 Zedong first met Yixiu on the day that the contract was signed . Years later , his granddaughter Kong <unk> stated that Mao was unhappy with his father 's choice , and that he instead was in love with his cousin , Wang <unk> . However , marriage to Wang had been ruled out by a local diviner because their horoscopes were incompatible . Although displeased by the arrangement , Mao agreed to marry Luo . At the time he was fourteen , and later erroneously informed Edgar Snow that Luo was aged twenty , a claim independently accepted by Mao biographers Ross Terrill and Philip Short , but later challenged by biographers Jung Chang and Jon Halliday , and Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine , who established that she was eighteen . 
