More Than A Pretty Imperial Plaything
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday March 13, 2004
Empress Orchid
By Anchee Min
Bloomsbury, 508 pp, $29.95
Tzu Hsi is often included in a rogues' gallery alongside historic harridans Jezebel of Samaria and Catherine de Medici. Although she attracted a certain notoriety, however, the ``Dragon Empress" who reigned for 50 years also had her admirers. Fortunately, Anchee Min's fictional biography of China's last female ruler is neither black nor white. But, despite showing her to be more a young woman struggling to survive than the archetypal embodiment of evil, it is still less convincing than most.
The story of Orchid (her name before she became Empress of the West, or Tzu Hsi) is one that lends itself to fiction: fire and pillaging destroyed much primary source material and, as Sterling Seagrave argues in Dragon Lady (1992) , many Western writers extrapolated the lubricious accounts of Edmund Backhouse, a British interpreter who arrived in China in 1899, and who was later found to have fabricated the court diaries upon which he based his titillating musings about Tzu Hsi.
Combining fact and fancy which turns some people off historical novels Min has more than enough ingredients for her work, which chronicles Tzu Hsi's life from her birth in 1835 to 1861, the year her husband, the Emperor Hsien Feng , died. Like a magpie dazzled by a trove of trinkets, it seems the author of Becoming Madame Mao , Katherine , Wild Ginger and the acclaimed memoir Red Azalea had difficulty choosing what to take and what to leave behind. And no wonder, with a cast of thousands, including wily eunuchs, long-suffering consorts and princes and princesses.
As with Min's other titles, Empress Orchid is written in the first person and in an economical style that favours short, staccato sentences. The book begins with the death of Tzu Hsi's father ``in the 1840s", which hints at how little is known about him and his family. A small-town governor who succumbs to depression after failing to suppress the Taiping peasant revolts, he is carried in a coffin to Peking, his birthplace, where Tzu Hsi moves into an alley home with her mother, brother and sister Rong.
In the capital, Tzu Hsi enters a beauty pageant of sorts and becomes one of many wives of the weak emperor. Once ensconced within the walls of the imperial compound, she competes again for his affection (and ``seeds") in a war of attrition with rival spouses and their servants. Even when she hits the jackpot and bears Hsien Feng a son, she is no more safe than China is strong in the face of greedy Western invaders after the Opium wars.
Throughout the book, Min employs dialogue and recollection to explain Chinese history, a device that sometimes fails. It grates especially when used to fill in background information on Ching-dynasty China. When Big Sister Fann, Tzu Hsi's boss before the girl enters the Forbidden City at 17, describes the internal politics of the imperial family, what comes to mind is a cartoon history primer, complete with improbable lines in fat thought bubbles.
Also jarring is Min's tendency to tell rather than to describe. Her big-picture summaries of important developments and events may maintain the narrative's fast pace but they also tease your interest and tax your patience.
Tzu Hsi's sexuality permeates the story, but, unlike the deviant, pornographic depictions of her by Backhouse and others, Min's treatment shows the empress in a favourable light, revealing her to be not just a pretty imperial plaything but also a wife and mother with everyday needs. While this makes her seem more human and strengthens Min's overall portrait, other aspects of the empress's character namely her odd moments of cruelty should be expanded. With so much more of the tale to tell, perhaps a fuller, more believable picture will emerge in the sequel.
© 2004 Sydney Morning Herald