 According to what he told Snow , Mao refused to live with his wife and claimed that they had never consummated their marriage . Soon after the wedding , he ran away from home to live with an unemployed student in Shaoshan . 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 . 
