The Thrones of China

By Rob Lee

Prince Lu suggests you make yourself heir to the King at this moment. Slay the Crown Prince here, with your arrow, and no one will know it was other than a hunting accident.

Far from the first deadly Palace intrigue to shape the dawn of Imperial Chinese history more than 2,000 years ago, The Thrones of Chinas tale follows Chinas first Emperor, his conquests, and the lovers, spies and assassins that people his court including Yuang, the enslaved country boy who rose to commander only to face betrayal by his most loyal ally.

Witness the misery of the peasants who labored on the gigantic Wall of China, visit the opulent courts of the Emperor and see how he fell into fatal madness, destroying all around him.

Step by intermediate step follow todays Simon, the poor black wanderer who has come to start a new life in China, only to learn how little its ancient betrayals and cruelties have changed and finally to fall in love, with a female Party commissar who is the secret leader of a deadly rebellion, and follow her startling fate.

The Thrones of China lays out the searing story of Chinas beginning and its present, the opulence, miseries and passions of its cultures, and why it all remains so opaque to outsiders to this day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491832776

Rob Lee

The author has lived in Asia for decades working as a journalist, magazine and book writer, news bureau chief and corporate communications specialist. Now a resident of the Lake Tahoe region, he served as an adjunct college journalism instructor, remains a keen reader of history and philosophy and maintains a second home in Japan.

Book preview

The

Thrones of

China

Rob Lee

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2013 Robert L. Cutts. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/12/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-3279-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-3278-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-3277-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013919995

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

For Eiko

and

With thanks to all the riders of the Lone Mountain

"The Chinese love jade. That strange lump of stone with its faintly muddy light,

like the crystallized air of the centuries,

melting dimly, dully back, deeper and deeper

- are not we Orientals the only ones who know its charms?"

— Tanizaki Junichiro, In Praise of Shadows

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Chapter One

May 1967

I never realized Chin Yung hated me enough to kill me. At my age then, hardly in my teens, the barrier of silence between servants and masters in a Mandarin’s household spared me all misgivings.

The gleam in her eye when she came to light my chamber candles each evening (because I had never even been taught how to light a match!) was likely all she showed of any malice. But I was the one blinded by the dark. Whenever I threw my tea on her because it was too cold, when I elbowed her ribs hard because her combing tangled my hair in a knot: I never even looked for a reaction.

Why should I? She was a housemaid!

Then on the last day it came. A stone as big as a pomegranate smashed through the afternoon window of my study – a time and target only a servant could know – and there were feet pounding up the stairs and shrieks all around me in the house. Into the study stormed a lumpy, evil-looking bastard, his face flush with either rage or exultation: my first Red Guard.

Armed with a sneer and the stave with which he’d bashed his way into the house and crashed through my door, he came at me. The peal of a spring thunderstorm unleashed overhead just then sprang in with him and shook my insides as if it were his weapon, too.

But first it was only his fist that hit me. Then his hand tore open my cotton pants and dug for my vagina, and my virginity succumbed to a different weapon.

Still ignorant of the guidance to his target that Chin Yung had provided with the rock, I screamed for her help and then bit his throat.

Outside the storm was exploding not only over Chongqing but all of China; the great dark assault of the Cultural Revolution, killing men and women, destroying schools and the authority of their teachers, overthrowing even the highest leaders of the nation’s Communist Party, plunging millions into the blackest clouds of despair and madness.

He cursed, threw me out the study doors and kicked me downstairs. I stopped my fall in front of the parlor’s open door, where I could see another of the wave of Red Guards end my father’s tutorial for one of his senior university students by ripping at his white beard with one hand while he jammed a dunce’s cap onto his head with another and screamed, You’re not properly attired, Dean!

My own captor, right behind me, yanked me up by my braids and smashed me through the lattice of our front door, threw me across the garden toward its gate, then out into the street where I rolled in the muddy rain.

I was just barely conscious by then but never, in the pain and the crowd roar of angry campus activists and Red Guards’ shouts and neighbors’ pleas for mercy, aware of seeing any more of my family or household, then or ever after.

Mo Ze-dong’s Red Guard hurled together around me the rest of the exploiting classes, reactionary revisionist bourgeoisies and capitalist roaders, some just five or six years old, and hoisted us onto something new to us — a bed of pigshit — in a farm truck.

They did all this, I later understood, because they were not elite cadres bound for Party success, nor from wealthy backgrounds ready for lives of leisure, but just proletarian college students who’d been told they were guardians of the Revolutionary Way and even righteous gods of justice and punishment.

I suppose now that they are deserved of sympathy and perhaps forgiveness: they were blessed and commanded in all this by the Great Helmsman and his Party Central Committee in faraway Beijing – and so the police here in faraway, despised Chongqing, stayed well out of their way.

The truck soon filled up with the wounded and the terrified and rolled off, bearing us criminals to reeducation. I would never see my classroom again, but I was to be taught a great deal. One of the first lessons was that four of my teeth were knocked out.

The sun was near its horizon when the smelly truck and its smelly cargo stopped at a village long enough to let down two or three of its pre-teen counter-revolutionary prisoners. A few local peasants on return from their fields froze along the roadside to stare in fear at the Red Guards in uniform up in the cab. One of these leapt out and shouted into their faces to bring up the head of the collective to receive his new students.

When he appeared, shaken and blank-faced, the Red Guard shoved a few pamphlets at him and climbed back aboard.

Several stops later it was my turn. This time the local village elder and newly-made cadre chief, with his red armband, was present. The Red Guard punk descended, pointed at me, shouted an order. But the farmer didn’t move. Please. We have no food here for an extra mouth. We saw our brothers, sisters, our parents starve in the Great Leap famine. The tools we melted down to send steel to the Chairman were all we had. There’s nothing now but tree limbs to work the fields. Look at her – she’s a child! What can she do to help us? I don’t know if we’ll survive the sum….

The Guard reached back into the cab and brought out a bamboo-root club, and he hit the old man’s arm so hard I could hear the bone break. The cadre went to his knees, his lips white in the clench of his teeth.

Shut up, you disobedient peasant, or you will replace her in the pig manure for the trip back to the city, and you can give your excuses to the party secretary. Didn’t you hear the Chairman’s own words from the Long March: the sign of a true revolutionary is his desire to kill? You can work her in your plots any way you please, as long as you’re in line with the commune’s commands – and if she cannot work, and cannot be reeducated, then kill her!

Two farmers clutched my legs and slid me down into the road mud, watching the Red Guard return to the cab and the truck disappear into its own exhaust smoke.

Women helped the old farmer to his feet and wrapped a scarf ’round his arm as a sling. They ignored me. The indifferent sun went down and left me in the already chilly shadows of the mountains.

When all of them were gone back into their village – my village, I suppose I should say now – I picked my way through the barren dirt of its outskirts and found a crumbled mud shed to spend the night in. I thought already to wait for the starlight to guide my way in escape back toward the city – when the hut’s door slid shut and I heard someone tie a rope to secure it.

Please, I said. I’m hungry. Of course it was the wrong thing to beg for, and there wasn’t any answer. I knew now my home was here for the length of the Revolution. I didn’t notice my own pee dribbling down my shaking legs, but that tied door saved my life – it had begun to freeze already. I felt out a pile of straw to crawl under and tried after awhile to sleep. I did not even smell the pig manure any more, but the taste of blood still seeped from my gums.

Two mornings later the rope was untied, the door opened. I was ordered into a duck pond at the village edge to wash off the pigshit, and the farm wives began to tie the knot of social umbilical that was to bind me to their extended family. First came a test of my ability to hear and speak in a dialect they could understand, with a backhand to teach me when I had spoken too long. Then they discovered I could read and write – only the Revolution’s propaganda and Mo’s instructions, since there was nothing else and the peasants knew they had better start to memorize both before the Red Guard returned. And that was all I was found to be good for, except working and sweating in the muddy fields.

But they fed me.

I was discovered to be too weak in muscle and stupid in field technique to be sent out to the main crop rows, where I might damage a plant, but for now I was about the right size to tend the kitchen gardens at each family’s hut, and they ordered me to carry water buckets from the duck pond and till, plant, weed and harvest with sticks.

Of course in the city I had never paid attention to anything that was green and grew, in pot or garden, but I was instructed in which plant parts were edible with hard punches in the ear if I damaged them. I can’t blame the wives: each fruit, each vegetable, herb, even seed was treated like a jewel. These precious green gems of living jade were the difference between survival and going hungry every day. My labor compensation was fair: I could eat what was left when the family was full.

Thus I learned another important lesson: to be born Chinese is to fear starvation all one’s life.

There were other lessons. Twice a month the village gathered around the cadre in his red armband; he handed me Red Guard pamphlets and I read aloud to my new ‘family’ until it was too dark to see. There were many topics like factionalism, capitalist roads and the leadership of Mo, which I’m not sure even I could understand. But there were instructions more useful, on crops to farm in rotation and to harvest for preservation, tool repair, irrigation methods, care and slaughter of livestock (besides ducks and chickens, we had none), and the productive use of fertilization. I can still remember the exhortatory heading: Firmly grasp manure! I read it. There wasn’t a smile anywhere in my audience; in the case of this village the fertilizer was natural and it all came directly from us.

So who was to say Mo and his cadres didn’t really help to keep us all alive in those terrible times, regardless of politics?

Time passed, and both I and the crops grew a little. The five villages in our cooperative were given a rumpled and rusted old tractor to share in the fields. As boys grew up they left for the city to join the Red Guards. The only teenage boy in our own village joined too, but stayed behind. The families celebrated this uncertainly. Was he really left here as a spy? And if so who was the first on his watch list?

At dinner at his family’s house, where I ate my scraps on the veranda, I found out it was me. I could guess from his eyes. When I went to my stack of hay in the shed he followed, all dressed up in his Guard jacket and cap to remind me of his authority. I knew why he was there, and what could I do but let him inside my filthy work trousers? I hadn’t bathed in days and I stank, but he didn’t care. He fell on me in one of the stalls like a grunting hog.

It hurt. He didn’t care about that either. Even I didn’t care, I just wanted him out. The only sensation I felt was the slapping of his fat belly on me. He finished and pulled away in the stinking pit that was our sole convocation. Then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I threw up.

And I knew of course he would be back. Many times: sometimes sullen and violent, sometimes babbling through the rough country alcohol in him about ‘feelings.’ But always to reach down at the very end to take what he’d come for.

Of course I got pregnant. And of course one of the farm wives spotted it early. As soon as possible the cadre leader called a meeting of the whole village, who gathered like a flock of hens to peck at the delicious gossip.

Most of the hours it took to discuss this circled around who could be the father: no one would dare ask me. I sat in the dirt within earshot and stayed silent.

At last my Red Guard, whose guilt had to be obvious, stood up. "Comrades! Before anyone here is accused, I have seen this whore strutting along the road, in public and what she thought was private, as if advertising herself. Late at night I’ve heard laughter and obscene noises from the trees near the field, both male and female, and as the deputy of the Chairman I say that’s where she’s been, with men from who knows where! And now our village is supposed to pay for it!"

It’s as far as he got. An arm circled my throat from behind, and I was dragged back to the shed as they all shouted curses. Other arms tied my hands behind my back, then strung me from the doorframe. My ‘family’ pressed in, bamboo and wooden staves in hand, to hit me over and over in my belly and hips. I was barely aware when one of them pulled down my trousers and blood spurted between my legs. Something tiny and red slid out of me and into the mud. It wasn’t until later that I understood what it was.

They let me hang all night, which probably kept just enough blood dribbling out to carry away an infection. When they dropped me into the same mud next morning, I discovered my thighbone was broken. No one who passed by on the way to the fields had the interest to notice, so I pulled myself into the shed, grasping one of the bloody staves, and tied it over the break straight and best as the pain would let me. Of course it would never heal right, and the limp it gave me was my lifelong diploma in peasant education.

But they were quick to judge when I was fit enough to return to work in the gardens. Inside the shed each night, I had to worry about a certain deputy of the Chairman sneaking in to finish his own task of murder.

At last, late one night he was there. Drooling some crap about sorrow and love but armed with a stave of his own. I had thought long and hard for all those days about what to do. Before he got too close in the dark, I writhed like a snake out the door behind him, pulled myself up and hobbled to the old tractor, always parked close to the shed. I hauled myself into the seat and waited.

He panted and swore in what he must have thought was a low voice as he reached around the darkness for me. Of course I had never driven the machine. But I had been nearby many times when it was started and stopped, en route to and from the fields. My fingertips became my flashlight. I felt along the panel of dials and switches and came to what I thought was the starter button and pushed it.

The engine snarled as the sole headlight reached out into the shed door. I had only seconds now. I turned the ancient steering wheel toward the father of my late baby as he lurched out in the light, and rammed the gear knob forward and pulled the speed lever. He never moved. Instead he fell down in front of us, the tractor and me.

I felt a big bump under the front wheel, which I could not see. But he let out a scream I could hear. I pulled the knob back to neutral, rolled out of the seat and tumbled to the ground. I could see bloody body parts extruding from the wheel on my side. One was a hand holding a stave. I took it, limped a few steps, smashed the headlight so it would never spot me again, and felt my way inside the shed for a shovel to use as a crutch. I wanted to be as far away as possible when my village discovered the fate of its favorite son.

But my pulse slowed, cooler thinking returned, and I realized I would be caught no matter where I hobbled. I went back to the tractor cab, pulled myself in again, yanked at the knob and turned out across the very dark fields to the road and opened the throttle all the way. If memory didn’t serve me well about where to steer, I’d be dead. But then I’d be dead anyway if I ignored this chance to get away. The roadway, like everything that went through the Cultural Revolution, was in bad repair and I more hung onto the tractor than drove it.

But from behind a cloudbank appeared a good bright moon, and I was back to the outskirts of Chongqing, my home city, before dawn. I abandoned the tractor before the rising sun could reveal what surely must have been large red splotches of blood all over its front end.

I needed water, I needed food and what I did learn about plants from the Great Helmsman I put to use in a roadside farmyard to steal those. Still leaning on the shovel, I was gone before the night was, and kept moving as best I could remember the route toward the ‘elite’ neighborhood of our family home. It took hours and a leg gone numb from pain to reach our smashed front-garden gate.

The street was abandoned now to the fate of China’s new culture, still littered with the stones from attacks on our house and others all around us, the buildings as empty and abandoned as if they were in quarantine for leprosy. I leaned my way through our front-garden flower bushes and vines all grown wild, memories more painful with each step.

All our windows and doors gaped open where they had been crushed. Not even beggars had squatted here. From the entry hall I looked into the parlor, where my father used to read while taking tea. Of course there was no sign of anyone or anything left: no books, no furniture, no precious family ceramics, no venerable calligraphy scrolls.

Engine noises rumbled way down the street, where the boulevard crossed it, and I was suddenly, in my own house, afraid I would be caught as a thief! One more mission here: up the stairs, inside my study, I stopped in almost a panic and listened for footsteps. I heard just my breathing, of course. Inside a closet my memory led my hand to a loose board in the back wall. The lacquer box was still there behind it.

Inside were three treasures – a ring fashioned like a dragon, and two large earrings. The first was my heritage: a symbol of the secret rank of nobility my father had held. The earrings were also a heritage: large and intricately worked, they were my mother’s, given to me to serve some day as a signal of my own elite station.

All three were heavy, solid gold. A shard of broken mirror was left on a shelf in the study — I couldn’t resist putting on those earrings. Suddenly even with blood and mud on my face, in that mirror I was a beautiful princess, as I had been born to become.

Just as suddenly, one of them fell off and crashed onto the broken glass on the floor. I could in those shards see my image turn into my mother’s aristocratic, smiling face alight with that golden emblem of our birthright, and it broke my heart: since my last day in this home I had not once thought of her. It brought tears, fed not just by loss but by shame.

I never understood that what she had left for me, along with the ring from my father symbolizing his power, was not the confining, regimented supervision of a Confucian maternalism, as I had believed all those years – a lifetime? — ago. They were the stern insistence of a matriarch’s passage to her daughter of the obligation of leadership to her own generation of her own people. Not now but someday, I promised her, I would earn the right to wear them.

As the Cultural Revolution collapsed soon after into the fatal flaws of its contradictions, kidnap victims like myself who had been dragged ‘down to the countryside’ to learn proletarian lives, but not their letters, from the slave labor were rounded up, brought back – except for the many who would be gone forever – and these soon proved themselves semiliterate and useless to the national cause, whatever it was dictated to be. They had to be schooled all over again and since I could read, that job became my new profession.

It wasn’t a bad life, and teaching gave me access to records of the vast displacements that had swept us all away. In them I soon found the name and address of Chin Yung, my old serving girl, though nothing about my family.

Chin Yung died that very night, as it happens, pushed by an unknown someone off a Yangtze River storm wall.

Well, it was a new age. Changes were inevitable.

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Chapter Two

April 2008

Watch out for the baby! Luyang called to him, ducking through the kitchen door juggling dirty plates.

Simon understood. He froze his feet, leaned sideways in his chair, looked under the table. The tiny urchin was just beneath him, crawling after a gnawed chicken thigh that had fallen there.

He slid the toe of his sandal around to nudge away a dog intent on the same prize, then swooped the scraps from the baby’s hand before they reached its mouth.

Many other waiters whirled around the diners, but none came for the baby or for the bones. It was just another evening in King David’s, the gathering spot for African regulars in this part of Mei-You Shi, the frantic small-traders’ neighborhood of shops crammed into these lanes of Guangzhou City. Here the expatriate men of many tribes came to stuff themselves after busy days, with cheap helpings of