The Red Queen (2 page)

My father, during these years of my early childhood, was exhausting himself by preparing for his state examinations. Mysteriously, he at first failed his examinations at the Confucian Academy, but he received an official appointment nevertheless, as custodian of a royal tomb, and redoubled his intellectual efforts. Our society – or perhaps I should say our section of society – was obsessed with academic success and with the passing of these time-honoured examinations. Even those who did not seek public life, even those who became scholars of the woods and the mountains, were obliged when young to share the obsession with examinations. You may think that your society lays too much emphasis on grades and tests and examinations, and some of you may argue that they cause much psychological damage – well, all I can say is that I believe that our society, in this respect, was even worse. You inherit only a shadow of the oppression. It was impossible to rise or even to survive in our world, if you were a man, without passing through a rigid sequence of military or civic examinations. You had to pass through them before you could escape from them by achieving the respected status of mountain-scholar – a path which one of my brothers was obliged to choose. But my father did not wish to retire. He was a very ambitious man, or so I have now come to think. During his life, he held many prominent ministerial positions. In his later years, he could rightly be described as the power behind the throne.

The time came when my parents began to quarrel bitterly. I think this was after the birth of Third Brother, the second of my younger brothers, in 1740 or 1741, when I was about six years old. (Second Brother, the first of my younger brothers, was born in 1739, an event of which I have no memory.) I do not know the reasons for my parents’ disaffection, but I could see its results. My mother had recently lost both her mother and her father-in-law, and upon the birth of Third Brother she fell into a depression. I, too, was unhappy because of my paternal grandfather’s death – I had been fond of him, and he had always made much of me. But what upset me most, I have to admit, was the fact that during his last illness I was banished to my great-grandmother’s house. I hated it there. She was a stout, ill-tempered, tyrannical old woman, and nothing in her household seemed to run smoothly. And, of course, I missed my parents. But when I returned home, after grandfather’s funeral, all was at odds there, too. As I have said, my parents were quarrelling, and my mother was insisting that she wanted to go home to her own family – and indeed she did leave my father for a while, taking me back with her to Pansong-bang. As I recall, my father was enraged both by her desertion and by her refusal to take some medicine that he believed would alleviate her depression. Her rejection of it he read as a rejection of him. He was also angry that I had been taken away; he came to collect me and took me home with him. (Strangely, I cannot remember what happened to my little brothers at this time. Were they with me and my mother in Pansong-bang, or with my father and the wet nurse? It is immaterial, but it is strange that I cannot remember. My memory is full of gaps.) Mother then returned home also, but for a while she and father were not on speaking terms. Angry messages were sent from one to the other from different parts of the house. The domestic atmosphere was cold and deadly, and I wished mother and I were back at Pansong-bang.

Mother wept day and night, and she developed an eating disorder that made her refuse all food. I suppose she was depressed. Was it a form of postnatal depression? Such a condition was not officially recognized or named in those days, though it was common enough. It was midwinter, and an icy wind blew through the eaves. The door frames and screens rattled, and icicles hung from the roof tiles. Soon my father’s anger turned to sickness, and he too began to refuse food – and so, in consequence, did I. I had witnessed too much; I was too close to them. I could not choose but to partake of their misery. I could not stomach the meals I was offered: they filled me with nausea. Was this an imitative filial piety or a form of incipient anorexia? I remember that a lump of my thick black hair fell out: I had a bald white shiny spot on my scalp, the size of a large coin. I was fascinated and appalled by this physical manifestation of grief. So were my parents. They had been in the grip of a mutually exacerbating and competitive despair, but eventually, for my sake, or so they said, they were reconciled. My father claimed that he could not bear to see me in decline, so he began to eat again, and encouraged me to do the same. He even offered the spoon of ginseng to my lips with his own hand. My mother also rallied. They said they were reconciled for my sake, but how am I to test the truth of that? What was I to them? What of my brothers? Where were my brothers during this dark time? Am I so selfish that I have forgotten the part they played? Why was I the close and chosen one, the spy within the bedroom?

When this grim winter episode of marital conflict came to an end, and spring returned, my parents gave me a toy pan and a toy pot to cheer me, and to reward me for having been so sensitive to their misery. And it is true that by the end of this grief-and-anger period, I felt that they had transferred their misery to me. I had taken it into myself. One should not, I believe, expect so much of small children, though I note that, in this respect, even greater emotional burdens are now placed on children by parents than was common in my day. But I liked my new toys, and I played with them, dutifully, seriously, happily, as a small child should. I still remember them clearly, that little bronze pot and that little pan, because I did not have many toys. Busily I filled and refilled them with water and flower petals and pebbles and grains of rice. I arranged feasts for my dolls, in the courtyard, under the foxglove tree. Dried poppyheads were my pepper pots, and I shook the black seeds on to my cold little feasts. I begged to be allowed to heat my dishes on a real stove, but this was forbidden. I managed to warm them, slightly, to a tepid state, on the hottest corner of the heated stone floor, and then I would raise them to my lips and pretend to eat. My play did not wholly convince me. Already I knew that play was a pretence, and that sorrow was real. An old head on young shoulders: that proverb from your language would have fitted me well, as it would have fitted my little sister. The Hong children aged fast.

My childhood, happy or unhappy, innocent or fearful, did not last long. Shocking things were soon to be expected of me, things that would now be forbidden by law in most nations on earth. I was to be the victim of advancement.

All these childish times came to an end when my parents put my name forward for the threefold royal selection ceremony for a royal bride. They justified this decision as their ‘duty’, for I was grandchild of a distinguished minister. They said they feared disgrace if I were not offered for the sacrifice, and claimed they were afraid to conceal me. My mother later swore that she hoped and believed that I would be rejected. I do not know how much truth there was in this: certainly she wept copiously when she discovered the way the wind was blowing, and even my father turned pale. I myself had no hopes, fears or expectations. I did not know what was happening. I was the youngest of all the candidates, and the most poorly dressed. I was sent to the palace in a skirt made from the cloth intended for my dead sister’s wedding, and lined with fabric made over from old clothes. I was not quite a thing of rags and patches, but I did not see myself as a possible princess. I was not the material from which princesses are made.

It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of the rigid dress codes of this period, within the court and beyond it. Fabrics held destinies, and colours spoke of faction and fate. Seen now, from afar, from a world from which much ceremonial (though by no means all) has vanished, the rigidity of these rules of dress may seem a psychotic expression of a deformed society. No wonder so many of us went mad. No wonder my poor husband developed those strange and unnamed phobias that were in part his undoing. It is more of a wonder that we did not all run mad.

Nevertheless, despite the poverty of my second-hand clothes, despite the fact that I was merely the daughter of a poor scholar, I was to be the chosen one. I was favoured at the preliminary selection by Lady SŏnhŬi, the mother of the Crown Prince, my bridegroom-to-be. The favours of Lady SŏnhŬi filled me with fear and panic. She was the king’s most favoured consort, and she was an intimidating woman. She had been known when young as the ‘Bright Princess’, but by the time I encountered her she had developed a formidable manner. I was frightened of her.

The prospect of the second presentation and selection, which reduced the numbers of contenders to three girls, filled me with a worse terror. Once more I was chosen. Already the horrors of my new position were clear to me. My father’s house was besieged with fawning relatives and begging servants, but the palace itself, on this second long visit, was certainly no refuge. I remember struggling, physically, with the lady-in-waiting who tried to measure me for my ceremonial robes. I was in a state of panic, and I am afraid that I tried to bite her. I had to be calmed by force. I remember waiting long hours in strange pavilions in the vast palace grounds, sometimes alone, sometimes being patted and stroked and caressed by strange princesses. (My bridegroom-to-be had several full and several half-sisters, some of whom play a sinister role in this story.) I was confined for hours, perhaps days, to the Hall of Clear Thinking, and I tried to think clearly, but it was not easy. His Majesty King Yŏngjo came and patted me, and flattered me, and pressed improving reading matter upon me. I felt sick, and could hardly control my bowels. Strange foods were offered to me, but I could not eat. I was robed in stiff and uncomfortable court clothes of green and violet, and a slave of the bedchamber painted my child’s face into an adult mask with unfamiliar cosmetics. I did not recognize myself. I longed to go back to my parents and my nurse, but, when at last I was released from these tortures, I found that my palanquin was being carried home by palace servants, and I was attended by one of the queen’s own women, robed entirely in black. In homecoming there was no escape.

My home itself was transformed: my parents were waiting for me in new robes, their manner subdued, anxious and unhappy, and they now addressed me in formal speech, not as their daughter, but as their mistress. They had prepared a formal and symbolic meal, laid out on a red cloth, of which the royal entourage was to partake. (Was there rice, cooked with chestnut and jujube, signifying long life, such as I ordered to be provided, years later, for the unhappy betrothal of my son? I cannot remember for I was half-blind with dread.) My father seemed to have sunk into a state of panic and fear. He sweated profusely in his unfamiliar ceremonial garments. He smelled of fear. Why had I been offered up to this strange fate? To appease what gods, to gain what advantage? I overheard my parents, full of doubts, talking about me, and whether they had been right to present me. In these last days, before I left my parents’ home for ever, my father was full of advice and foreboding. I was allowed to sleep in my mother’s bed, for the last time, and I lay there sobbing, hiding my head beneath the kingfisher quilt, listening to the low murmur of their adult anxiety and grief. I wished to die, and so to avoid my fate. I cannot describe the intensity and the terror of my apprehensions. I felt like a criminal, though I did not know what offence I had committed. I cried and cried, and would not be comforted. I was only a child and had not learned the arts of concealment.

But fate marched towards me, with an army of regulations, and, as I have said, new garments, including the consolation of that red silk skirt, which came too late to bring me any joy. Rather, it reminded me of the obscure and relatively carefree youth that I was about to lose for ever. The codes of the court, its customs and rituals, were drummed into me. I was a quick learner, but I did not then understand the rationale that had constructed these elaborate performances, and I like to understand what I am doing, and why. I was only ten years old, but maturity had been thrust suddenly upon me. I could tell from my father’s manner and his elaborate and often repeated warnings that a false step or a rash word would mean disgrace, perhaps death, not only for myself, but also for my family.

That red silk skirt has much to answer for. I ordered another one like it, for my adult body, when I thought I was my own mistress. It gave me no pleasure.

I say that my husband was mad. And so I believe he was. But his son and my son – our son, the son who became king – could not admit this. Nor could we admit the manner of his death. Our lives have been full of so many denials. Intricate, politic denials. Our son devoted much of his adult life to the rehabilitation of the reputation of his mad father. But I lived through that madness. What and whom do I blame for it? Do I blame his father, my father-in-law the king, King Yŏngjo, for his excessive demands and excessive expectations? Do I blame King Yŏngjo for so oddly and unnaturally favouring several of his daughters and thereby deliberately and openly humiliating his only son? Do I blame the unnatural rigour and ceremony of court life? Do I blame the factional strife that tore our country apart? Do I blame the dead hand of Confucianism and its reverence for the dead parent? ‘Filial piety’ was the everlasting refrain of our culture. As you can well imagine, its rigid dictates were not always observed as faithfully as they should have been, and many a child rebelled against its parent, but nevertheless those who rebelled did so at a high psychic cost.

My father-in-law the king was suspected of gaining the throne through fratricide. His brother, King Kyŏngjong, was a man weak of mind and body, and, after a brief rule, he died, and Yŏngjo succeeded. Foul play was suspected, and many rumours circulated. This was ten years before I was born, but the rumours did not die away – they multiplied. My slave Pongnyŏ, who cared for me as a baby, and who came to the palace with me when I was married, was full of gossip about these old scandals. She loved to frighten me with her tales. Some said the feeble-minded king had been bewitched, and had died through the black arts – by powdered bones, by incantations, and by mystic writings on eaves and lintels. Others said that his garments had been treated with the venom of snakes. One story held that a eunuch had poured a noxious ointment of henbane and mandrake into his ear, as he lay sleeping in the royal arbour. But the most popular version was the one in which Prince Yŏngjo had sent his brother a dish of poisoned mushrooms. The king tasted them, praised them, went into a spasm, and died within the hour. And so Yŏngjo gained the throne. That was the version that Pongnyŏ liked best, though she could never offer any first-hand evidence for it.