The Red Queen (20 page)

I see I have yet again used the word ‘filial’, which crops up with such monotonous and often meaningless regularity in any discussion of Confucian behaviour and Confucian ethics – but I think one can forget Confucianism here. Confucianism laid out the cultural means whereby and the manner in which King Chŏngjo chose to celebrate and commemorate his father and me, his mother, but the mainspring of Chŏngjo’s actions lay elsewhere. No dictates written in stone guided or impelled him: he was moved from that inner and unique but universal self that is in each of us, which is formed in each of us, which is formed by a pattern which transcends cultural conditioning. I cling to this belief, as the violent storms of disbelief and deconstruction swirl round me, as others try to tell me what I must have said or felt, what Chŏngjo must have said or felt. Little is certain, and with time we pepper into dust. But some angry self remains to protest its identity, its unique enduring life.

The mother cat, the silkworm, the father in the rice chest, the child in the hot dust.

I see now that I am beginning to use words that do not belong to me, words that my appointed ghost has whispered in my ear. Postmodern contextualism, enlightenment universalism, deconstruction, concepts of the self. ‘Globalization’ seems to be one of the words that goes through the restless dreams of my envoy. I do not even know what it means, or what she means by it. Must I try to find out? Why is she worrying at me like this? What have I done to deserve it? Must I be tormented beyond the grave? Must I go back to school, at my age, and begin again? I am too old and too tired. Even the dead can feel exhaustion, you may be sorry to learn.

And what, I suppose I must ask, has my ghostly envoy done to deserve me? What faults, what crimes, what sympathies, what weaknesses have opened her heart to me? I cannot afford to feel pity for her. I need her services.

King Chŏngjo survived in order to reinstate his father. He disinterred the body of my husband, Prince Sado, and reburied him in a new tomb, in a new city south of Seoul, with new funerary rites. He consulted geomancers, and claimed that the new tomb was more auspiciously placed than the old one, and that his father would rest better there. I do not know what my son Chŏngjo really thought about the auspices, or about the afterlife. Maybe he had a different agenda altogether. Maybe he thought it advantageous to his regime to create a new and better fortified seat of power. Maybe he thought the climate was better to the south. Maybe he wanted to build himself a summer palace, like a Chinese emperor. Maybe he wanted to be remembered as a great patron, as a builder of great monuments. Maybe he hated the memories that haunted the palace where his father was murdered, and where I was condemned to continue to reside. Maybe, like his father, he needed to escape from the stifling past. Many have speculated about these matters. But not even I, who was his earthly mother, know the truth.

What I do know is that he chose to honour my sixtieth birthday in a most lavish and spectacular manner. The sixtieth birthday, known to us as ‘
hwan-gap
’, is always a major cause for celebration in our country, partly because our lunar calendar is based on a sixty-year cycle, and partly because in earlier times so few of us lived so long. So I had expected a large celebration, but nothing on the scale that was prepared for me. Songs were written for me; delegations were sent to visit me; prayers were offered for me. There were months of festivity. A banquet was held to which my surviving uncles and vast numbers of cousins and second cousins and third cousins were invited, including some who had been living in exile or disgrace. Even the concubine of my late father was invited, in recognition of her years of service and devotion. I cannot say that I was particularly delighted to see her, as her son and grandsons had proved somewhat too prosperous during my son’s reign. But I was pleased by the spirit of amnesty that prevailed.

And I was at last allowed to leave my home. I was permitted to make a triumphal journey, from the lower palace in Seoul where I had been immured for almost all of my adult life, to the new city of Hwaseong, some forty miles to the south. In Hwaseong several days of banquets and feasts and parades and games and presentations had been laid on in my honour, and in honour of my dead husband, who would also have achieved his sixtieth birthday in this year, had he lived. Prince Sado was lying quietly in his new tomb, but I was carried towards him in my palanquin through shouting crowds, and waving pennants, and the sound of music.

This expedition was a shock to all my senses. I had been so long concealed from the larger world, and the world from me. At last I, too, had my journey. I saw the wide river, and the mountains, and the people of my land. I walked by the southern lake, and admired the lofty towers of the fortress, and laid my hand upon the sun-baked wall of the curved battlement. I saw, for the first time, a great view, as from a hilltop. I was sixty years old. I had yearned to see the world when I was younger: could I make any sense of it now that it was revealed to me? Or was it too late? I think I will send my ghost for me to visit Hwaseong, and see what she can make of it. I believe much money has been spent on its restoration. My ghostly envoy is an energetic young woman, full of curiosity. How much of the past, I wonder, lingers in the air? Will she be able to smell the roasted offerings, to see the fluttering of the silk flags, to count the serried ranks of soldiers and courtiers, to admire the horsemanship and the dancing, to walk the fortress battlements?

I was showered with many gifts upon my sixtieth birthday. Tribute was brought to me from all the regions of our land, as though I were an emperor. I was presented with bowls and bottles of fine porcelain, with silks and with jewels, with fans and with screens, with lacquered cabinets. Where are these priceless objects now? Some will have perished, but some were designed to be everlasting, and must surely have been preserved and cherished. Are they for sale in the antique shops of Insadong? Are they on display in the Museum of Ewha Woman’s University? Are they to be found in the Museum of the Amorepacific Beauty Company? These gifts displayed the finest craftsmanship of our nation, and I was much honoured in the receipt of them.

But the object that I remember best from all these riches was a strange little curio that had been made in the West. It was given to me by my son, who said that he had bought it through the intermediary of a Chinese trader in Onyang. It was a round, miniature enamelled brooch, less than an inch in diameter, with a gold pin and a gold frame and a split pearl border. It portrayed a solitary Western human eye, an expressive female eye with a light hazel iris, set in a wide brow, and surmounted by a white forehead and curling locks of bright brown hair. I had never seen anything like it. It was rather disconcerting. I have since discovered that such objects, though rare, were briefly fashionable in the West, but how this single eye reached our country remains a mystery. Was it brought by a foreign merchant or an envoy to Canton or Peking, as a reminder of a loved one back home in the West? Had it been sold, lost or stolen? I have a fancy that it may have travelled to Peking three years before it reached me, with the British envoy, George Macartney. I fancy that it belonged to a member of his diplomatic entourage, which received such a muted welcome in the Immobile Empire. Macartney took with him many grand offerings, intended to impress upon the Chinese the superior wealth and technology of the British Empire. This was one of the great transcultural confrontations of history. Maybe my enamelled eye observed it all.

The terrestrial globe, the enamelled eye.

This is only a fancy. I do not know, and I do not know why my beloved son bought this eye for me. He told me that its oddity appealed to him, and it appealed to me also. He said it was a good-luck eye, a long-life eye, an eye to pierce the clouds of the future, an eye with which to see the unseen world. I kept it safe during my lifetime. Where is it now? Has it travelled back to its homeland? And where is the globe that Crown Prince Sohyŏn brought to our country before I was born?

It was in this year, the celebratory year of 1795, that I began to write the story of my life and times. I started this project ostensibly at the request of my nephew, the oldest son of First Brother, and thus the heir to our house. I have said, in this memoir, that it was he that urged me to write, and so he did, but in truth the impulse came also from an inner prompting. The visit to Hwaseong inspired me, and, when I returned to Seoul, I began to write. My memory was awoken, and I was moved to search and re-examine the past. Things were good for me, when I wrote this first draft of my life’s events. I had a sense of triumph, and of survival. It was in this mood that I wrote my first account.

Things changed. They did not remain good. My beloved son King Chŏngjo died five years later, suddenly and without warning, in 1800, in his forty-ninth year, after twenty-four years on the throne. He was at the height of his powers and apparently in good health when he died. I believe he suffered a fatal stroke. There was no question, this time, of a dish of poisoned mushrooms, though of course some sensation-mongering historians and fanciful fiction-writers have claimed that he was murdered. This was not a good time for our family, or for me. Again, I faced the agony of the loss of a son, and this time I faced it alone. He had been good to his mother, and I had loved him with all my heart. Widowed for nearly four decades, and distrusted by some of my close family members, I had made him the centre of my life, and I had looked to him for my survival. His death shocked me, and left me full of fear. But I had grown harder with the years. I knew, this time, that I would survive even this blow of fate. I was an old woman when my second son died.

King Chŏngjo is buried in Hwaseong, with his father. They were reunited in death, that terrified boy and that tormented man. I believe that my mortal remains lie there, too, though I have to confess that I am not very interested in their location. My posthumous life and my bid for immortality lie in the spirit world of these memoirs.

My second and third accounts of my life and times were written after my son’s unexpected death, in the first and most anxious years of the reign of my grandson King Sunjo, when my grandson was still a child and surrounded, inevitably, by treachery. His stepgrandmother, the young dowager widow of King Yŏngjo, ruled as regent from behind the throne, and her family was in the ascendant. I retreated into obscurity, assuming the role of a harmless widow. But I lived on, to set the record straight, and to defend my father, my murdered uncle, my murdered brother. My memoirs were written in much danger and much bitterness. They became my occupation.

My Third Brother was executed in 1801, the year after King Chŏngjo’s death, the year in which I wrote my second memoir. He was accused (I believe falsely) of having converted to Catholicism. There were many purges at this time, many martyrdoms, much hatred of the largely unknown West. PrinceŬnŏn, the son of Sado’s court concubine, was executed on the same religious pretext in the same year. His brother, PrinceŬnsin, had already been banished and had died in exile. Uncle, brother, stepchildren – all dead and gone.

My fourth and fullest account was written in 1805, when I was seventy years old. I wrote this version for Prince Sado. It is his true memorial. In this version, I tried to tell the truth about his illness.

As I have already mentioned, I believe, now, that Prince Sado was a paranoid schizophrenic. These are the words that are now available to describe his condition.

Does it help to know this?

Yes. It does.

My fifth account is my secret. It is my spirit story. It is the story that will never be fully known, and never wholly completed. It is the story I shall tell to my ghost and to her offspring and to her offspring’s offspring. I will whisper in their dreams, and they will wake and wonder what it was that they heard.

Of whom, amongst the living and the dead of history, do I still need to make reckoning? I lived on. My eyesight continued to deteriorate, my ankles ached, and the flowers of the other world began to blossom on the backs of my hands. But I outlasted many of my enemies, and my memory did not falter. I kept my wits about me.

I died in 1815, in the year of the Battle of Waterloo. You, my grandson, outlived me, and reigned until your death in 1834. The Yi dynasty survived until the end of the nineteenth century. The last queen of Korea, Queen Min, died in 1895 in the palace, exactly one hundred years after my visit to Hwaseong. At the age of forty-four, she was brutally murdered by foreign assassins, and her body was incinerated in the garden where I used to watch the ginger dragonflies. Only a finger bone survived the flames.

Queen Min was, like me, a clever woman. The Western envoy and traveller Isabella Bird, from Edinburgh, who held long audiences with her, memorialized her as ‘the clever, ambitious, intriguing, fascinating and in many ways loveable Queen of Korea’ – a witty and ambiguous epitaph for the last of my country’s queens. Queen Min, unlike me, died a violent death, but her weak husband survived, to a life of compromise and shame, under Japanese rule. But that is another story. (A lavish musical entertainment based on Queen Min’s life was ill received in the West in recent times, and perhaps it was not in the best of taste, though I must confess that I enjoyed it, from my immortal vantage point in the Royal Box.)

Our palaces were sacked and burned and deconsecrated, and displays of wild animals debased our royal gardens. That, too, is another story. Other wars followed, in the wake of the wars of the world. The Japanese left; the Americans came. Our country was divided. The Japanese returned as tourists; the Americans stayed on as soldiers. Foreign imports flooded our shops, foreign practices penetrated our culture. We learned new technologies, and our exports increased. We in the south of our kingdom left our chosen form of hermit exile and joined the globe, for better and for worse.