Empress Orchid - Anchee Min [74]
“There is no more yang element left in me.” He sighed and pointed to himself. “This is a skin bag. Look how pitifully it extends from my neck.”
I tried everything. I did the fan dance and turned our bed into an erotic stage. Each night I invented a different goddess. I stripped and did bedroom acrobatics. The poses were borrowed from an Imperial pillow book An-te-hai had found for me.
Nothing I did had any effect. His Majesty gave up. The look on his face broke my heart. “I am a eunuch.” His smiles were worse than his tears.
After he fell asleep, I went to work with the chefs. I wanted His Majesty to have a more healthful, nutritious diet. I insisted on country-style fresh vegetables and meat instead of deep-fried and preserved foods. I convinced His Majesty that the best way to please me was to pick up his chopsticks. But he had no appetite. He complained that everything inside him hurt. The doctors told him, “Your inner fire is burning so badly that you have blisters growing along your swallowing pipe.”
His Majesty stayed in bed all day. “I won’t last long, Orchid, I am sure,” he said with his eyes fixed on the ceiling. “Maybe it is for the best.”
I remembered that my father had done the same after he had been removed from his post. I wished that I could tell Emperor Hsien Feng how selfish and unmerciful he was to his people. “Dying is cheap and living is noble.” I groaned like a drunken lady.
Trying to cheer him up, I ordered his favorite operas. Troupes performed in our sitting room. The actors’ swords and sticks and imagi-nary horses were inches away from His Majesty’s nose. It got his attention. For a few days he was pleasantly distracted. But it didn’t last. One day he walked out in the middle of the performance. There would be no more opera.
The Emperor had been living on ginseng soup. He was spiritless and often fell deeply asleep in his chair. He would wake up in the middle of the night and sit alone in the dark. He no longer looked forward to sleep for fear of nightmares. He was afraid of shutting his eyes. When it became unbearable, he would go to the piles of court documents, which were brought every evening by his eunuchs. He would work until exhausted. Night after night I heard him weeping in utter despair.
A handsome rooster was brought to his garden to wake him up at dawn. Hsien Feng preferred the singing of a rooster to the chimes of clocks. The rooster had a large red crown, black feathers and emerald green tail feathers. It had the look of a bully, with vicious eyes and a beak like a hook. Its claws were as large as a vulture’s. The Imperial rooster woke us with loud cries, often before dawn. The cry reminded me of someone who was cheering: Ooow, oow, oow … Oh. Ooow, oow, oow. It woke His Majesty, all right, but he didn’t have the energy to get up.
One night Hsien Feng threw a pile of documents on the bed and asked me to take a look. He pounded his chest and yelled, “Any tree will bear a rope for me. Why should I hesitate?”
I started to read. My limited schooling didn’t allow me to go much deeper than the meanings of primary words. It was not difficult to understand the problems, though. They were all anyone had talked about since I had entered the Forbidden City.
I don’t recall exactly when Emperor Hsien Feng began to regularly ask me to read his documents. I was so driven by the desire to help that I ignored the rule that a concubine was forbidden to learn the court’s business. The Emperor was too tired and sick to care about restrictions.
“I have just ordered the beheading of a dozen eunuchs who have become opium addicts,” His Majesty told me one evening.
“What did they do?” I asked.
“They needed money to buy the drug, so they stole from the treasury. I can’t believe that this disease has invaded my own backyard. Imagine what it’s doing to the nation!”
He pushed himself out of bed and went to his desk. He flipped the pages of a thick document