The Red Queen (5 page)

When I was mortal, I stole most of my learning from books translated into the vernacular. I learned
han’gŭl
early and easily, encouraged by my learned aunt.
Han’gŭl
was the ingenious and scientific phonetic alphabet so brilliantly devised six centuries ago, during the Golden Age of King Sejong. We did not call it by the name of ‘
han’gŭl
’, a name which was not given to it until the twentieth century, but we could all read it. It is much more accessible than classical Chinese, though that, too, I studied with some success. King Sejong did not, of course, create this script single-handed, but he was, I believe, personally responsible for appointing the committee of scholars who devised it, and to him goes the honour of the vision of a more widely accessible written language, which would not exclude the common people. (Careless accounts in tourist guides to our country credit King Sejong himself with the invention of the alphabet, just as, I note, North Korea now attributes the twentieth-century invention of massed dance notation to the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, the son of the Eternal President, Kim Il Sung. I think King Sejong was a cleverer man and a better monarch than the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, but of course, I am a southerner, and I permit myself to retain some of my prejudices in death.)

When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands upon. I stole learning from my clever young aunt, who was willing to teach me. I stole from Prince Sado, who in those early years was willing to talk to me about history and about literature and about the Confucian texts. I was an eager and a secret scholar. I stole and stored the scraps I thought I might need. Learning was not forbidden to women, but nor was it freely offered to them. I think, now, that my exemption from the masculine curriculum and the state examination system was a blessing in disguise: unlike my husband, I was able to sharpen my wits without fear of failure. But at times, when I was young, I envied those who had more access to learning. The luckiest women, in this respect, were the
kisaeng
, those courtesans of the
demi-monde
who were expected to be literate and well informed in the arts. In its treatment of women, our society and our civilization resembled most that the world has known. These days, women sift through the sands of past time for cultures when women were learned and held power, but they have not yet discovered much. They look back to the stone ages for lost matriarchies, but little has yet been revealed. There were powerful queens and empresses, even in our own land, long ago in the Silla period, and there are Korean fairy stories about powerful and adored princesses, as there are in every culture. But, for the most part, women’s power was exercised through men. As mine was, for I lived in repressive times. I take no little credit for the survival of my son and my grandson. I fought for their lives. They owed their lives to me in double trust, by my blood and by my wit.

But, I repeat, I failed my husband Prince Sado. I could not help him. Nor could I help my third and perhaps my most loved brother, Nagim, who died in exile. So many died in exile. It was a common fate. Nor could I save my uncle Hong Inhan, who was executed, I fear through my fault. I saved my son and lost my uncle. These were hard times, hard choices.

Although I am dead and immortal, I cannot read the undiscovered past. I have to wait for some mortal human agency to dig it up for me. It is slow, and at times I grow impatient. These mortal human agents were, through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, called archaeologists and anthropologists and historians. They are joined now, in the exploration of the past, by geneticists and evolutionary biologists. Were I to have a second or a third time on earth again, perhaps I would choose to be reborn as an evolutionary biologist. But I am a ghost, and I am not free. I can speculate, but I cannot rend the veil that obscures the past. I have my envoy, and she has her envoys, but all these emissaries have their temporal and corporeal and local limitations. As a ghost, I am denied easy access even to some of the discoveries that have been made about my life and times. My life was full of prohibitions, and not all of them have passed with my death. Ghosts, too, have their restrictions.

Our system, the Confucian system, was a dead system. It was centuries dead long before I was born. It did not move forward, in the eighteenth century, towards the universalism of the Enlightenment, though, despite its rigid hierarchies, it had some universalist tenets and tendencies of its own. But the systems of belief that have succeeded it are also dead. All religions, all faiths are dead, though some still make a false show of survival. It is simply that Confucianism endured for more centuries than most.

I do not blame Confucius for the destruction of my husband. I could, I suppose, do so, if I wished to be ingenious, and to apportion blame far from where it must rest. But Confucius did not lay down the code and the manner in which the father must kill the son and the son the father. Nor did Aeschylus, who was a contemporary of Confucius, invent this code. Nor did their near-successor Sophocles. They neither prescribed nor proscribed. They simply described what was, and what had been, in the bloody history of our ugly species. There is no moral to the story of Oedipus.

We in the palace, of course, knew nothing of the ancient Greeks, and I still have much to learn about them. But, largely isolated though we were and chose to be, we were not entirely ignorant, even in those mortal days, of the arts and sciences and superstitions of the West. A hundred years before my birth, our Crown Prince Sohyŏn had spent some years in China, and he and his envoys returned with books and stories and artefacts and paintings that showed us something of life in Europe. He brought a terrestrial globe, showing us for the first time the Western view of the shape of the world. We saw the Western global view, though I cannot say that we liked it. I am told that none of these objects has survived the many anti-Western purges that followed, but I remember seeing with my own eyes an oil painting of the crucifixion of Christ, brought by the Jesuits to Yenching, and thence to our court in Seoul. And I remember that I wondered at the barbarity of the West, which devised such bizarre tortures, and I was puzzled that a culture which committed such atrocities should wish to export and advertise them. I also saw books of engravings, which were full of scenes of tortures and decapitations and castrations and other so-called martyrdoms. I did not care for these foreign images, as a child or as a woman. But it may be that the art that reached us was inferior art, second-rate art, export art. Cheap missionary art, for undiscerning foreigners.

I have since discovered that what I then in my ignorance took to be portrayals of the cruel ceremonial castration of a royal male baby were in fact portrayals of the circumcision of Christ, a subject for some reason particularly dear to the Jesuits. I knew nothing, when I was alive, of the religious significance of these images, but, as a mother of boys, I did not like the way the sharp metal instruments hovered over the infant’s small and tender parts. Nor did I like the way that fat and naked cherubs improbably hovered in the sky, looking complacently down upon this unpleasant event. (In our country, in those days, the custom of circumcision was unknown, though I believe it is now very widely practised. It is one of our more curious twentieth-century American imports.) The only Western image which pleased me was a lacquered portrait of a royal mother and child, painted on gold-dusted wood and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. I liked this image of maternity, and I approved of the power invested in the mother figure.

I do not deny that we had our own atrocities. We had our decapitations and our castrations. But we did not celebrate them in art. Our aesthetic was fastidious. Our court art may have lacked the art of perspective, but it was refined and it was delicate. It did not portray gross carnal acts or crude painted idols. It was an art of flowers and fish and birds and butterflies and blossoms.

I was brought up in much bodily ignorance, and I dreaded the moment of consummation. I dreaded failure and rejection. Princesses who failed to conceive were often condemned to a hard and lonely life. As my fifteenth birthday approached, my mother and my aunt had tried to tell me the rituals of the marriage bed, and our slave Pongnyŏ and my wet nurse Aji had whispered and giggled and sniggered about these secret female matters to me. My mother told me my duty, and told me that it would be fulfilled if I were to submit silently to the act, and to continue to respect my husband. My mother respected my father. I had been witness to this. I knew my duty. It was my duty to conceive and to bear an heir. My small, soft, nubile body within its cocoon of silk and brocade was a sacred vessel, and it must be filled with the royal sperm and bring forth a son. The body of my husband in those early days was as shiny and smooth and yellow as a grub. What a dreadful metamorphosis awaited us both!

I think Prince Sado feared the event as much as I. Already he lived in fear of his father – not the violent terror of his later adult years, but an anxious, fretting, nagging fear of failure. His father’s admonitory spirit accompanied us to the marriage bed. But we performed our duty to the satisfaction of all, and I duly conceived and bore my first son, to the rejoicing of the court and, I am told, the common people – though who can tell what the common people think or feel? They may have nourished hatred rather than joy. I never saw the common people living their common life. I glimpsed them through the curtains of my palanquin when I was sixty years of age, as they lined the roads of my royal progress, and I was curious about them. But it was too late. Too late.

The act of sex seems to give pleasure to most men, and they seek it, sometimes to their peril. My father-in-law the king had more than one wife: this was his duty. (His first wife and primary consort, Queen Chŏngsŏng, one of the three Gracious Majesties who loomed over my marriage bed, was childless.) But I think the fact that he took a young consort quite late in life, and a young consort of a lower caste who bore children who were the age of our children, was deeply unsettling to Prince Sado. (Sado was very attached to the childless Queen Chŏngsŏng, his stepmother, who always took his part.) It must have seemed to Prince Sado that his father would live and procreate and dominate and criticize his son for ever. He would never be free of his father. This is what he must have thought. And he was right.

Prince Sado, after our marriage, took secondary wives and concubines, as was customary, and he also lay with nuns and prostitutes, which cannot have been his duty. It is even said that he slept with his younger sister, Madame Chŏng, the favoured daughter of their father. It may have been so. Certainly their relationship was unnaturally intense, and some of the events towards the end of Sado’s life might best be explained by such an involvement. But the rumour of incest may have been a malicious fabrication, like the story of fratricide. Such stories are common in royal circles, in all countries. It was clear that this sister hated me, but she had many other reasons to hate me. All I wish to say in this context is that the act of marital sex gave me no pleasure at all. Maybe it pleases some women of other social orders, or in other lands. But for me, the act was so bound, so circumscribed, of such a deadly importance. It was like an examination – like those examinations over which my father and my brothers slaved so diligently in the search for advancement and enlightenment. I passed, but at what cost?

I have observed, in the animal kingdom, that the female of the species seems to receive little delight from coitus. Who has not seen a cockerel mount a hen, or a dog a bitch? The female endures the indignity, shakes itself, and moves off. There is tenderness and fidelity, I am told, between some species of birds, and even of fish, but I have never observed it. Mandarin ducks are an emblem of marital fidelity and appear on many a painted screen, as well as on the one my father-in-law gave to me: they are said to pair for life and to grieve if a partner dies. I have not observed this phenomenon with my own eyes. I cannot read the expression of a grieving drake or duck. But the paintings are pretty enough. Indeed mine, as I have said, was more than pretty. It was a painting of paradise.

When I was a girl of about twelve years old, a married princess but still a maiden girl, I had a pet kitten. She was a gift from some emissary from a foreign kingdom of the west; I forget its name. Siam, perhaps, or Burma? We were not distinguished as a cat-loving or cat-worshipping nation, but I was allowed to keep this kitten as a pet. She was such a pretty creature, cream and beige in her colours, and gentle and soft in her ways, and affectionate towards me. One day, as we were playing in the palace compound, a large, wild, black-and-white tomcat leaped down from the roof tiles into the courtyard, and chased her and cornered her and mounted her.

I cried because I thought he was killing her, but Pongnyŏ told me that no harm was being done, though the act had appeared to me to be an act of aggression. And indeed there was no harm, for the cat conceived and bore three of the most charming kittens you could ever have seen. The expression and demeanour of bored and subdued indifference with which she had endured the tomcat’s crude and rude assault was succeeded by such purring, such delight, such pride, such pleasure! Even as she gave birth, she purred in ecstasy. She nudged and licked and caressed her little blind blunt-headed babes, and taught them how to nurse from her teats. She was the most tender and gentle of mothers, although she was little more than a kitten herself. Her motherhood gave both her and me great delight, and watching her kittens play was one of the happiest memories of my early married life. The kittens would chase one another round the garden amongst the stalks of the chrysanthemums, and climb up the cherry trees and the gnarled junipers, and hide behind the big leaves of the foxglove tree. They would stalk sparrows on the gravel, and try to pounce on butterflies. They were fastidious in their manners, cleaning and grooming themselves diligently. They would neatly bury their small messes in the earth. They were so clean that I allowed them to sleep upon my bed in a small bundle, and they would nestle in the silver ewer or the white porcelain vase in my chamber. They charmed even Pongnyŏ and Aji. I smile now, to think of them. Who
taught
their mother to teach them? My little cat was gentle, motherly and wise. She loved her kittens. Her love was inborn. It was her nature.