Luo Yixiu

Socially disgraced, she lived with Mao's parents for two years until she died of dysentery, while he moved out of the village to continue his studies elsewhere, eventually becoming a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party.

[9][note 2] Although historian Lee Feigon stated that the Luo family was locally important,[8] Mao biographers Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine claimed that they had fallen into poverty.

[12] Mao Zedong had been born and raised at his father's farm in Shaoshanchong, a small rural village named for the nearby Shaoshan mountain.

[13] His disciplinarian father, Mao Yichang, had decided to deal with Zedong's rebellious attitude in a manner typical of the time, by forcing him into an arranged marriage that would compel him to take family matters seriously.

[12] Years later, his granddaughter Kong Dongmei stated that Mao was unhappy with his father's choice, and that he instead was in love with his cousin, Wang Shigu.

[12] The wedding ceremony would have culminated with the guests entering the bridal chamber, where they would have made various sexual references and innuendos, led by a figure with his face painted black.

[20] In Chinese rural tradition, the bride was expected to show the bloodstains on the bed sheets from her wedding night to prove that her hymen had been broken during sexual intercourse, and that she had therefore been a virgin.

[22] There he spent much of his time reading, particularly historical works like Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian and Ban Gu's History of the Former Han Dynasty, and political tracts like Feng Guifen's Personal Protests from the Study of Jiao Bin.

[2] Luo Yixiu's grave is located on the mountain facing Mao Zedong's former residence in Shaoshanchong, a few steps away from the tomb of his parents.

[28] In Mao: A Reinterpretation, American historian Lee Feigon argued that Mao's experience with arranged marriage inspired him to become "a vehement advocate of women's rights" in the late 1910s, as he began to write articles for the left-wing press criticizing the traditional Chinese family system and arguing that love, rather than societal or family pressures, should be the primary determinant in marriage.