11 years after his death. When asked what motivated her to travel 1,600 kilometers to Beijing just for a name, she said with a sly smile, “I was just that clever.”
　　Tang’s business sense and hard work brought her rapid success. With its prime location less than 500 meters away from Mao’s childhood home, and the Mao ambience created by stories connecting the restaurant with the man himself, centering on the 1959 encounter, the business took off. 　　In 2004, Mao Jia Restaurant Develop-ment Co. ranked 23rd among the top 100 catering companies in China, according to a survey released by the Ministry of Com-merce and the China Cuisine Association. But despite this success, the matriarch of this business empire says she has no money. “Why should I have any money?” Tang asked. “I used to be a beggar. I am illiterate and too old to do any work.”
　　She said that all the money the restaurant earns still belongs to her customers, and she wants to find the best way to give the money back to the people.“I never forget that after writing out the name of my restaurants, Wang Shoudao told me three things to do so as not to fail the name,” said Tang. “The first thing is to treat the customers well, whether they have money to pay the bill or not; the second is to make contributions to the country and the third is to care for the youth.”Tang has been trying to fulfill the three rules over all these years.
　　She set up an education foundation, which so far has sponsored over 500 children to finish their schooling. She is proud that four of the children she supports are starting university this year. “I love children and it is important for them to be educated, unlike me,” Tang said. Due to a poor childhood, Tang never went to school. Although she taught herself how to read later in life, she can still only write seven Chinese characters―her name and that of her company.Among the charity work she does, she has financially helped dozens of orphans, donated tens of thousands of yuan to build a paved road for a local school and employed handicapped people and laid-off workers at her company. She said she can’t calculate the exact figure of the money she has donated to charitable causes.Tang said she felt happy after receiving a spoken guarantee from her children, who will succeed her as president of the company, that her path of devotion to education and charity work will be continued after her death.
　　“I ask them to be sophisticated, diligent and patriotic,” she added.She recalls that in 1953 Mao took a swath of cloth out of his own pocket and gave it to Tang’s family. She got part of the cloth to make a new shirt, a luxury for Chinese people at that time.
　　“Chairman Mao is a great man who had six of his family members die for the cause of liberating the people,” said Tang, who continues to both revere his memory and benefit from it, and refuses to criticize Mao’s legacy. “I know there were bad things said about him, but I don’t give a damn.”

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