“Xie Qing, are you kneeling to the Dragon Throne, or to this realm?”
The beads of my imperial crown chimed softly as I gazed at his lowered eyes.
His fingertip traced the still-wet ink on the green jade desk:
“Your servant kneels to
that night of snow outside the imperial study in the seventh year of Yongzheng,
to the pear blossom petals caught on Your Majesty’s sleeve, and to...”
His words stopped abruptly. Only the steady drip of the water clock remained.
Later, while sorting through old archives from the Privy Council,
I found several lines of neat script on the back of a border dispatch:
“If your servant must die,
may I become the spring breeze beyond the frontier,
cross Yumen Pass and climb the golden steps,
only to stir, before Your Majesty’s desk,
that branch of pear blossoms on the verge of withering.”
This morning, an attendant reported
that the pear tree in the courtyard had mysteriously blossomed for a second time.
I ran my fingers over the broken hairpin in the sword case
and suddenly understood:
the most exquisite treason in this world
is to hide a lifetime of tenderness
within the historians’ accounts of a “rebel and traitor,”
so that when later generations turn the pages,
every one of them bears
a bloodstained flower mark.
I still like to give myself five-star reviews. [Rolls eyes] I am very happy to see that there are really babies reading the books I wrote. Sometimes I feel that be is very cruel when I actually write it. But if it were not for my writing style, it seems that be would write better than be. Maybe be is the normal state of life. A touch of breeze and a pot of wine, hundreds of years of life, but only a few.