The Fruit Fascination That Started a Viral Trend in China
How mangoes from Pakistan became a symbol of another nation’s cultural revolution
The year was 1968. Chairman Mao Zedong was looking down skeptically at a crate of mangoes brought to him by Pakistan’s foreign minister, Mian Arshan Hussain. Unimpressed but unwilling to rebuff his ally, Mao ordered the crate to be sent down to workers suppressing student riots in Qinghua University. The oncoming year in Chinese history — an absurd time capsule full of mango-scented water, mango bedsheets, and passersby smoking mango cigarettes on dark corners — was about to have its incipient event. As reported by Michael Moore in The Telegraph, it was in the dusty factory where the exhausted workers gathered around the delivery that the legend of mango mania in Communist China truly began.
Mangoes are known as a delicious summer staple in Pakistan and much of South Asia. I grew up rabid about them, suffering through tortuous math lessons with my grandfather to earn a delicious mango milkshake at the end. They’re not easy fruits to eat; they have to be peeled, then sliced, and their fussy nature is reportedly why Mao disliked them. Yet to the workers, the fruit’s weaknesses hardly mattered as it became a revered icon of their chairman. Mangoes attained their sacrosanct status in Chinese…
