Prince Chŏngjo was horrified by these scenes. And I am now ashamed of them.
I realize that at this stage in my earthly story I run the risk of sounding like a mean-spirited old woman, full of reproaches and laments. How ludicrously petty, in the context of eternity, were my jealous confrontations with Madame Chŏng! My bad relationship with her was unfortunate, I admit it. But it was not wholly my fault. And I was fond, in my way, of the poor little princess.
Prince Chŏngjo survived the machinations of Madame Chŏng and her adopted son, only to fall into the clutches of other predators. He was wooed by flatterers, and I am afraid that he succumbed to the temptations of their company. I dreaded to see him repeat the mistakes of his father, as he began to spend time with drinkers and womanizers. There was no shortage of ambitious young men ready to profit from his friendship. One or two of them even managed to ingratiate themselves with the ageing king, who was by now verging on senility. I watched, helplessly, as gossip spread. One young man in particular, a distant kinsman of ours, Kugyŏng, worked himself into a position of trust, and seemed to think that on the king’s death he would move to the centre of the stage, and rule as co-regent with my son – two headstrong young men together, given over to extravagance and self-indulgence.
We were all waiting for the old man to die. And, at last, King Yŏngjo did indeed pass away, in the third month of the year 1776. King Yŏngjo had reigned for more than fifty years, and I myself had known him well, if not intimately, for more than thirty of those years. He had survived many illnesses, and many political crises. He had outlived several of his children, including his son and heir, the guilt of whose death lay on his conscience. He had been failing for years, growing senile and yet more eccentric, and, towards the end of his reign, his eyesight was so bad that he could not see the names on the lists of appointments he had to approve. He turned against his one-time well-born scholarly advisers, and delegated most administrative matters to eunuchs – many of these were able and educated men, and the state seemed to run itself quite smoothly.
King Yŏngjo was keenly aware of the ambitions that surrounded him, and had made it clear that he wanted no obstacle to his grandson Prince Chŏngjo’s succession. Nevertheless, he did not let go of life willingly. He struggled against the approach of death. He struggled to hang on to the vestiges of authority. For days he lingered behind the royal death screen, refusing to allow his spirit to depart.
I was surprised that his death moved me, when it came at last. I had never felt entirely easy with him, for I was bowed from the first into an uncomfortable posture of perpetual deference. Yet, despite all the weight of protocol, we had had our moments of human contact, and I think that over the decades he had learned some respect for me. I shall never forget that first meeting after Prince Sado’s death, when I found myself comforting him for the unnatural crime he had himself committed. He had feared to find me vengeful and unforgiving, but I was able to indicate to him that I understood the extreme difficulties of his position at that time, and he was able to show me that he was grateful for my understanding. Our lives were unnatural, but we were not devoid of natural feelings. I believe he suffered for Prince Sado’s fate, and that he knew in his heart that he bore some guilt for Sado’s illness. He knew that he had nagged and hounded his own son to death. That is a hard thing to know.
Yes, I found that I now missed the old king. I missed the familiar irritation of his trivial despotic irascibility. I had grown into womanhood under his influence and protection. Now I was mature, and I was on my own. I was just over forty years of age at the time of King Yŏngjo’s death. I had a premonition that I, like him, would enjoy or endure a long life. There would be no easy escape for me.
We prayed much for longevity, in our culture. We surrounded ourselves with its symbols. We celebrated old age, in images of sun and moon, of pine and carp and crane and turtle. Life expectancy was short, and we venerated survivors.
My sense of loss was compounded by my fear for the future. How would my son succeed as the new king? So many were waiting to bend him to their will – the young queen’s powerful faction, and his aunt Madame Chŏng, and innumerable ministers who were jockeying for position in the new regime. And there was the newest favourite, who thought that his hour had come. This new acolyte, Hong Kugyŏng, had managed to ingratiate himself with King Yŏngjo as well as with my son: he was bold and ambitious, and he believed his time would come when the old king died. Those who had fawned on Madame Chŏng’s son when he had seemed to be in the ascendant now deserted him for Kugyŏng.
These were dangerous times for my young son. I find I do not wish to describe in detail the mistakes he made, the risks he ran. I have told this story at length, in my second memoir, the memoir written in 1801, and you may find it there. I feared for King Chŏngjo, in his inexperience, and I was right to fear. His enemies were ready to destroy him.
The question of the succession remained unsolved and was becoming ever more urgent. The new king had as yet no son. The queen was now in her mid-twenties, but still childless. King Chŏngjo needed to safeguard his position, and I would have been happy to encourage his taking an appropriate second consort, but, instead of finding a suitable mother for a future heir, Chŏngjo was manipulated by his new favourite, Kugyŏng, into taking Kugyŏng’s sister, a pre-pubertal twelve-year-old child, as the royal consort. This girl, to whom he gave the royal title of ‘Wŏnbin’, was showered with inappropriate honours, and became known as First Consort even though the true queen was still alive and present at court.
This move caused outrage and served no purpose, as the wretched child soon died. She was a little silk grub, killed for her brother’s glory in the cocoon of her own silk trappings. When she died, Hong Kugyŏng insisted on extravagant royal mourning for her, with incense-burning more befitting a queen than a nonentity of a child, and, when some right-minded officials refused to participate in these farcical charades, they were dismissed from their posts. Worse than that, Kugyŏng managed to persuade people that the true queen had been implicated in the child’s death – he even extracted confessions to this effect, under torture, from some of her ladies-in-waiting. News of these outrages spread out from the palace, and I heard that some shopkeepers in the town became so nervous about the political situation that they shut up their shops and fled.
I will not attempt to describe in detail the tortuous machinations and blatant nepotism that filled the next few years. The court stank of corruption. And I myself was in despair that my son, of whom I had had such high hopes, would bring yet more disgrace upon himself as well as us.
I have to ask myself: was I anxious for myself, or for my son, or for my country? In the four accounts I wrote during my lifetime, I sought to justify my actions, and those of my son, and I argued, I believe convincingly, that my husband Prince Sado had been mad, and was therefore not responsible for his acts. (I would have made a good lawyer.) Correctly, I believe, I exposed in these accounts the crimes of Madame Chŏng and others at our court. But there were some incidents that it was hard to explain away, or to justify. My son King Chŏngjo was, like it or not, responsible for the death of my uncle, having been made to believe that my uncle had conspired against him. Whom should I justify here, the uncle or the son?
Maybe I was a monster mother, and maybe the maternal instinct in me was perverted. My mother love was born in innocence, as I have tried to describe, and it had nothing to do, in those early days, with the indoctrination of Confucian ethics. History has forced me into casuistry.
I find I grow weary of my memories of these confused and tormenting times, and of my own laboured attempts to elucidate them. Which of you will have the patience to follow this sorry tale of machinations and deceptions and expulsions and banishments and executions, in a far-off court, in a foreign land, long ago? Perhaps you have already lost the outline of my story. Maybe you, too, like Henry Savage Landor, that nineteenth-century English traveller to our country, believe that we in Korea ‘feel pain l
ess’ than Western people because we are ‘differently constituted’? Or maybe you believe that we deserved whatever pain we felt. Maybe you, too, feel, as did your intrepid envoy Isabella Bird, that our country was deeply subject to ‘the oriental vices of suspicion, cunning and untruthfulness’. Maybe you agree with those historians who described us as a nation ruined by luxury and indolence, by court intrigues and party strife.
Have patience. I will make haste to come to an end. I am moved to proceed to the rest of my agenda, urged on by my obsessed ghost, who leaves me no peace. As I leave her no peace.
The relationship between my ghostwriter and myself is uncanny. We are both rationalists, and we both protest that we have no belief in a supernatural life after death. Yet here we are, harnessed together in a ghostly tale of haunting and obsession. We narrate one another, my ghost and I.
I will attempt to reduce the rest of my long life on earth to a précis, to a few paragraphs, for my ghost is losing patience with me. She wants to sweep through time to tell her own story.
So, as I have described, the reign of my son King Chŏngjo, the twenty-second monarch of the Yi dynasty, began badly, and we feared the worst. But eventually he saw through the wiles of those who flattered and manipulated him, and he became a sound, kind and good ruler. I say it, and it was so. All government slaves were freed under his reign, and he developed generous relief programmes for the poor. Early in his reign, it is true, King Chŏngjo presided over cruel tortures and persecutions, particularly of the Catholics, and several members of his immediate family perished at this time. My uncle Hong Inhan was executed in 1776, the year of King Chŏngjo’s accession, accused of disloyalty to his great-nephew the king. My father, a subtle diplomat and a great survivor of many promotions and demotions, was fortunate enough to die a natural death two years later, in 1778. In the same year, Madame Chŏng was stripped of her royal titles and banished to Kanghwa Island, a fate that she had predicted for herself. Four years later, she was allowed to return to live near Seoul, but she had lost her influence, and died in obscurity and disgrace. Her adopted son Chŏng Hugyŏm had been executed in 1776. (Some records say that Chŏngjo poisoned Madame Chŏng, but I cannot believe that this was true.)
In 1782, King Chŏngjo at last produced an heir, to much rejoicing. So much for the tales of his impotence, those tales which Madame Chŏng had maliciously encouraged. But his first-born, like my first-born, died as an infant, and his mother died of grief a few months later. Not long after this, partly through my urging, King Chŏngjo took another secondary consort, the Lady Kasun. She and I were close, as close as mother and daughter, and we had a common aim, which we achieved when she gave birth to you, my grandson Sŏnjo, in 1790. You were born on the eighteenth day of the sixth month, at three o’clock in the afternoon. It was my birthday. I took this to be a good omen.
King Chŏngjo became a good ruler, responsive to the common people: innumerable successful petitions were made to his wisdom and judgement. He always heeded the drum of appeal. He was also a fine artist, a fine scholar and a man of vision. He created a magnificent new library, and encouraged the new scientific discipline of ‘Practical Learning’. During his reign, our country began to emerge from the hermit-crab shell which unfortunately but understandably became our image in the succeeding century. We moved into the modern world.
King Chŏngjo was able to rise above the terrors of his childhood. He managed to do this not by forgetting them, but through confronting them. His was a brave spirit. His father Prince Sado had died in dishonour and pain, and Chŏngjo did not turn his back on this disgrace. He met it, as a challenge. He devoted much time to honouring and reinstating the memory of his father. It might be argued, by cynics, that he did this as a means of assuring his own legitimacy; it might also be argued that he was a devout Confucian, who truly believed in the duty of honouring his ancestors. The truth was, I believe, more complicated. I believe that what he saw and heard as a ten-year-old child in the hot noonday sun on the day of the Imo Incident affected him so deeply that he felt a deep, unique, personal, filial obligation towards his father’s memory. Only by truly reinstating his father could he himself survive as a whole man. He had to dig up the disgraced body, and resurrect it, and rebury it.
I see I have yet again used the word ‘filial’, which crops up with such monotonous and often meaningless regularity in any discussion of Confucian behaviour and Confucian ethics – but I think one can forget Confucianism here. Confucianism laid out the cultural means whereby and the manner in which King Chŏngjo chose to celebrate and commemorate his father and me, his mother, but the mainspring of Chŏngjo’s actions lay elsewhere. No dictates written in stone guided or impelled him: he was moved from that inner and unique but universal self that is in each of us, which is formed in each of us, which is formed by a pattern which transcends cultural conditioning. I cling to this belief, as the violent storms of disbelief and deconstruction swirl round me, as others try to tell me what I must have said or felt, what Chŏngjo must have said or felt. Little is certain, and with time we pepper into dust. But some angry self remains to protest its identity, its unique enduring life.
The mother cat, the silkworm, the father in the rice chest, the child in the hot dust.
I see now that I am beginning to use words that do not belong to me, words that my appointed ghost has whispered in my ear. Postmodern contextualism, enlightenment universalism, deconstruction, concepts of the self. ‘Globalization’ seems to be one of the words that goes through the restless dreams of my envoy. I do not even know what it means, or what she means by it. Must I try to find out? Why is she worrying at me like this? What have I done to deserve it? Must I be tormented beyond the grave? Must I go back to school, at my age, and begin again? I am too old and too tired. Even the dead can feel exhaustion, you may be sorry to learn.
And what, I suppose I must ask, has my ghostly envoy done to deserve me? What faults, what crimes, what sympathies, what weaknesses have opened her heart to me? I cannot afford to feel pity for her. I need her services.
King Chŏngjo survived in order to reinstate his father. He disinterred the body of my husband, Prince Sado, and reburied him in a new tomb, in a new city south of Seoul, with new funerary rites. He consulted geomancers, and claimed that the new tomb was more auspiciously placed than the old one, and that his father would rest better there. I do not know what my son Chŏngjo really thought about the auspices, or about the afterlife. Maybe he had a different agenda altogether. Maybe he thought it advantageous to his regime to create a new and better fortified seat of power. Maybe he thought the climate was better to the south. Maybe he wanted to build himself a summer palace, like a Chinese emperor. Maybe he wanted to be remembered as a great patron, as a builder of great monuments. Maybe he hated the memories that haunted the palace where his father was murdered, and where I was condemned to continue to reside. Maybe, like his father, he needed to escape from the stifling past. Many have speculated about these matters. But not even I, who was his earthly mother, know the truth.
What I do know is that he chose to honour my sixtieth birthday in a most lavish and spectacular manner. The sixtieth birthday, known to us as ‘hwan-gap’, is always a major cause for celebration in our country, partly because our lunar calendar is based on a sixty-year cycle, and partly because in earlier times so few of us lived so long. So I had expected a large celebration, but nothing on the scale that was prepared for me. Songs were written for me; delegations were sent to visit me; prayers were offered for me. There were months of festivity. A banquet was held to which my surviving uncles and vast numbers of cousins and second cousins and third cousins were invited, including some who had been living in exile or disgrace. Even the concubine of my late father was invited, in recognition of her years of service and devotion. I cannot say that I was particularly delighted to see her, as her son and grandsons had proved somewhat too prosperous during my son’s reign. But I was pleased by the spirit of amnesty that prevailed.
And I was at last allowed to leave my home. I was permitted to make a triumphal journey, from the lower palace in Seoul where I had been immured for almost all of my adult life, to the new city of Hwaseong, some forty miles to the south. In Hwaseong several days of banquets and feasts and parades and games and presentations had been laid on in my honour, and in honour of my dead husband, who would also have achieved his sixtieth birthday in this year, had he lived. Prince Sado was lying quietly in his new tomb, but I was carried towards him in my palanquin through shouting crowds, and waving pennants, and the sound of music.
This expedition was a shock to all my senses. I had been so long concealed from the larger world, and the world from me. At last I, too, had my journey. I saw the wide river, and the mountains, and the people of my land. I walked by the southern lake, and admired the lofty towers of the fortress, and laid my hand upon the sun-baked wall of the curved battlement. I saw, for the first time, a great view, as from a hilltop. I was sixty years old. I had yearned to see the world when I was younger: could I make any sense of it now that it was revealed to me? Or was it too late? I think I will send my ghost for me to visit Hwaseong, and see what she can make of it. I believe much money has been spent on its restoration. My ghostly envoy is an energetic young woman, full of curiosity. How much of the past, I wonder, lingers in the air? Will she be able to smell the roasted offerings, to see the fluttering of the silk flags, to count the serried ranks of soldiers and courtiers, to admire the horsemanship and the dancing, to walk the fortress battlements?
The Red Queen Page 16