Free My Last Empress by Da Chen Page B

toasting me with hot tea, greeted me coldly. Such guardedness was to be expected, adhering firstly to the belief that relations among educators are to be thin and pale like water; true affection would dent the thin walls of one’s intellectual sovereignty and demean the honor of a genuine scholar. A true intellectual should be scholarly about his own pursuit of knowledge, unbiased by his personal likes, thusly raising the bar of general scholarship. I also expected that the tutors would all bear a collective grudge against this slooped ocean man. They had all, without exception, ascended thisfar not by chance but by academic achievement, earning the highest marks in the civil service examinations held every six years, based on which the palace selected their officials. Such achievement was then assiduously followed by decades of devoted service. Only then could one be considered for the lauded position of a royal tutor that would endow sumptuous estates and unparalleled prestige to be enjoyed by not just himself but all his offspring.
    I offered each three deep bows of respect, which they returned. In the gloom, the morning hours trotted on. All the other tutors came and went like shadows in a puppet show in muted sequences, their gowns swishing, hats lifted passing one another, and chairs squeaking. Then my turn came, with a eunuch leading me to the royal study quarters. It was deep in a mansion quieted by tall walls, eunuchs passing and going, feet light, hovering, busying themselves, birds perching on willows seen through fan-shaped wall windows, blades of grass secretly poking up in cracks and seams between bricks and smoothed stones.
    The emperor himself was on the porch, a fine-boned, thin-framed creature dressed in a white western suit and necktie, head tipped with a round-brimmed crown, and wearing a pair of black leather shoes.
    “I wear this in your honor,” the teenager proclaimed in hesitant English, reaching over his right hand, ready to shake mine, when I heard the servant order me to kneel.
“Xia bai huang shang,”
he said harshly. But the young emperor was quick, grabbing my hand with his, shaking it healthfully. I was ready to attempt a kowtow, as required, when he pulled me up.
    “Mian gui,”
he said, granting me pardon. In the same instant, he ordered curtly for the eunuch to leave.
“Qu le, qu le.”
    The eunuch bowed, not daring to look up at his master, though his reply was firm, claiming a higher order from the Queen Mother, whom he called Grandpa, to watch over the teaching ceremony.
    “Qu le!”
The emperor’s voice rose with severity.
    Off the servant went, mumbling, casting me a low menacing glance.
“Yang ren bu shou ting fa.”
Translation: “That ocean man didn’t kowtow to the emperor.”
    Heads would have normally rolled for such a slight, but not on this day.
    As soon as he was gone, the emperor hunched his back, stiffened by his starched collar and snug suit, and bowed to me; his hands still held mine in a tight grip. The gentle manners had no doubt rubbed off from the obsequious eunuchs who had surrounded him since an early age, playing guards and angels, friends and teachers. Gratefully, I returned the favor, bowing back.
    “Come see my house,” he said, resorting to his English again, urging me indoors.
    I nodded.
    “But you have to be a blind first.”
    “A blind?”
    “Close your eyes, if you will,” he amended excitedly, and I realized he had meant to say “blindfolded.”
    I did, entering, his hand guiding mine, his gold rings cold to my skin.
    “Now open them,” he urged.
    When my eyes opened, it was not the somber schoolhousemy mind’s eyes had foreseen—one desk, two dull chairs, his facing north, mine east—but the sight of his crowded collection of foreign artifacts: long-handed clocks, stubby snuffboxes, and bicycles, all in multiple numbers and disorderly display.
    “They have all been gifted me by foreign kings and queens, princes, and female