Free My Last Empress by Da Chen

members ofthe palace eunuch corps—maroon gowned, thinned-voiced men—carried me through the Gate of Valor, a northern back entry reserved for familial affairs, its casualness hinting at a heightened degree of privacy.
    We passed Mai Shan Mountain, a slanting manmade hill piled from the soil dug from nearby Bei Hai Pond back-ending the palace outside its wall whereupon a Sinned Tree still stands, accused and convicted of providing a conniving branch, enabling another boy emperor, not this one, to hang himself in despair. The historian in me cherishes this nugget of factual reminiscence. A full Court trial was held to conduct a three-day proceeding wherein the tree was the defending culprit, with a charade of sobbing witnesses. The Court trial was necessitated by the need to find a killer because suicide would be impious to heavenly intent and purpose, making human and fallible what is loftily of gods and ages. The tree was uprooted to stand trial, possibly the first of its kind, only to be replanted back as irrefutable proof of a noxious growth, a sinner to be viewed by all and to suffer the insufferable, of having done in the one who could not be so undone. The tree, old it might be, blossoms annually with gusto, attesting not to its innocence but to a certain absurdity inherent in this monarchy or the next. Who, least this author, is equipped to critique an establishment that had outlasted many other empires?
    Where am I, in the procession of my entrance? Oh yes, we passed beyond a canopy of old pines, expectedly gnawed and knuckled, skirted ponds and lakes, turtles and goldfish. I was passing the back palace—you see the historian in menever quits working—the notorious dump for those of the hundreds of neglected palace women. All legal wives of the young emperor, they were chosen yearly, selected for their talent in needle, medicine, nursing, singing, dancing, or culinary skills: essential workers living at the Royal Court. A lucky one might one day catch the eye of the emperor and engage with him in a ritual known as
de fu
, getting lucky. That seed she carries and the child she bears, if she survives the envious saboteurs who hope for her death or disappearance, will bring fortune or misfortune.
    My apartment was a gift from the emperor himself, a two-storied elegance deftly called House of Deference and Tranquility, renamed and redecorated for my use, much to the protest of the old liners, whose paws would, as you will come to know, impinge upon every fabric and inch of this city within a city: the nation within an empire.
    A thin boy was kneeling at the apartment door awaiting my arrival in the dappled light of a noon sun, maroon gowned as all eunuchs were attired. All palace women naturally were to be watched over by the men in the house, the unique eunuch corps, thousands in number. Men they might be but manly they are not. This shy boy was my endowed vassal, an ink boy in name, though his chores varied. He was, foremost, to be my little lantern, shining the way in my initiation into the dead-end lanes of my palace existence. Without him I would go nowhere and accomplish less.
    “What’s your name?” I asked after the sedan carriers departed.
    The boy hesitated and said quietly, eyes downcast, “I wasbestowed the palace name of In-In, though I was known since my birth as Cow Penis in my home village, a fortnight’s journey from here.”
    “Cow Penis?” I smiled at his endearing pronouncement, tinted vastly with a Shandong accent, one of many varieties made known to me thanks to my teacher, Dr. Jeffrey Archer.
    “Father saw our neighbor’s cow’s penis while it was taking its piss when Mother bore me in our pigsty, in the midst of her chore of feeding a litter of thirteen piglets.”
    “You could have been named Piglet then.”
    “But it was what Father saw that counted. So Cow Penis I was called till the day I
yian ge
—cut off my penis. Uncle Ting of Lung’s original clan would not wish to let