Empress Orchid - Anchee Min [72]
That night was the first night I didn’t have to perform the fan dance.
We sat in bed and talked. His Majesty spoke about his mother, and I my father. We shed tears together. He asked what I remembered most about my life as a child in the country. I told him about an experience that changed my view of peasants. When I was eleven, I participated in an event organized by my father, the taotai, to rescue the crops from locust infestation.
“The summer was hot and damp,” I recalled. “Green stretched as far as the eye could see. The crops were waist high. The rice, wheat and millet were fattening up day by day. The harvest was fingers away. My father was happy, because he knew if everything went smoothly until the crops were harvested, the peasants living in almost five hundred villages would be able to survive the year.”
Then came the sound of swarming locusts. They descended when the crops began to mature. Overnight the entire region was infested. It was as if they had come from the clouds or from deep within the earth. These brown cousins of crickets had two tiny shell-like drums close to their wings. When the wings flapped against the drums, it sounded like fingers tapping on tin. The pests came in dark clouds that blotted out the sun. They swarmed over the crops and chewed up the leaves with teeth like saws. In a few days fields of green disappeared.
My father gathered all of his men to help the villagers fight the locusts. People took off their shoes and beat the locusts with them. My father saw the futility of this and switched tactics.
He declared a state of emergency and told the peasants to dig trenches. He placed people in the path of the locusts as they moved through the crops. When a trench was ready, my father ordered one group of peasants to chase the locusts. “Hold up your clothes and wave,” he said. The idea was to push the locusts toward the trench, while another group lined up behind the trench, which was piled high with dry straw.
Thousands of people waved and shouted at the top of their lungs, and I was one of them. We chased the locusts into the trench. Once they were in, my father ordered the straw to be lit. The locusts were roasted. I beat at the locusts as fast as I could to prevent them from flying away. We fought for five days and nights and were able to save half our crops. By the time my father pronounced victory, he was covered with locusts and their broken shells. I even picked locusts out of his pockets.
Emperor Hsien Feng listened to me with fascination. He said that he could imagine my father. He wished that he had known the man.
The next day I was ordered to move in with His Majesty. I would stay with him for the rest of the year. He put me in a compound connected to the audience hall, and he came to me during breaks and between audiences.
I dared not wish for my good fortune to last forever. I tried hard not to expect anything. But deep down I desired to keep what I had sprouted.
When Emperor Hsien Feng left me for work, I missed him immediately. I became easily bored and was impatient for his return. Walking around the garden, I could think of little to do but reflect on what had happened the night before. I fed on the details of our time together.
Each day I checked the calendar to remind myself that I had gained another lucky day. May of 1854 was the best time of my life. Everything was too good to be true for a girl of my background. However, I had never allowed the Emperor’s adoration to alter my sense of reality. Whenever I got carried away, I caught myself the moment I saw Nuharoo and the other concubines. I told myself to remember that my luck could end in an instant. I tried to make the best of my time.
When the season turned, His Majesty moved to Yuan Ming Yuan, the Grand Round Garden, and took me with him. It was the loveliest of his many summer palaces. Generations of emperors had come here