I Love a Broad Margin to My Life - Maxine Hong Kingston [42]
side walls. 18 ancestors,
each dated with years consecutively
from 960 to 1279.
They wore the high headdresses of high
rank. They had my mother’s name: Chew.
Next to Chew was a simple word that I
had asked my mother to draw, giving me
the name of the kings in the stories she told.
Almost blind, she’d written that word.
I asked the mayoress, “Please say this word.”
“Sung.” She touched both words.
“Chew Sung.” She swept her arm right to
left across the altar. “The Chew Sung
huang dai.” Kings. Emperors. Gods.
“Ten thousand old people bowed to them.”
From the last (1271–1279)
emperor’s picture, the genealogy tree
continued along the left wall to the door.
“Your names are here,” said the mayoress, pointing
to branches nearest the door. A fear
went through me, that fear when I am about
to learn something. I asked carefully,
“Were we soldiers? Were we servants?”
I would’ve asked, “Were we courtiers?”
but didn’t know courtier. Most likely,
we were courtiers. “No! No! You emperor!
You emperor!” You who left for America,
became American, you forget everything.
You forget who you are. Emperor!
Chew Sung Emperor. Emperor of the Northern Sung.
Emperor of the Southern Sung. A teacher of English
took my hand, bowed over it, and said,
laughing, “Your majesty.” So, the stories
about mighty sea battles, gunpowder bombs,
lost wars, 100,000
refugees, the boy emperor falling
off the typhoon-broken ship,
the other boy emperor tied to the back
of the prime minister, the Lum woman who hid
the princes, passed the young dragons off
as “Big Lum” and “Little Lum”—“Forever,
you meet a Lum, you carry her shoes”—
the mass suicide of queens and princesses
at the river, the stone you can see today
to remember the last, lost battle, “Sung”
carved on one side, “Yuan” the other,
and more stones, the Empress’s Dressing Table
Stone and the Throne Stone—all that history,
us. We were the carriers of the Traveling Palace;
wherever we settle, that’s the Center.
Kuan Fu, the long-lost capital,
is here. Found. The Traveling Palace was built
of mud and straw, rocks for furniture. My father
teased my mother, “You lived like Injuns.”
Their stories of the Sung were always about its fall,
the trauma of war, the running as refugees.
The conqueror was Yuan. (I’d thought, Juan in Cuba.
“Cousin Juan threw away BaBa’s
poems. Juan stole the book box.”)
Yuan means Mongol, and their leader was Kublai Khan.
I had to research for myself the glory of Sung.
Sung was the age when the ecosystem was healthiest.
From atop the Great Wall where now you see loess,
you would’ve gazed out at forests of elm,
planted as the Great Wall was being built.
Women were teachers; they even taught their sons
military strategy. General Yue Fei
and his mother were Sung. The Sung mapped the land
and the sky. Its navy patrolled the rivers and seas.
(But the Yuan had a larger navy; the Mongol
women fought on horseback and on warships.
The Sung deforested the Xiang River Valley
for wood and metal to build ships and to forge
weapons.) Movable type was invented during Sung,
and paper money. They discerned true north.
Artists made Buddhas and bodhisattvas.
There was a poet named Poet. Poet
wrote about travels that take but a day
then home again. Painters painted the long
journeys. The long golden handscroll,
“18 Songs for Barbarian Reed Pipe”:
Nomads capture Wen-chi, poetess
and composer, daughter of the librarian. She
is the barbarians’ treasure, taken from her home
of many roofs and courtyards. She rides
a dappled horse escorted by processions of men
on dark horses and camels across the yellow
grass of the steppes and yellow sands of the desert.
They play flutes as they ride. Hooves of the horses
beat percussion. The earth is drum. Falcons
ride on shoulders and wrists. She sees migrating
geese make words in the sky; she reads them as letters
from home. She pricks her finger, and writes with blood
a message from her heart. “Let my heart
be heard from the ends of the earth.” The wild geese
can read words written