Empress Orchid - Anchee Min [5]
Hearing this, Mother fell to her knees.
The taotai’s men took back the taels.
Exhaustion suddenly overwhelmed me and I fell on my father’s coffin.
The taotai walked to the coffin and squatted as if studying the grains of the wood. He was a stocky man with rough features. A moment later he turned to me. I expected him to speak but he didn’t.
“You are not a Chinese, are you?” he finally asked. His eyes were on my unbound feet.
“No, sir,” I replied. “I am Manchu.”
“How old are you? Fifteen?”
“Seventeen.”
He nodded. His eyes continued to travel up and down, examining me.
“The road is filled with bandits,” he said. “A pretty girl like you should not be walking.”
“But my father needs to go home.” My tears ran.
The taotai took my hand and placed the silver taels in my palm. “My respects to your father.”
I never forgot about the taotai. After I became the Empress of China I sought him out. I made an exception to promote him. I made him a provincial governor, and he was given a handsome pension for the rest of his life.
Two
WE ENTERED Peking through the south gate. I was amazed at the massive rose-colored walls. They were everywhere, one behind another, winding around the entire city. The walls were about forty feet high and fifty feet thick. At the hidden heart of the sprawling, low-lying capital sat the Forbidden City, the home of the Emperor.
I had never seen so many people in one place. The smell of roasting meat fluttered in the air. The street before us was more than sixty feet wide, and for a mile went straight to the Gate of Zenith. Along each side were rows of deep huddled mat-constructed booths and shops festooned with flags announcing their wares. There was so much to see: rope dancers twirling and spinning, fortunetellers throwing interpretations of the I Ching, acrobats and jugglers performing tricks with bears and monkeys, folksingers telling old tales in fanciful masks, wigs and costumes. Furniture craftsmen were busy with their hands. The scenes were right out of classic Chinese opera. Herbalists displayed large black dry fungi. An acupuncturist applied needles to a patient’s head, making him look like a porcupine. Repairers mended porcelain with small rivets, their work as fine as embroidery. Barbers hummed their favorite songs while shaving their customers. Children screamed happily while sly-eyed camels with heavy loads strutted elegantly by.
My eyes were drawn to sugar-coated berries on sticks. I would have felt miserable if I hadn’t seen a group of coolies carrying heavy buckets on bamboo poles across their bare shoulders. The men were collecting feces for the night-soil merchants. They moved slowly toward waiting boats by the canal.
A distant relative whom we called Eleventh Uncle received us. He was a tiny-framed, sour man from my father’s side. He wasn’t pleased with our arrival. He complained about his troubles running a dry-food shop. “There hasn’t been much food to dry in recent years,” he said. “All eaten. Nothing left to sell.” Mother apologized for the inconvenience and said that we would leave as soon as we got back on our feet. He nodded and then warned Mother about his door: “It falls out of its frame.”
Finally we buried our father. There was no ceremony, because we couldn’t afford one. We settled down in our uncle’s three-room house, in a kinsman’s compound in Pewter Lane. In the local dialect, the compound was called a hootong. Like a spider web, the city of Peking was woven with hootongs. The Forbidden City was at the center, and thousands of hootongs made up the web. My uncle’s lane was on the east side of a street near the canal of the Imperial city. The canal ran parallel to the high walls and served as the Emperor’s private waterway. I saw boats with yellow flags travel down the canal. Tall trees were thick behind the walls like floating green clouds. The neighbors warned us not to look in the direction of the Forbidden City. “There are dragons, the guardian spirits sent by the gods, living inside.