The Empress Lover

by Linda Jaivin

  Here I need to say a few words about my servant and friend Ch’ang. Those who believed that he had appropriated a considerable fortune from me in the various dealings in antiques and curios for which he acted as middleman, who whispered that I was under his control after he took possession of my former house on Shih-Fuma Street, where I continued to reside as his tenant, might be surprised to see that I persist in calling him my friend. But they do not know the extent of his involvement or sacrifice in this secret business.

  After my goddess, despite her advanced age, delivered our son with an ease and speed that would have been remarkable in a much younger woman, it was necessary for every reason to hide his existence from the world. The revolutionaries were active at home and overseas, calling for an end to the “foreign” dynasty that had brought so much humiliation upon China. They argued that it was time China took her place among the modern nations of the world. Had our son been announced, all the anti-Ch’ing and anti-foreign sentiment in China would have combined to rip this tiny, innocent life and, I dare say, our own, to shreds. Life, limb and reputation were all at stake.

  Ch’ang was crafty and reliable, and to make a long story short, for the hand that holds the pen is already shaking with exhaustion, between myself and Li Lien-ying we promised him the resources with which to raise the boy as his own under my roof. Not long after that, the emperor, already sickly, passed away and she followed by one day, assassinated I am sure – though the history books will never record it – by the treacherous Yuan Shih-kai who, several years later, as president of the republic, found out about the infant’s existence and sent assailants to my home.

  And so Ch’ang was not, as is commonly presumed, knifed and strangled as the result of some shady business deal gone wrong. The murderers were looking for the child and tortured him when he said he didn’t know where he was. The police were well compensated for protecting the murderers, as was attested by the sudden sprouting of rings of gold and jade on the hands of their chief soon after. But the truth was that the boy had been sent away at the tender age of four, around the time he began to look unmistakeably like his mother. Ch’ang was not faultless in this affair, for after the boy’s departure, seeing the end of his profitable use to me, he made certain claims upon my property that were backed by threats of blackmail.

  I sent the boy, with his legacy of the carved jade bracelets and the useless, possibly even harmful, knowledge that he was born a prince, into the care of relatives in England. I am not sure if they were more relieved at this apparent proof that I had been cured of my inversion, or scandalised by the fact that the mother had most certainly not been of the white race. In any case, they wished to have nothing more to do with me and I never saw our son again. Sic transit gloria mundi. Or as Augustus said, Acta est fabula: Plaudite! The play is over. Applaud!

  PART THREE

  I am running after Dr H but don’t know how to follow, don’t know where he has gone. I find myself on Ghost Street with its red lanterns. Phantom-like are the emanations of laughter from the restaurants that line the street, the muffled shouts of drinkers at their raucous games. I have spent too many late nights here and elsewhere over steamy hotpots with jiurou pengyou , friends of wine and meat, whose names sank long ago beneath the roiling black surface of memory, lost to Modiano’s matière sombre. Here and there, drivers in army greatcoats lean on their cars, warming themselves with tobacco and waiting for the night to return their custom to them.

  I walk back towards the Drum Tower, and then south towards the Palace, following once again the historic mnemonic of the old Imperial Precinct Wall. Before the Forbidden City’s Gate of Eastern Splendour, I stop in my tracks. Its soaring lintels are caked in snow and ice; a fragrant beauty hangs in the air. A young man of important and secretive demeanour, dressed in sable and wearing the hat of a high official of the Qing dynasty, approaches on horseback, his glossy queue hanging down his back. The great red doors swing open. A conspiracy of eunuchs swarms out. Taking the lead of his fine white horse, from whose nostrils comes a steady cloud of steam, the eunuchs beckon him inside. The doors close in my face.

  I am running through Tiananmen Square. It is not the Tiananmen Square of the new millennium, guarded and barricaded and forbidding, nor the Imperial Way of the Qing, but of the 1980s, open, throwing up no obstacles. I lose a shoe but I keep going. I am trying to capture something that is eluding me when I understand that thing is time. Why didn’t I go then, why didn’t I disobey him, why didn’t I follow him? This shockingly lucid thought clutches at me, shakes me, unbalances me. I fall down somewhere, Liubukou perhaps, or maybe Fuxingmen, and weep but cannot make any sound. I realise that I am running up stairs in a building that keeps closing in on itself, its stairs turning into ladders turning into snakes, like an M.C. Escher nightmare. I was in the belly of the whale, no, the belly of Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail, killing itself and then bringing itself back to life, eternally cycling, reincarnating, a universe complete in itself. For as I climb only to discover that I am falling, I also realise that what I thought I was chasing is chasing me instead.

  It is neither the doctor nor time, I realise. It is the story that has caught up with me. Or, you could say, the truth. Backhouse, it strikes me, again with unnerving clarity, had the genius to hold on to his story, to grow it and live it to the end. I do not have that particular genius, as much as I’d like to say I do. Cold air wraps its fingers around my throat.

  My scarf has slipped from my neck. Slowly, I wind it back. It is late, how late I do not know, and though the heater is still on, the temperature in the room has dropped. My blurry stare rests on the two cats, who have retaken the other chair and curl together, once more a throbbing wheel of yin and yang. The title of a Daoist treatise floats into my head, summoned by some obscure mental algorithm. It was a manuscript that archaeologists found in Dunhuang: Wondrous Instructions on the Skill of Quiescent Breathing. Where had I read about it? Did I just dream it? Have I actually read it or do I just know the title? I feel a little dazed. I look up. The goddess of immortality Chang’E is still flying to the moon and the clock is still stopped at nine minutes past eight. The Sage has pulled up another chair and is seated nearby, looking at me, a book in his lap. The bar has emptied. It is just the two of us now. I breathe, quiescent, wondrous.

  The mysterious woman who has come into my bar on this snowy night opens her eyes and blinks, unfocused, her mouth soft. Her gaze falls on me and she smiles uncertainly. An image, tinted like an old photograph, forms in my mind and then curls and crisps at the edges, and burns off leaving a chemical smell. She has sensed something too – the faint vertical grooves above her nose deepen. I don’t mind these wrinkles on a woman’s face, or the lines in the corner of their eyes; I like the reassurance that someone has both thought and smiled. I think, for some reason, of a young woman I met years ago, when I was still dating young women. She was only twenty-four years old and was capable of neither frowning nor laughing. Despite the agreeable symmetry of her features, her face seemed alien, blank and affectless. I was shocked when she explained, matter-of-factly, that she had had Botox. She professed to be mad about poetry, but I wondered how you could read poetry without being able to access the emotions that live in the skin. I saw her home, bored at the prospect of taking to bed someone who was incapable of looking even the slightest bit excited about the poetry that is sex. Oliver, predictably, thought I was an idiot for turning her away. But even he has his limits: once, when he fondled a woman’s preternaturally large, round breasts, one escaped his hand to travel up towards her collarbone. It didn’t deter him from sleeping with her, but he confessed that he avoided her breasts for the rest of the night – not an easy task, he admitted, given their size and eerie mobility.

  I realise my gaze has drifted to her breasts, which are a nice size, not pert, but not droopy either; they are, I think quite spontaneously, civilised breasts. Where’d that come from? I give my head a little shake and pretend to yawn so that
I can recalibrate my expression. She smiles, a slow, melancholy smile, and that’s when it hits me. How I know her. The knowledge of it smacks me in the face with such violence that the hand that had been reaching for the bottle to refill her glass travels instead to cover my mouth and cheek. Just as I do this, I see that the realisation has hit her as well, for her face, already pale, whitens.

  Time swings on its hinge.

  It is clear now why I am here, why I have come. We are all here now, all of us. A frozen memory begins to thaw.

  The day had begun badly, with a row. I say row, but our tiffs rarely achieved such epic proportions. I would want to thrash things out, talk through any misunderstandings or presumed misunderstandings, tell him exactly what was on my mind and hear his point of view – typical Westerner, Q would say, shaking his head and refusing to engage. He knew all my buttons – ‘typical Westerner’ was one. But I could never really find his – currents of lust and affection and friendship ran between us, but it still hurts to admit that we were never truly, or at least mutually, passionately, intimate. He doesn’t demand anything from me, I’d tell Jingjing, tentative-proud, and she’d just shake her head fondly. I know now that she was biting back the urge to tell me that this wasn’t necessarily a great thing. Smarter than me in these matters, she said that Wang Jian demanded little of her as well but she wished he demanded more. Demanding less wasn’t necessarily an act of generosity or even trust. They can afford to be relaxed about us, she said, because they can see how befogged with love we are. But even she did not go so far then as to say that really, at its core, it was a kind of indifference; she said that later, after their break-up.

  Befogged with love is definitely a good description of my state of mind when Q and I started seeing each other – finally started seeing each other. By then we’d both had a number of other relationships of differing degrees of intensity. I’d had two successive Chinese boyfriends, both of whom, I came to realise, ultimately saw me as a passport on legs. That they liked the legs too was just a happy coincidence. One, after more than a year of apparent mad love and naughty, secretive, dangerous fucking, dumped me the day he got a visa to study in London. The other bristled when I wouldn’t agree to marry him a week after we started going out. He asked me again a week later, and a week after that. I told him that I wasn’t ready for such a big commitment, that I wanted to slow down, and a week after that suggested that maybe we should take a break. He dropped the subject and stayed with me, but a month later, disappeared. Tellingly, I didn’t miss him all that much. When I ran into him about two weeks after that, he was on the arm of a giddy American girl. I just hoped she could teach him, as I never was able, that sticking a finger up a woman’s vagina and roughly poking around for a while wasn’t actually foreplay. Good luck to her. After that, I had a dalliance with a ridiculously handsome Japanese student with a foot fetish (apparently I have excellent feet), a casual affair with an older, drink-sodden Yugoslavian diplomat (Yugoslavia was still a country) who told me he wanted to be my ‘slav’, and then I began seeing an English guy my own age, a journalist with a good line in clever banter and a knowing, playful tongue. One day, apparently confident I’d be happy to share in the conspiracy of his words, he breezily remarked that he didn’t find non-Asian women attractive because they were a) too fat and b) too independent. In my book, foot fetishism is one thing, racial fetishism another entirely, especially when it carries a misogynistic undertone. My response: I stuck my stomach out as far as it would go and marched out the door. The dickhead came running after me: ‘I didn’t mean you, Linnie!’ I told him that, ha ha, fooled him, I wasn’t actually ‘Asian’ at all; I was South American, the daughter of a conquistador and his dusky native rose, and he could go fuck himself. Of these retrospectively minor heartbreaks I shall speak no more.

  It was partly as a result of these misadventures, however, that I gradually convinced myself that in China, as elsewhere, I was never going to meet or at least get together with Mr Right, and whoever I did hook up with would always see me as representing something that might be a part of me but wasn’t the whole, and chances were that part was a squeezable laissez-passer to one side or another of the Great Wall. I decided that if that was how it was, I would work it, use my natural, genetic ambivalence, my unanchored looks and my feral mind to my advantage. I embraced an identity as a shapeshifter, a one-woman Carnivale of masked balls. Backhouse was – dare I use the word – a role model. He fascinated me with his ability to slip in and out, not so much of character, but of characters. The shy, modest scholar. The wild libertine and sexual braggart. The uxorious consort. The gracious gentleman. The eternally put-upon grudge-bearer. This country has long attracted and somehow accommodated a certain kind of foreign quirk. And if the Backhousians wrap China around themselves like a magician’s cloak, China itself barely notices. Sheer irrelevance can be the source of great freedom. I played more roles than The Dream of the Red Chamber has characters.

  That’s a long way of saying that by the time I met up with Q again, at a party, when he said I shimmered, it was true. It didn’t hurt that he had pretty much the same effect on me then as the first time I met him. But I had caught his eye at last, and it didn’t take long for him to catch my hand. We’d wasted enough time. We went back to my place that night. As we hurried towards the Friendship Hotel, he tucked me under his arm, and I breathed in the close, animal smell of his leather jacket. Years of fantasising about him turned me cartoonish in my desire, and he’d no sooner kissed my neck than I was thrusting my tongue into his ear. He jerked away in surprise. Manman lai, he said, slow down. I was so embarrassed I could barely look at him but he took charge then, and his desire didn’t take long to heat up. Naked under the doona, his skin was on fire. I tried to touch every bit of him with every bit of me. He was assured in his lovemaking, sensual and abandoned, except he refused to reciprocate my ‘playing the jade flute’ by going down on me because, he said, a friend had told him that foreign women tasted unspeakably odd. I remember feeling marginally more chagrin at the realisation that he ultimately saw me as ‘foreign’ than the knowledge that he wasn’t prepared to give as good as he got. I don’t remember many of the other details of our lovemaking that night except that what he wouldn’t do with his tongue he did very well with his fingers. When I came, with him inside me, it felt like I’d never stop, great clenching waves of bliss sweeping through me from head to curled toes. He climaxed with a throaty sigh, his buttocks moving hard and tight under my fingers, his hot breath searing my throat. Later, pressed for details by Jingjing, I used the expression the Party had used in evaluating Mao’s legacy: san–qi kai, a thirty–seventy split, mostly bliss but with a certain quota of excruciating moments. If I’m to be completely honest, that pretty much summed up the relationship as a whole. The you shi secret men’s business moments I mentioned earlier, that belonged to the thirty. But the seventy – that’s what I lived for.

  Like most couples, we gradually discovered a rhythm and routine, in and out of bed, and accumulated small grievances, some of which we thrashed out, some of which we nursed. I made that stupid remark about poverty, and he reacted, and I hinted at a mutual future, saying something about maybe, in a few years, visiting Europe together, and he replied, way too quickly, that it was impossible to predict where either of us would be in even six months’ time. That particular conversation, so strangely reminiscent of our very first exchange, about his Forever bicycle, I later realised with horror, took place in January 1989, just as the Dragon Year, with all its portent, was giving way to the Year of the Snake.

  It was around then that the physicist Fang Lizhi launched his petition calling for the release of Wei Jingsheng and other political prisoners, and soon other intellectuals had their own petition that Q signed, making me both proud and nervous. Then, security forces prevented Fang Lizhi and his wife from attending a function at the American embassy with President Bush, and the poet Bei Dao wrote a furious response. Tensions rose along with resentment
and anger at government corruption. The death of the purged and relatively liberal leader Hu Yaobang in mid-April was the spark that lit the powder keg and students began pouring out of the campuses to march on Tiananmen Square, occupying the city’s heart in more than just the literal sense. Time sped up. The students sang and danced and then they stopped eating. Q, like everyone else, was spending more and more of his days on the square.