Page 63 - Vol. VII #7

“When you see Lady Jing,” Zhang says, “immediately go to your knees and kowtow three times. Also, always stand a meter or more away, and don’t ever touch her. Understand?”
“Is this him?” Lady Jing asks. “Stand up. Please, stand up.”
“There’s more,” Pei Pei says.
“Do you know anything about laws?” she asks. Pei Pei shakes his head.
“Can you read?”
He nods.
Over the next few days, Pei Pei begins to accept his fate. He spends a great deal of time with Lady Jing, learning the trade. In the afternoon, he accompanies her to the Discussion Room where all the concubines meet with their provincial lobbyists. Lady Jing finds these events boring and always falls asleep. “When you officially become my gong-gong,” she says to Pei Pei, “I can stay at home and you can take my place.”
~
“We understand that the emperor can’t afford to send great men, those who graduated from the univer- sities, to come and teach a peasant village. But if someone who is literate can be sent over, we would be grateful. We, the parents, donated our savings and hired a man from the city to help us write our words down in this letter—”
Pei Pei nods. Zhang knocks on the red door, and the chambermaid opens it, taking his hand. Pei Pei follows them inside, almost tripping on his robe, which swings from side to side, trailing the ground. When they pass a silk veil Pei Pei kneels and starts kowtowing.
“You can stop now.” She yawns. “I’m going to fall asleep. Maybe it wasn’t the emperor’s accent that made the letters boring.”
Pei Pei gets up, looks at the girl’s face for a second, and then looks down again, his chin touching his neck. The girl is beautiful. She smells of bananas and lavender. She wears a large floppy headdress with flickering rubies and sapphires.
“Never mind,” the girl says. “Come here and sit next to me. Zhang tells me you have a wife. Is she pretty? Do you have a picture? Has she given you any chil- dren yet?”
“I’d like to be alone with him,” she says. She waves her hands and Zhang and the chambermaids exit through the silk veil.
Pei Pei puts the letter back on the girl’s desk and sits down next to her. He talks, but doesn’t know what he’s saying anymore. He describes what Song looks like, but he can no longer picture her in his head. Children? He doesn’t even know if he wants children anymore. How many children does a man need, any- way? How many children can the world support? The girl listens with enthusiasm. She likes him. She’ll treat his family well here. Song will not need to worry any- more. He will not need to worry anymore.
She bounces next to Pei Pei and takes his arm. They sit on the bed for a few minutes not saying anything. Then the girl grabs a bunch of letters off her table and flips through them carelessly.
~
“I’ve been getting these letters incessantly,” she says, handing him one of the letters. “Read me this one.”
There are very few concubines who attend these meetings, and the ones who do tend to be indifferent. Their gong-gongs speak with the lobbyists for them. Having been to only a few of these meetings, Pei Pei has already noticed the grin on their faces when the lobbyists hand them envelopes, which he suspects are stuffed with money. When he becomes a gong-gong, Pei Pei thinks, he will not be so easily corrupted. He will act on behalf of the people and use his position for the benefit of New China.
He flips it open. “I’m not a very good reader,” Pei Pei confesses. “I stopped going to school when I was fifteen.”
“You have a beautiful voice. The emperor reads these letters to me, but he has a thick accent. I fall asleep before he finishes. Go on, read me the letter.”
Pei Pei holds the letter over the light and squints to make out the handwriting. “Dear Lady Jing,” he reads, “We hope you are happy in your new home in Tibet. We wish you a thousand smiles. Our school is located in Xinchun Village. We haven’t had a teacher for a while now. Our last teacher, Mr. Bai became a gong- gong. We know that he is needed elsewhere, that by serving the emperor, he is also serving us.
The only concubine who seems enthusiastic at these meetings is Lady Xiu of Beijing. Her gong-gong is
never present. She argues with the lobbyists in a refined manner. Instead of allocating money to the big
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