The Red Queen Read online

  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 practice
s 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.

  These are posthumous stories. The story is not over yet. The north of our country still attempts to lead a hermit life. It now is labelled ‘evil’. It is part of the ‘axis of evil’, whatever that may be. Evil is not a word for which, at my advanced age, I feel much need.

  My writings survived. At first they were known only to a few. The tragedy of Prince Sado has always been a legend in our land, but my writings, which give the true account of one who was both an eyewitness and a chief player in the drama, were not so widely known. But now they have found their way into the wider world, and into other languages. I have watched the process of their dissemination with interest and amazement. My story has seized the imaginations of generations then unborn. Artistic renderings of my life in media then unknown have been projected. My amanuenses and translators discuss and at times misinterpret my affairs in cyberspace. I prompt them, I prompt them. I am not a jealous ghost. I am proud, but I am not jealous. I wish you all to know my story.

  It may be that manuscripts describing these events still await discovery. Only last week, a new epitaph on Prince Sado by his father King Yŏngjo was discovered, which is said to cast new light on that tragic death. I found it on the Internet. No story is ever finished. Mine continues.

  How could I have foreseen the nature of the world that I have now posthumously entered? I haunt it, and it haunts me. It is an astonishing place, busy and complex and confusing. Its peoples are ever restlessly, needlessly on the move. It attempts improbable syntheses. Its frontiers are porous. There are few hermit kingdoms now.

  I come from a time of paper and of silk. Paper lanterns glowed in the night for us, and paper boats with silken sails floated upon the lake for us. Ours was a world of silk and rosewood and hemp and jade and stone and ink and water. Our floors were warm and smooth; our screens were light; our minds were subtle. It was a quiet and violent and brutal and secret country, inside the palace walls.

  Outside those walls, ours was a hard land with a harsh climate, a land of gneiss and granite and petrified waterfalls, a kingdom surrounded by water, a country of mountains and of cold peaks and wastes, of banishments and exiles and brambles.

  Or so the stories say. I did not see much of it. Maybe it was not like that at all. I did not see the way the common people lived.

  It is all changed now. It is a modern country now.

  And now I must lead you through the gates of harsh cacophony, through the hideous clamour, through the metallic inferno, through the plastic polymer hell, to the lavish luxuries of the air-conditioned, global, universal third millennium. Stop your nose against the pollution; stop your ears against the uproar. Follow me, to the world of globalization and multiple choice. You may like it there. It is the future. It is your future. Take it. It is yours.

  PART TWO

  Modern Times

  She will arrive too early at the airport. She always arrives early at airports. It is foredoomed that she will arrive early at Heathrow. She tosses and turns, after a late and festive farewell night, alone in her wide and queenly bed, half sleeping and half waking, waiting for the alarm clock (which she does not trust) and the prearranged telephone calls (which she does not trust) and for the morning light of Oxford, which will filter, slowly, through the pale blinds of her high windows, whether she trusts it or not. She must rise at six-thirty. She will rise before six-thirty. She cannot make herself wait patiently for the full light of day, although at this time of year the days are still long, and the dawn still comes early to the city.

  We watch her, but she does not know that we watch. She ignores our intrusion. Why are we summoned to her bedside? We are summoned by the book in her hand baggage. It would appear that she intends to read it on the aeroplane. It is already packed, in one of the several easily accessible outer zip compartments of her little dark green case-on-wheels.

  The script pulls us towards her, by the magnet of its 200-year-old message. We enter the room, whether we will or no. We flock and throng and cluster near her ceiling, little winged spies, looking down on her restless form. We look around her bedroom, and flow out into her bathroom, her corridors, her apartment. The air is thick with our attention. We are here; we are watching; we will report on what we see.

  This restless woman does not have the body of an anxious woman, nor do the furnishings of her room express excessive neurosis. Only the evidence of the methodical nature of her packing betrays her ingrained and perhaps not irrational fear of missing trains and aeroplanes. Those lists on her bedside table, by the water carafe and the bottles of pills, also betray some form of anxiety. But, at the same time, they indicate method. This is an efficient woman, trained in outwitting her weaknesses, in medicating her real or imagined illnesses, in forestalling accidents of forgetting and of oversight.

  By the bed, on the floor, a pair of large old-fashioned tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles lies unashamed and eloquent across the spine of an open book. The book lies face down. The spectacles look like a large winged creature that has alighted there.

  Her body seems to be a confident body, not an anxious body. She is tall, and she lies at a diagonal across the large bed, sprawling in restless abandon, filling it from corner to corner with her smooth, large limbs. Her legs protrude from beneath her duvet, and her arms are flung wide. Her large toenails are painted a cracked and peeling garnet-red. The duvet cover is of cotton cloth, with a crisp, bold, blue-and-white Delft design, and the crumpled white pillowcases have borders of broderie anglaise. The woman wears a scarlet nightshift of light, loosely woven muslin, which has ridden high over her round belly. Her pubic hair is thick and curling and tawny chestnut. One of her full breasts is exposed to view: it splays out proudly and firmly beneath her jutting collarbone. It is a breast that has been admired and handled. It is not a lonely breast. It is a voluptuous breast.

  Her eyes are shut, although she may not be sleeping. Her lashes are thick. They are slightly clotted and matted with the dissolute remains of the previous day’s mascara.

  Her hair is thick and curled and tousled. It is tawny brown, with false golden highlights, and it sticks to her high, wide brow in warm tendrils.

  This woman is not young, but neither is she old. She is glossy and firm, and she is in her prime. She is a woman who rates herself highly. All this we can read from her recumbent, semi-sleepless form. She hovers between sleep and waking, in that realm where dreams converge with fears and plans and memories.

  We can read her destination from the pile of books by her bedside, from the list of contact addresses and dates that she has placed by her carafe of water. Her air ticket and her passport are in the pocket of her well-worn brown-leather shoulder bag, but the computer-printed list tells us that her destination is Seoul, in South Korea, and that she is taking an Air France plane from Heathrow to Paris’s Roissy-Charles de Gaulle, where she will change flights for Seoul-Incheon. It seems that she intends to spend several days in South Korea. In Seoul, she will stay in the Pagoda Hotel. It appears that she has contacts in the British Embassy and the British Council, at a Korean women’s hospital, and at a pharmaceutical foundation.

  The buzz is that she is flying off to a conference, to deliver a paper. So we whisper as we cluster in the upper air. Has she written her paper? Has she made at least two copies of it? Has she made sure to keep one with her in her hand luggage? Is she planning to take her laptop computer with her? Or has she decided that travelling with such a valued and expensive item would be too much of a worry?

  In her little, dark green case-on-wheels, the memoir of the Crown Princess is waiting for her. Its author is waiting to speak to her. Its author, long locked in the silence of death, has found another listener. This fitfully sleeping woman is her new victim. The book is a trap, an infection, a time bomb.

  She is well endowed, this living woman. Her be
droom is large and airy and elegantly austere. Our eyes can see clearly now in the first light of the end of the dark, and we can see that the blinds of the bedroom are a pale shade of sky blue with a printed border of clouds, that the walls are a perhaps unfashionable eggshell white and that two white, fleecy sheepskin rugs lie upon the highly polished wooden floor. Dusky saxe blue cushioned seats line the deep embrasure of the window. There is a bookcase, the contents of which indicate an interest in art and architecture, but we may conjecture that this is but a small and decorative selection from her library, and that her working books are kept elsewhere. A large celadon vase of a delicate pale blue-green, placed on a white painted wooden table in the window bay, holds an arrangement of pale, dried, silvery seed heads of honesty, mixed with orange, papery Chinese lanterns. There is an oval Art Nouveau white wood-framed mirror over the bookcase, in which we may fancy that she frequently admires herself.

  It is an uncluttered room. Maybe she has tidied it in anticipation of her imminent departure. Maybe she is a tidy person. Maybe she has a person who tidies this room for her. The only clothes we can see are those that she has carefully laid out for her journey on the back of the blue loose-covered armchair. There is a touch of an institutionalized Walter Pater Oxford about this elegant, lightly inhabited bedroom. Her mark on it is not deep. She is a visitor.

  Does she always sleep alone? She has not always slept alone. She wears a golden wedding ring on her left hand, and a gold ring set with pearls on the ring finger of her right hand. For a single person, this is a large bed. She lies in state.

  There is one photograph on display, in a slightly tarnished ornate silver Victorian frame. It stands on top of a small table near the window. It shows a very young child of indeterminate sex. The child is propped up against a cushion or a pillow, somewhat far from the camera. A remote, removed child. The child is not smiling at the camera.