by Tan Twan Eng
“My small room was lavishly furnished, quite unlike my own at home. I put down my bundle of belongings and thanked Master Chow. Even then, I knew instinctively that one should not cross this ageless being.
“He nodded to me and informed me that Wen Zu would be waiting to meet me at breakfast, in the Pavilion of Willows.
“I changed into fresh clothes and let the sun and the sounds of laughter guide me to the Inner Courtyard where the pavilion was situated. Surrounded by willow trees, the courtyard was actually a series of large interconnected carp ponds, humped with many graceful stone bridges. In the center, like an exotic flower, was the pavilion. That was where I met the young man who was to be my student and eventually my friend.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
My grandfather’s eyes softened. “He wasn’t remarkable-looking at all. He was just a youth—two years younger than yourself, maybe. His face had not yet been hardened by the realities of his life. The eyes were guarded but lively and curious. ‘So you are the one sent to be my tutor,’ he said.
“He wasn’t emperor yet, so I was quite informal with him. ‘Yes, and to help you with your studies.’
“He made a face. ‘I dislike studying. When I am emperor I shall stop studying.’
“I said that I disagreed with him and he said, quick to have the final word, ‘That is why you were sent.’
“We had a hurried breakfast. I was hungry after the morning’s ride. It was quiet, except for the songs of birds and the busy clicking of our chopsticks against our bowls. Already the day was late. I told him that he was to have his first lesson that day, copying out the Analects of Confucius. Because of the presence of the Western powers in the International Settlement in Shanghai I would also teach him English, which I had learned from foreign missionaries.
“I quickly came to understand the structure of power within the hermetic atmosphere of the palace and of our places within it. This was an important process, the way young animals in the wild learn about their environment and its hazards, for it was a matter of life and death. Friends were lost and enemies made on chance remarks and the interpretation of words.”
“Did you ever meet the emperor?” I asked.
“Not at first,” my grandfather shook his head. “The emperor was almost never seen. Master Chow headed the ranks of the eunuchs who controlled the palace. The various wives and concubines of the emperor had negligible presence, since they had not done their duty by giving him a male heir. I came to feel sorry for Wen Zu, for his position was dependent solely upon the failure of these women. My place in the whole complex scheme was wound tightly with Wen Zu’s.
“Over and above all was the presence of Tzu Xsi, the Dowager Empress. She was known fearfully as ‘the Old One.’ Her influence weighed down the air of the palace, making it seem corrupt, sweet-rotten, malevolent, and cloying, like the opium she used. All eyes were her eyes, all ears, hers. She seemed to know of all things occurring in the palace. But I would not be summoned to her until almost five months had gone by. It was easy to be overlooked in the vastness of the palace, or so I thought foolishly.
“Although I was reasonably strict with Wen Zu, my loneliness and his life of isolation gave rise to a strengthening friendship between us. My ability as a martial artist impressed Wen Zu as well. Each morning, before the palace awoke, I would complete a series of fighting forms in an unused garden. He caught me in the middle of my exercises one day and insisted that I teach him the movements.”
“How did a scholar like yourself acquire such skills?” I asked.
“How? I was sent to the Shaolin Temple in the mist-covered Kaolin Mountains for apprenticeship when I was six. It was a final attempt to improve my health. Would you believe I was once a sickly child?” My grandfather tapped his chest with his fist. “Nobody knew what was wrong with me. Gods were implored and mediums consulted, to no avail. My mother spent hours boiling pots of strange herbs and exotic meats in the hopes that I would recover. One day a wandering monk was literally dragged off the street to be consulted. Within a month, after letters of introduction had been sent by my mother and a reply received, I was taken on the journey south to the temple.”
“It seems like a drastic measure,” I said.
The old man nodded. “To send a boy with minimal chances of surviving into adulthood to those monks with their relentless and punishing training? My mother did it to save me.”
“Did she accompany you?”
My grandfather shook his head. “I was placed under the care of the chief of a trade caravan. I can only recall bits and fragments of those weeks of endless traveling over deep, barren gorges and bamboo forests bristling with bandits. But I remember my arrival at the temple. The main building was simple and old, located in the middle of the shady and extensive temple grounds. What drew my eye, however, were the mountains surrounding the temple, rising into the clouds. I could make out small stone steps clawing up the steep, pine-covered mountain, and, even more amazing, the small darting figures of bald-headed monks carrying buckets of water on those steps.”
“It was part of the monks’ training,” I said, making a guess.
“As I was soon to discover—yes,” my grandfather said. “My illness and my weak physical state were not tolerated. My head was shorn clean immediately and within a day I was out before dawn, two wooden pails hanging over a pole slung over my shoulder. I joined a stream of novices running up the mountain to obtain fresh water from a waterfall, one of many hundreds of ants scurrying up and down the slippery steps. I slipped and fell many times. I bloodied my knees and banged my head, and I cried every night. Although not cruel, my fellow monks did not go out of their way to pamper me.
“The routine was endless. After filling up the stone reservoirs, we would sweep the training halls of the temple, clean the altars, remove the burnt incense sticks from the censers, and place fresh flowers and fruit before the deities. Then, with relief, we would all gather in the dining hall and have our breakfast of hot gruel and tea, which never varied, not once in my six years there.
“There were also lessons in the teachings of the Buddha and the endless chanting of sutras, which I disliked. But I enjoyed the martial training of the Shaolin Temple, which would never have existed had it not been for one man.”
“Who was he?” I asked, and he smiled at my impatience.
“In my first week I was brought to a cave hidden in the mountains. Tendrils of mist blurred the tops and ravines as we climbed higher and higher. I watched as below us a hawk floated and then sank into the mist.
“We went deep into the cave until we came to a wall, at the place where the temple’s most famous priest had meditated for ten years. I explained to Wen Zu how Bodhidharmo was an Indian monk who had traveled all across China. Arriving at the temple he found that the monks were weak and soft, often falling asleep while meditating. He incorporated a training regimen in order to harden their bodies and minds. This was the foundation both of the strength and of the eventual fall of the temple, years after the Indian monk had already left them.
“‘Why?’ Wen Zu, the future emperor, asked me.
“The monks became the best fighters in the country. Notwithstanding the fact that they had no interest in politics, the emperor became fearful of their skills and sought to exterminate them. But the temple was too well-fortified for the emperor’s soldiers. It took a corrupt monk to disclose a secret way into the temple and all of the monks and novices were slaughtered in the battle which followed. But five senior monks escaped and in time became known as the Five Ancestors, bearers of the temple’s knowledge.”
“What happened to Bodhidharmo?” I interrupted my grandfather.
“Wen Zu asked me the same question,” he said. “He was fascinated by the monk. No one knew, I told him. After ten years of continuous meditation, sitting in that cave, facing the wall, he went as he came, like a hawk returning to the mists.
“I told Wen Zu how I had once sat down at the same spo
t, in the same position the monk must have done and stared at the empty wall. There is a story that Bodhidharmo had become enraged when he fell asleep while meditating and so to defeat sleep he had sliced his eyelids off so that they would never betray him by closing. He remained aware, vigilant, even in the deepest pools of meditation. In the dark, in his cave, I heard the trickling of a mountain stream, the tiny cries of bats, and felt the cold wind cut into the cave.
“Wen Zu grimaced with unease when I told him this. He liked his sleep, and he was wary of any unnecessary pain. I too could not fathom the total dedication shown by the temple’s most instrumental monk.
“However, the story of Bodhidharmo continued to haunt Wen Zu, and he asked the eunuchs to obtain for him books about the monk. This was a mistake, though we were unaware of it. For it soon traveled to the Old One’s ears that I was opening Wen Zu’s eyes to the world, a world of which she did not want him to have any inkling.
“‘Records of this monk appear throughout China,’ Wen Zu informed me, after reading extensively from piles of books and journals obtained at great expense. ‘He went as far as Japan, where his teachings merged with local beliefs and rituals.’
“I was amused by the authority in his voice. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, pointing to his books.
“‘Reading,’ he said.
“‘No. You are studying,’ I replied, and he had the grace to laugh. ‘You have succeeded where others have failed,’ he said.”
“What about your family? Didn’t you miss them?” I asked when he paused and I refilled his cup of tea.
“Oh, very much. Once a month I obtained permission to return to my family. It pained me that your mother and Aunt Mei were growing up so quickly in my absence and I wondered if my appointment as royal tutor was such an honor after all. My father, as promised, visited me whenever he could, always bringing a dish my mother had cooked or a piece of clothing she had made. He looked older, and I became aware of the changes happening to the world outside. The Western powers were tearing up China and the emperor was helpless, the country weakened. You know there is a saying of Confucius: ‘When the Son of Heaven is weak, the nation is weak.’ A simple but penetrating truth, don’t you think? My father’s visits always left me despondent; when he left, the palace seemed bigger, more empty, the silences louder.
“Time felt like smoke in an airless room in the palace, seeming not to move at all, but to hang suspended. One morning I was taken by Master Chow to the Hall of Ten Thousand for an audience with the Dowager Empress Tzu Xsi. As we neared the hall we seemed to rise and float on the scent of opium. Surrounded by her retinue of tittering eunuchs and handmaidens dressed in riotous colors, she examined me with her squinting, intense eyes.
“Even then she was old, old as the huge tortoise on a golden chain next to her, which she kept as a pet and as talisman. The creature’s shell had been completely covered by tattoos of intricate lines and sacred words. On a brazier a pot of soup was being warmed. The slow, struggling movements of a frog being simmered alive caught my eye. I could smell the aroma of its cooking flesh and wondered how I would feel if I were being slowly boiled to death.
“She gauged my potential to stand in her path. Our eyes met and I held them steadily, but I dropped them after a second and she was satisfied. She inhaled on a pipe held out to her. Her fingers were clawlike, the nails grown so long they had curled like wires and had to be sheathed in gold. She beckoned to me with one elaborate finger and I leaned forward.
“‘Make sure the Heir to the Throne learns his lessons. You are here also to open his eyes to the world,’ she whispered, her voice thick as the smoke that curled out from her barely opened mouth. ‘Open his eyes, but not too much.’
“I could only nod and drop to my knees in obeisance, hating myself for disgracing my mother’s people by my actions.”
“‘Your mother’s people’?” I did not want to interrupt him again, but there were so many questions I had to ask in order to clarify matters before I got tangled up in his tale.
“My mother came from a long line of revolutionaries who wished to overthrow the government, most of whom had gone underground to avoid persecution and death. She was a Han, and historians consider them the true people of China. They had fought against all outlanders who had invaded and conquered China, including the Manchu people who founded the Ching Dynasty in 1644. My father was a Manchu, and I always wondered how much my mother had loved my father to cross to his side. However, she made certain I never forgot her history, and even as a child I was told of the exploits and the greatness of her people. Now, in the center of the hall, facing this crone who was the leader of the enemies of my mother and her blood, I had to humble myself.”
“But you were the tutor to the future emperor,” I said.
“It was an unspoken view within the ranks of the older eunuchs that Wen Zu’s future as emperor was not looked upon with favor by the Old One. He was too distantly connected to her and therefore her influence upon him would be minimal once the emperor was gone. Wen Zu was merely a temporary measure; there were persistent rumors that the Old One had more than one other candidate in mind and, in time, an heir closer to her would be announced. After I met the Old One, I began to fear for Wen Zu’s life and for mine as well. I kept these fears hidden. It was a tumultuous time: the country was still recovering in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.”
I had read somewhere that the rebellion had been sparked off by riots and attacks on foreign missionaries and local Christian converts by members of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists. These were people dispossessed by drought, famine, and earthquakes. They blamed these calamities on the stranglehold the Western powers were exerting on China. The harmony of the country had been knocked out of kilter by the presence of these hated foreign devils, and the Boxers’ aim was to expel them from the country.
“I’ve always wondered why they were called ‘Boxers,’“ I said. “It paints a strange picture of people running around in boxing gloves.”
“The name was given to them by European historians. They believed that spiritual incantations and martial-arts training would render them impervious to blades and swords, invincible against the foreigners’ ‘fire-spears.’“
“Thousands of them must have died,” I said.
He nodded. “The foreigners—which included the Japanese— retaliated decisively. They sacked, looted, and burned the Summer Palace, and the dowager empress and the emperor were forced to abandon Peking and escape to Xian, the ancient capital eight hundred miles to the west. I knew all this because my father had been part of the emperor’s escorts when they fled Peking.
“Peace was eventually made with the foreign devils, and China surrendered more territories and lost more face.
“One evening, Wen Zu led me to one of the many silent, massive halls. Palace officials named it the Hall of Repentance. A silk fan hung from a wooden beam in the middle of the empty hall. It was spread open and was twenty feet wide. I looked up at the white silk, pleated with the thin ivory bones of the fan. Vertical lines of writing in black ink covered the fan. I picked out the names easily: Nanjing, Tientsin, Hong Kong, Amoy—so many of them. These were the ports and cities relinquished under the terms of the Unequal Treaties, as a consequence of wars fought and lost by China against the West. The words on the fan seemed to us like the reprimands of our forebears, as if asking us, ‘How could you have allowed this to happen?’
“Perhaps aware of his tenuous position as the future emperor of China, Wen Zu would regularly make proclamations that he hoped the God of Heaven could hear and so help him secure his fate. ‘When I am emperor you will stay on as my friend and advisor,’ he often said. ‘Many changes will have to be made to make our country strong again. We have to show the West our capabilities.’
“He was only restating the old ideas that had swept the palace a few years earlier before the Boxer Rebellion, when the emperor had been petitioned by a group of reformers who wanted to restor
e the empire based on a vague reinterpretation of Confucian writings and to modernize it along Western ideals.”
“The emperor would have turned them away.”
“On the contrary, the emperor gave his support and issued a series of edicts proclaiming the reforms that would take place. But the reformation movement failed and the emperor, disillusioned, fell back into his old habits of indolence and self-indulgence.
“I thought we would hear no more of reforms and modernization, but I was wrong. In the spring of 1908, in my second year in the palace, the movement was revived. Once again the emperor was roused out of his stupor, eager to reclaim his dignity. For a while he was intoxicated, not by wine or opium, but by the thought of himself being recorded as the savior of the dynasty, especially in light of the grave humiliation suffered in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. Against the dowager empress’s wishes he initiated his reforms once more.
“Given power by the emperor’s proclamations, these new reformers rampaged through Shanghai, Canton, and Peking. They destroyed the factories and all the stocks of opium owned by the Western trading houses.
“My father, on one of his visits, warned me not to get involved. I passed on his warning to Wen Zu, who did not heed me. He took to visiting the Hall of Repentance regularly, reciting the names of the lost ports and ceded territories like a sutra. ‘Those ports will once more belong to China,’ Wen Zu said, his eyes shining as they saw the future as envisioned by the reformers. ‘We will own the country again.’ He made his views well known in the palace. Like many young men he liked to shock, but I was certain he was quite sincere in his beliefs. However, sincerity was sometimes not a virtue in the palace.”
“How did you endure for so long in the palace? It must’ve been stifling,” I said.
“We often escaped to the city outside for an hour or so. We walked the streets I had known all my life, past the tea houses and the brothels with fancy names like Tower of Dizzy Stars and the Inn of Cosmic Pleasure. Heavily painted women stood on the balconies and waved their scented handkerchiefs, calling out to the people below, promising them exquisite, heavenly pleasures. The streets were crowded with beggars, performers, and hawkers, and the air was plaited with the smells of roasting meat, boiling sweets, fried tofu, dirt, and refuse. Refugees from the north lay dazed on the streets, victims of drought and war. I heard so many languages in the streets: there were voices from Mongolia, from the Gobi Desert, and from the outer hems of the empire. Arguments were carried on in various dialects of the provinces; all were different-colored threads sewn into the tapestry that was the Middle Kingdom. This truly was the center of the world. We had invented the compass, and I found it fitting that we were placed right in its heart.