by Linda Jaivin
‘What on earth did you tell her?’ Hoeppli asked.
‘The truth. That some of us, including myself, were very grateful. Others feared it was a plot to poison them. Their loss. The melons and the sweetmeats were most delicious. I assured her that people, and I believe these were my exact words, “could not realise that your only motive was kindness of heart and conveyed no political connotation”.’
It was not long after this, Backhouse claimed, that Chief Eunuch Li Lien-ying summoned him with rather more startling news: ‘The Old Ancestress will require the most intimate contact …’ And so began, in his telling, a most incredible affair.
‘You must perfume your whole person for the occasion. She has never seen a naked European of decent birth and will want to inspect you closely behind and before … Custom ordains that you should remain on your knees and I have prepared stuffed cushions for the purpose.’
Backhouse confided his nervousness to the chief eunuch: as his proclivities lay elsewhere, he explained, he feared he might have trouble exhibiting the level of sexual excitement that Her Majesty would no doubt require. Li assured him that there were potions for that – and also pliable eunuchs to be had as a reward for such service.
On the appointed day, Li helped Backhouse to prepare, anointing his genitals with sandalwood oil, laying before him a great repast and giving him a light cloak to wear. Eunuchs carried him in and presented him to the Old Buddha, as Cixi was known, who awaited him in her boudoir. All around them, a museum’s worth of European clocks ticked and tocked. Mirrors on every surface multiplied and fragmented the scene, giving it an even more surreal air (though this sensation may have owed something to the potion as well). The Empress Dowager was wearing a delicate robe that she allowed to fall open to reveal her naked body. She asked Backhouse to guess her age. He considered, before replying ‘between thirty and thirty-five’. She cried, ‘Flatterer.’ But, he told Hoeppli, she was not displeased.
‘Now exhibit to me your genitals,’ she commanded, ‘for I know I shall love them.’ By this time, he said, he had ‘an enormous orgasm and the Old Buddha fondled my verge and glans penis, kissing many times the urethral orifice or “meatus” (Ma Yen ), which was saturated in the exotic perfume. Then she played with my voluminous scrotum … and fondled my abundant pubic hair.’
Dr Hoeppli leaned forward in his chair. Backhouse, propped up against the headboard of his sickbed, closed his eyes – whether the better to recall the events he was describing, because he was tired, or for dramatic effect, the physician couldn’t tell. When he did not immediately open them again, Dr Hoeppli could scarcely contain his curiosity, and had to exercise the utmost self-control not to shake his patient awake. At last, Backhouse, drawing in a long breath, opened his eyes and blinked.
‘She bade me contemplate her august Person and I admired the abundant wealth of pubic hair, while at her command I took in my hands her abnormally large clitoris, pressed toward it my lips and performed a slow but steady friction which increased its size. She graciously unveiled the mysteries of her swelling vulva, even as that of Messalina, and I marvelled at the perennial youth which its abundance seemed to indicate. She allowed me to fondle her breasts which were those of a young married woman; her skin was exquisitely scented … her whole body, small and shapely, was redolent with la joie de vivre; her shapely buttocks pearly and large were presented to my admiring contemplation: I felt for her a real libidinous passion such as no woman has ever inspired in my pervert homosexual mind before nor since … Then Her Majesty bade me place my scented fingers inside her vulva and apply my lips to its ample surface. As I expected, she next told me to kneel over the couch in the full glare of the garish light and the reflection of the mirrors which presented the counterfeit resemblance of my buttocks which she graciously likened to a peach; she minutely inspected the fundament until she bade me open up with my two forefingers and caressed it with her long-nailed index, inserting it (to my discomfort) inside the anus. Then she drew closer and brought her erect clitoris into juxtaposition of my “trou fignon” which she poetically compared to a rose-bud. She worked the member (which Marie Antoinette so loved in the Princesse de Lamballe) backward and forward inside my anus; until, after perhaps five minutes or more, the gratifying titillation caused her to exclaim: “Shu Fu ” …’
Backhouse paused again here to eat a ripe strawberry from a basket that Hoeppli, knowing how much he enjoyed them, had brought to his bedside as a gift. He continued: ‘I cannot explain why, but a definite discharge of a sticky fluid wetted me in and around the anal cavity.
‘“Ta Yen’rh ,” said she: “Large anus: I’ll warrant that it has seen service.”
‘“Yes, Your Majesty, I’ll not deny it and plead guilty to the impeachment.”
‘“How many times?”
‘“Innumerable as the hairs of the head,” replied I unblushingly.’
‘You must write down these adventures,’ Dr Hoeppli declared at last. ‘And I shall pay you for the manuscript.’
Despite suffering at the time from high blood pressure, dizziness and ‘prostatic hyperplasia with urinary troubles’, Backhouse, adrenalised by the promise of money as well as delight at the thought of the posthumous shock he’d deliver to all who thought they knew him, prepared two fat handwritten manuscripts, The Dead Past (detailing erotic capers in Europe, including sex with British prime ministers, the French poet Paul-Marie Verlaine and Oscar Wilde) and Décadence Mandchoue, from which the above quotations are taken. He gave them to his friend.
Hoeppli, a man of science, was not entirely credulous. He questioned Backhouse about some of the more far-fetched coincidences and logical contradictions in the narrative. Conceding that memory might have failed him here and there, Backhouse revised them accordingly. In the end, as he wrote in his afterword to the manuscripts, they were ‘not purely imaginary but are fundamentally based on facts’.
Anticipating their eventual publication, Dr Hoeppli typed up four copies of the manuscripts and added some annotations. He boxed them in the simple but elegant fashion of Chinese books and dispatched the copies to the library of the British Museum in London, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale and the Harvard College Library in Cambridge. He sensed the time was not yet right for their publication.
Okay, so I made up the bit about the strawberries, though it is on record that Backhouse liked them, and imagined the conversation between Hoeppli and Backhouse. As for the rest, check out Décadence Mandchoue yourself if you don’t believe me. It’s even available as an e-book. Having been deemed, like its sibling Dead Past, to be historically ‘worthless’ by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who found their ‘cascade of dropped crowns and coronets’ ridiculous and improbable, and thanks to its explicit content, Décadence Mandchoue wasn’t published until 2011. Derek Sandhaus, the editor, who meticulously annotated the wildly, sometimes hilariously pedantic work (pedicatio – anal sex; sans secousse ou douleur – without a shudder or pain; trou fignon – anus, etc.) has written that the book is almost impossible to classify: ‘Is it autobiography, fiction or non-fiction?’ I met Derek when he was speaking at a literary festival in Beijing. I confessed that I had written a failed novel on the subject of Backhouse and Cixi when all I had ever seen of Décadence Mandchoue were a few published fragments. After the publication of the full manuscript, I told him, I was astonished by its imaginative perversity. I hadn’t come close to matching it. If I were ever to approach the subject again, I would want to quote extensively from the original. He said to stay in touch and kindly gave me his email.
I think that most readers would agree with the general assessment of the experts that the value of Backhouse’s memoir lies in its being a ‘little gem of English erotic literature’, as Robert Aldrich, Professor of European History at the University of Sydney, has written, and a fascinating insight into the psychology of one of the greatest hoaxers of the twentieth century. Frank Dikötter, Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, ca
lled it ‘one of the most outrageous, colourful and hilarious memoirs ever written’ and ‘so pornographic’ that it makes William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch ‘look like a fairy tale for children’.
Great fun, in other words, but nothing to be taken too seriously. There are just two things that potentially upset the picture. One is the revelation by Hoeppli in his afterword to Décadence Mandchoue that the first time his own rickshaw puller, a dispossessed Manchu, saw Backhouse, ‘he mentioned spontaneously that there was a rumour that this old man in bygone days had been a lover of the Empress Dowager’. (I’ve occasionally wondered if the rickshaw puller was in fact Mrs Jin’s grandfather but his name goes unrecorded.) Hoeppli may have been many things, including gullible, but no one ever suggested that, like his notorious friend, he was a rogue. Or a liar.
The second thing was the letter I had received that day.
A brief note, before we move on, about Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre of Glanton and a respected Cambridge historian whose prolific work also includes such tomes as The Rise of Christian Europe, The Age of Expansion, The Philby Affair and a number of studies of Nazi Germany. Critics lavished praise on Hermit of Peking when it appeared in 1976. The New York Times declared it a classic. The Times of London wrote: ‘The reader is throughout amused, amazed and enthralled.’ The Observer called it both ‘a very well-told story’ and ‘a brilliant piece of research’.
Hugh Trevor-Roper’s deep fascination with Backhouse’s sensational, masterly hoaxes and forgeries became in itself the subject of interest in 1983, when he first authenticated then withdrew support for the ‘Hitler Diaries’ – which Rupert Murdoch decided to publish anyway. They turned out to be, as he came to suspect, a forgery.
Jesus, I was easily distracted. It was well past eleven a.m. Twelve hours might be a long time to wait for the answer to life’s questions. But it was a short time to translate the subtitles for an entire film.
Putting away my books with some reluctance, and making a fresh cup of coffee, I returned to the ta, racy on a combination of adrenaline, nervous speculation and the smell of the brew. I pulled on my fingerless gloves and savoured the warmth of the cup against my fingertips. A movie by Chen Kaige I had once subtitled included a routine by Beijing comedians about fingerless gloves, which they found hilarious – what was the point? Pay a little more and get full coverage! I take it they didn’t spend a lot of time trying to type in a cold room.
Needing to get straight to work, I did what anyone in my situation would do: I checked my emails. An exceedingly courteous Nigerian general’s wife wished to deposit US$3.4 million dollars into my account. I wasn’t the most financially astute person in the world, a fact to which my circumstances bore witness, but neither was I born yesterday. I was born a long time before yesterday. I pressed delete. An online Chinese travel agency was having a special on fares to Gansu province. Winter in Gansu was even more ghastly than winter in Beijing. Delete. An old high-school classmate now living in Sydney announced her retirement in a group email. Her kids were fabulous and ‘all growed up! ;-)’. She and Rob were going to sell their house and move back to the coast. I had no retirement plan, no kids, no Rob and no house. No coast. Delete.
Facebook is blocked here, which frankly is something of a relief. I don’t need that ticker-tape parade of life passing by my window every day with its marching bands, wacky floats and delirious crowds: the quintessential hongchen, ‘red dust’, a world of materiality, illusion and desire from which both Buddhism and Daoism aspire to liberate us. Besides, what the hell was my status? Political widow? Could you be a widow if you weren’t married?
Q, I willed, call me. Please just call me. Tell me that everything is okay. The phone was mute. Its digital clock didn’t even have the decency to tick. Was there an app for that? I checked, gave up. Another ten minutes passed.
I texted Q. Long time no imperial summons, I wrote and hit send. I then repeated the message on WeChat. I often thought it would be best, in some ways, if he would leave me alone, and me him, for good. I’d tried to put him behind me before. But this thing, this crazy letter from a dead man offering a key to my past, the drink-me potion that would transport me to the other side of the looking glass – Q would be interested. He was like that: omni-curious, eager to see what lay just around the corners of life, drawn as readily to darkness as he was to light. And I longed to show him how much I belonged here. I wished, for the millionth sickening time, that I hadn’t argued with him, that I could stop arguing with him once and for all. My heart pressed against my ribs. No text came in reply. He’s just not that into me? Believe me: that’s not the problem.
The curtain fluttered again. It would have been carried on one of those colliding currents of air, the warmth heaven-bound, the cold crashing to earth. I squinted out the window at the mustard-smear sky, with its toxic promise of streaming eyes and a smarting throat: ‘that great yellow eye of the Pei-king sky’ the poet Victor Segalen called it over a century ago, when it was simply Gobi desert sand, and not smog, that made it so.
Segalen was another one with an empress dowager fixation. For him, it was Cixi’s relatively unremarkable successor, the mother of the three-year-old emperor Puyi, who took the throne when Cixi and her emperor nephew died in 1908. Segalen’s René Leys, a novel in the form of a memoir – Segalen uses his own name for the narrator – tells the story of a remarkable young linguist, the Belgian René Leys, who gains not just the confidence of the young empress dowager, but access to her bed and admission to the secretive and guarded world of the Forbidden City and even joins its internal police: ‘… the red wall, the yellow wall, the impenetrable purple wall had abruptly become delicate, diaphanous webs that I should pierce and pass through like child’s play’. René Leys was inspired by Segalen’s Chinese tutor, a young Frenchman called Maurice Roy who in his later years became a bank clerk, refusing to speak about his past, and who died in a lift accident in Shanghai. It’s a bit like that here – it can be as easy for a foreigner to try on a new identity and discard an old one as it is to carry a fake Gucci and toast one’s friends with a counterfeit Bordeaux labelled Château Margaux. Was Maurice Roy a bank clerk pretending to have been an empress dowager’s lover and former security operative, or an empress dowager’s lover and former security operative pretending to be a bank clerk? Was René Leys also based, as some have suggested, on Backhouse himself? (All roads lead …!) Nothing here was ever completely transparent; in recent decades even the air has become opaque.
On this day, the air was exceptionally vile. It squatted over the courtyard, crushing the trees, sliding down the sloped and tiled roofs to defecate on the window ledges. It was a Sisyphean task to keep any courtyard house in Beijing from being buried in sand and atmospheric vomit. Though a straight line led from my door in what used to be the Jin family gatehouse through to the inner courtyard where Mrs Jin lived with a floating population of nieces, nephews and old friends, I couldn’t even see her door this morning. The ornamental gate that separated my mini-courtyard from the main one floated like a mirage outside my windows. Mrs Jin had appeared ghostlike out of this stew – not unlike, I supposed, the way the mysterious messenger on horseback had earlier appeared to her. It occurred to me that the reason she hadn’t seen the horse at first was that it was masked by this ambient cloak of invisibility.
A great wind blew up and hurled the gritty air against my rattling windows and thin door. It whipped the branches of the trees and bent their slim trunks and, somewhere in the courtyard, flung a ceramic pot down onto the stones, where the sound of its shattering came rushing through the confusion like the message in a dream.
There was no reply to my text or message on WeChat. Fine. Fuck him.
My best friend, Jingjing, was back in the US, wrapping up some complicated financial business there. I thought about sending her a message on WeChat but the time zones were all wrong.
It was nearly noon.
I keep running into young foreigners here who want to be subtitler
s. Before the Global Financial Crisis, they were in it for the presumed glory, the stardust they assumed sprinkled itself over anyone who managed to come within the orbit of the great and glorious Chinese film industry.
Once, a few years back, Duan Mou invited me to come and watch him film in a small town in the southeast. I stayed for a week with the cast and crew in a hotel that, like the rest of the little town, appeared to have dropped from another plane of reality into the middle of some rice paddies. The lobby of the hotel soared to a Venetian dome, from which mosaic tiles plunged randomly, plinking and smashing on the rough marble floor. As the sole occupants of the hotel, we knew to walk around the danger zone, where the daily growing heap of broken tiles came to resemble some kind of dynamic contemporary art installation. Every floor had a faux-Louis XIV lounge suite by the lift, gathering dust. One day, I saw the maids polishing the faux-velvet upholstery of the lounge suite on my floor with faux-Lemon Pledge – the label, I noticed, read Lemon Pedge. In the rooms, too, it was all trappings and no fittings – a marble shower but no hot water, and a plush-looking carpet composed of a grimy synthetic, scarred with cigarette burns. The lifts were impressively wood-panelled and leather-faced – until your eye focused on where they’d got chipped or torn, and then they exposed themselves as plywood and vinyl.