Empress Orchid - Anchee Min [134]
“Guide my hand, Orchid,” he said, and tried to sit up, but collapsed instead.
The three of us—Chief Eunuch Shim, An-te-hai and I—laid His Majesty down on his back. I put the paper near his hand and told him that he could ink his signature now.
With his eyes fixed on the ceiling, Emperor Hsien Feng wiggled the brush. I carefully guided his strokes to prevent his signature from looking like a child’s scribble. By the time we covered his name with the red Imperial seal, Hsien Feng had dropped the brush pen and passed out. The ink stone fell and black ink splattered all over my dress and shoes.
In July of 1861 we celebrated Hsien Feng’s thirtieth birthday. His Majesty lay in his bed and drifted in and out of consciousness. No guests were invited. The birthday ceremony included a food parade. The dishes were barely touched; everyone sensed his coming death.
A month later, Hsien Feng seemed to hit bottom. Doctor Sun Pao-tien predicted that His Majesty’s demise was a week, perhaps days, away. The court grew tense because the Emperor had not named his successor.
Tung Chih was not allowed to be with his father because the court was afraid it would be too disturbing. This upset me. I believed that any affection demonstrated by His Majesty would sustain Tung Chih’s memory for the rest of his life.
Nuharoo accused me of placing a curse on Hsien Feng by telling Tung Chih that his father was going to die. Her astrologer believed that only when we refused to accept his death would Hsien Feng be saved by a miracle.
It was hard to fight Nuharoo when she had her mind set. I could only manage to have An-te-hai sneak Tung Chih to his father’s bedside, usually when Nuharoo went with the Buddhists to chant or was enjoying her teatime opera, provided by Su Shun and performed in Nuharoo’s quarters.
To my disappointment Tung Chih didn’t want to be with his father. He complained about his father’s “scary look” and “bad breath.” He was miserable when I pushed him toward the sickbed. He called his father a bore and once yelled, “You hollow man!” He pulled at Hsien Feng’s sheets and threw pillows at him. He wanted to play Ride the Horsy with the dying man. There wasn’t a single compassionate bone in his little body.
I spanked my son. For the next week, instead of leaving Tung Chih to Nuharoo I spent time observing him. I discovered the source of his poor behavior.
I had instructed Tung Chih to take riding lessons with Yung Lu, but Nuharoo made excuses for the child to be absent. Instead of practicing with real horses, Tung Chih rode the eunuchs. More than thirty eunuchs had to crawl around the courtyard to make him happy. His favorite “horse” was An-te-hai. It was the child’s way of getting revenge, for An-te-hai had been ordered by me to discipline him. Tung Chih whipped An-te-hai’s buttocks and forced him to crawl until his knees bled.
Worse than this treatment of An-te-hai was that he ordered a seventy-year-old eunuch named Old Wei to swallow his feces. When I questioned Tung Chih, he replied, “Mother, I just wanted to know if Old Wei had been telling the truth.”
“What truth?”
“That I could do anything I wanted. I only asked him to prove it.”
I looked at my son’s little face and wondered how he had become capable of such mean tricks. He was clever and knew whom to punish and whom to reward. If An-te-hai hadn’t been loyal to me, he would have yielded to Tung Chih’s every desire. Tung Chih had once claimed that he knew Nuharoo’s favorite dishes. It didn’t occur to me that this was my son’s way of rewarding her. I even praised him when he sent Nuharoo her favorite fancy moon cakes. I thought it was an appropriate gesture of piety and was pleased that my son got along with her. Then Tung Chih bragged about how Nuharoo encouraged him to neglect school. She had said to him, “There are emperors in history who never spent a day in the classroom but had no problem bringing their country to prosperity.”
I confronted Nuharoo and pointed out the danger of not disciplining Tung Chih. She told me that I was overreacting. “He’s only five