The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel

by Maureen Lindley

  After a few days, though, the Quiet Garden settled back to its usual routine, and Pu Yi began once more to listen to his wife. But he was in a torment of fear and indecision, one day saying they should go to the north-east, the next that they should leave for the west until popular opinion, which he believed to be on his side, called them home to his rightful throne.

  My next move was to arrange for a phone call to come to the house from one of Pu Yi's favourite waiters from the Victoria Café. We bribed the waiter to do it and threatened the lives of his children if he ever spoke of it to anyone. He was to tell Pu Yi that, wishing to protect his Emperor, he felt obliged to inform him personally that some suspicious-looking men had been making enquiries about the times Pu Yi chose to eat in the cafe. They had even enquired which were his favourite and most ordered dishes. He said he could see the bulges of their weapons under their coats and he feared they wished to harm the Emperor. He thought that, for his own safety, Pu Yi should not eat there again.

  My plan was to make Pu Yi's life in Tientsin so bound by terror that he would be afraid to enter his own garden, let alone the city. As a prisoner of his fear, I thought that he would be more inclined to escape the house that would become his jail. But terrified as he was by the phone call from the waiter, it was to take three more episodes to set his flight in motion.

  I had a meeting with Doihara and we set on a plan to have a basket of fruit with the card of a known sympathiser sent to the house with the message, 'To Henry and Elizabeth, may they prosper' forged in a hand that Pu Yi would recognise as that of his friend. Nestled under the oranges, like two sleeping assassins, were a pair of live grenades.

  The house became still while those who knew the plan waited with racing hearts for the Pu Yis to discover the deadly fruits. When they did, there was a scream from Wan Jung and such fury from Pu Yi that Doihara had to calm him with the promise that he would double the guard at the Quiet Garden. The Colonel told Pu Yi that things in China were going badly for the Emperor and there were enemies everywhere. But he assured him that nothing would be received into the house again without a thorough inspection of it first.

  I felt sorry for Wan Jung, who reacted to events moving too fast for her to think properly with mood swings and fury towards Doihara. She insulted him by calling him incompetent and requested that someone of higher rank be brought in to liaise with herself and Pu Yi. She brought her tutor to stay at the Quiet Garden and listened only to him. Although she was polite to me the warmth had gone from our relationship and I would sometimes catch her looking at me like a child who had been hit by a trusted mother. It hurt me to lose her affection but I could not blame her: I had trespassed on our friendship and she knew it. Her tutor told her that during my childhood in Japan, my blood had been influenced away from the elegance and loyalty of the Chinese, and was now tainted with the cold ambitious streak of my adopted nation. He advised Wan Jung that I could no longer be trusted. Her lady-in-waiting, in the pay of Doihara, told me that he had convinced her mistress that things had taken a turn for the worse on the day I had arrived at the house, and that he did not believe it to be coincidental. He truly was a good friend to the Empress and, although I had lost her confidence, I was glad she had someone on her side. I had no doubt that Pu Yi would in the end go to Manchuria, but I had a secret hope that Wan Jung might still avoid that fate.

  Next in our campaign, an ugly but innocuous snake was laid to sleep under the covers in the Emperor's bed. It was placed on the sheet near to where his heart would lie and looked on first sight like a hideous piece of excrement. On its discovery both Pu Yi and Wan Jung, faint-hearted with fear, finally felt the need for flight. He still hankered for a throne, even a Manchurian one, while she still longed for the west. As they endlessly debated where they should go and consulted fortune-tellers for guidance, I got on with the final plan with which to scare them from Tientsin.

  Our last and conclusively successful attempt was a plan of my making and a triumph. We engineered a series of riots in the Chinese quarter of the city from where the sound of gunfire carried clearly on the night air. The Emperor quaked at the sound and was white with fear. His eyes, behind the wire-rimmed spectacles that gave him the appearance of an intellectual, were those of a frightened child. He was told that the Chinese were getting out of hand and that martial law had been declared in the Japanese concession. For fear of a mass invasion of the Quiet Garden, the house had been ringed with troops and armoured cars. Colonel Doihara advised Pu Yi that neither he nor his Empress should show themselves at the windows, which must now be kept not only closed, but also shuttered both night and day.

  And so it was that year of 1931 in the gloomy month of November, with a final assurance from Doihara that he would rule over Manchuria as a monarch and that he would retain the title of Emperor, Pu Yi requested that he be taken there without delay. Scared out of his wits and ready to accept any advice the Colonel had to offer, he agreed without argument that it would be safer for him to travel to his new empire without his wife, Wan Jung. It was promised that she would follow him within weeks, accompanied by the bulk of their luggage and their pets.

  Pu Yi took a brief leave of his bewildered Empress as she stood in her nightdress in the hall of the Quiet Garden, and a better one of me, saying that when he was restored to his throne in Peking, I would be an honoured guest in the Forbidden City. As we stood at the open door, the contrast of the Emperor, disguised in a Japanese army greatcoat and cap, and his ill wife in her thin nightclothes could not have been more extreme. He dressed for travel, his mind focused on his own safety, she frightened and shivering with the cold, attempting to contain her fear. Without a shred of empathy in his make-up and used to his own desires being paramount, Pu Yi had no sense of the fear and panic his wife was experiencing. I put an arm around her shoulder and called her Empress, to remind her to have courage. She stopped sobbing and turned away from her husband, slowly mounting the stairs to her room.

  The great Qing Emperor was driven from the Quiet Garden secreted in the boot of his own expensive convertible. A personal servant drove, while one of Pu Yi's advisors played passenger in the back seat. The car made its way to the dock, which sat in the British concession on the banks of the Pai River. It was a short but not uneventful journey, as the nervous driver hit a telegraph pole, causing the Emperor to bang his head badly enough for him to suffer severe bruising and concussion. Dazed, and without even the formality of a greeting, Pu Yi was hurried from the boot of the car along a concrete wharf to a waiting unlit motor launch which would take him out to sea to meet with the steamer Awaji Maru. Unknown to Pu Yi, the Japanese officers aboard had orders that, if they were discovered by the Chinese, they should set fire to a hidden store of petrol aboard and send the Emperor to his heavenly throne.

  In the Quiet Garden, Wan Jung spent the rest of that night chain­smoking cigarettes, comforted by her old tutor. She set her lady-in­waiting to packing her clothes, even though it would be many weeks before she would be allowed to follow her husband. Shortly before midnight, she called me to her room so that she might take her leave of me. The Colonel had taken pleasure in telling her that he was sending me back to Shanghai the next morning, and that he was leaving his subordinate in charge of the Quiet Garden.

  'Even though you are not my true friend you have been good company and I will miss you, Eastern Jewel,' she said. 'An empress is destined to be alone, I suppose, especially when she is married to an emperor who thinks only of himself. Take my advice, Eastern Jewel, and do not trust the Japanese. Whatever you may think, they do not consider you one of their own.'

  I should have listened to Wan Jung, whose instincts I knew to be good. But she was the victim that night and I could not see her in any light other than that. I couldn't accept that there may have been sense in her advice. I trusted Japan, was zealous in its promotion and longed to serve it well. I took my leave of her with a kiss on the lips, which made her laugh, saying that I hoped to see her again.

&
nbsp; 'You must visit me in Manchuria, Eastern Jewel,' she said. 'Unless of course I have been lucky enough to die in my sleep before I go to that alien place.' I felt fearful for her, but forgiven.

  In the new year when she was finally taken to join her husband, news reached me that she hated Manchuria. She suffered from the extreme climate and was subject to bad dreams and poor health.

  I often thought of the ailing Empress wandering the halls of her inferior palace, ill and lonely, but proud in the knowledge that she was number one wife to China's true Emperor. She was poorly used, a victim of politics and her own snobbery, as well as of my betrayal of what, under better circumstances, might have been a rare friendship.

  Doihara, with his usual ease in such matters, had lied to Pu Yi, who on his arrival in the north-east was named Chief Executive, not Emperor. He had a victory of sorts a few years later, though, when he was finally enthroned as Emperor of the Japanese state of Manchukuo in the company of his ailing and drugged Empress.

  During those cold years in Manchukuo, Pu Yi was to take a second wife, a girl from the Tatala Manchu clan called Tan Yu­ling. She was sixteen years old, the same age Wan Jung had been when she married him. Tan Yu-ling died four years after the marriage, supposedly from typhoid, although it was rumoured that she had been poisoned by the Japanese so that Pu Yi would have no heir. Those who spread the rumours said that Japan wanted Pu Yi's brother to succeed him because he was married to a Japanese aristocrat, and a son from that marriage would have Japanese blood.

  I took my leave of Colonel Doihara with relief. He told me that I had done a good job for Japan and that my efforts would not go unrewarded. He advised me that I should think carefully before returning to Tanaka, who he thought was a poor match for me.

  'Tanaka is not the monster slayer you take him for,' he said. 'In any case, it is unfitting for a princess to align herself with someone of his class. If you want to prosper, Yoshiko, find yourself a man you can look up to.'

  On my arrival in Shanghai, Tanaka told me that my stepmother, Natsuko, had died a few weeks before. He had the news through an army colleague who knew of my connection with the Kawashimas. Natsuko's heart had stopped beating as she walked in her garden under the winter plum trees, only a few feet from where her sister Shimako had hung herself on the night of my fifteenth birthday.

  Tanaka was sympathetic, but he didn't understand the depth of my loss. He thought that I had hated Natsuko and, like many people who only believe what they see, he had no conception of how close hate and love are, or how much the one takes colour from the other. I sent him away and shut myself in my villa until I could bear to face the world again. Night after night my dreams were endless parades of the dead, where my blood mother and Shimako stood with Natsuko, like willows in a ghostly threesome, behind a glass door that would not shatter no matter how hard I beat upon it.

  I had to let go my fantasy that one day there might be a reconciliation between my secretly adored stepmother and myself. I would never now experience a loving gesture from her or hear her soft voice speak words of forgiveness. At the news of Natsuko's death something broke inside me, something that I knew would never repair itself. The thought of not seeing her again was so distressing that the only comfort I could find was in opium. But I woke even from that happy sleep with the pain undiminished.

  If Natsuko had loved me would my nature have been different? Does a love returned hold you firm like an anchor does a boat in stormy waters? So much is claimed for the power of love, but it has only ever wounded me. Not for the first time, I felt orphaned and angry. There is such hopelessness in the pain that comes from the death of a loved one. In that pain you cannot change the fact of their death, or bury the certainty of your own to come.

  Bourbon and Raw Fish

  For my part in the operation to encourage Pu Yi's flight to Manchuria, Japan commended me and bestowed upon me the rank of major, which I think I deserved. To celebrate my promotion, I had the full dress uniform of a Japanese officer especially tailored for me from the finest wool available. I gave instructions that the jacket should be narrowed at the waist and the collar set lower than was customary, so that my neck, which was long and smooth, could be more easily admired. I had my hair cut shorter than ever before and glossed it with brilliantine so that it shone and looked as dark as night.

  Tanaka, who had been in a bad mood ever since I had returned from Tientsin, said he thought that, as usual, I had taken things too far. My promotion to major had been an honorary one, and my outrageous new look was bound to annoy those Japanese officers who were more conventional than him.

  'They have trouble enough accepting a woman as a spy, Yoshiko, let alone having to mingle with her in the mess dressed like an operatic version of themselves.'

  I didn't let his views bother me; after all, I was used to criticism, having been subject to it for most of my life. I knew that his jealousy of other men liking what they saw was at the root of his irritability. But, unlike before, he seemed unable to cast his mood aside. No day passed without an argument between us, and nothing I did seemed to improve his mood.

  We made love as much as ever, but there was in our coupling a sort of desperation, as though he were seeking something that he had lost. I tried to release him from his gloom with new tricks that I had learnt from younger officers, but instead of pleasing him it only seemed to torment him more. He appeared to have lost his taste for innovation and liked nothing better than for the two of us to share one singsong girl in the afternoon and another in the night. I didn't mind indulging him, but I required more variety and would take time off from his company to please myself. When I returned to his bed he would sulk and take me without words, his hand covering my mouth so that I could not talk and annoy him further. He often chose to enter me from behind, telling me he did not want to see my face, which he wished was not that of a princess. 'A man is better off with a whore any day,' he said sulkily. Yet despite his festering anger, I liked his anguished lovemaking better than the sugared company of the singsong girls.

  I was surprised that he did not ask me if I had slept with Doihara in Tientsin. At some level I believed that his displeasure with me had at its heart his jealousy of the Colonel. Yet he never mentioned Doihara's name and when I did, he feigned disinterest.

  Tanaka frequently told me that I had gone beyond common sense in my indiscriminate behaviour, and that his association with me was holding up his promotion. I couldn't agree with him, as I felt myself an honoured daughter of Japan, who had achieved rank and was trusted with the highest matters of state. It was true that my reputation in Shanghai was such that everyone knew who I was, but I believed that was as much for my successes on behalf of Japan as it was for my sexual exploits. The position bestowed on me was a surprisingly modern one to have come from Japan's male hierarchy, but it confirmed my belief that any woman brave enough to take her own path in life could succeed. Most men, especially Japanese ones, have difficulty dealing with a woman's success, but I had imagined Tanaka to be above such sensitivities. In the past he had always encouraged me in my ambitions, and although I knew he was capable of jealousy, I did not like his new tendency to criticise and limit me.

  Despite his ill temper, Tanaka presented me with a congratulatory gift of a divinely carved netsuke attached to a leather purse that held a rolled copy of a poem by Japan's seventeenth-century playwright Chikamatsu. The poem spoke of fidelity and honour and Tanaka's voice trembled as he read it to me.

  Such a fine netsuke must have cost a great deal of money and, wanting to repay him for his generosity and to improve his mood, I told him that he was the best lover I had ever had. I also told him that, despite what he may have believed, I had not slept with Doihara.

  'I know different, Yoshiko,' he responded curtly. 'I had you followed in Tientsin. In any case, do you think a man like Doihara would keep his mounting of a princess quiet when it adds so much to his reputation and takes so much from mine?'

  'Why should it bother you, T
anaka?' I asked. 'Only you are important to me; he means nothing.'

  He gave a bitter laugh and pulled me to him. 'I asked you not to lie with him,' he said severely. 'As far as Doihara is concerned, it was important to me that you were my princess, not his.'

  Despite Tanaka's gift, which I knew was as near to a declaration of love as I would ever get from him, I could tell that he was not to be consoled by words. I put the poem into my writing case amongst the few sentimental things I felt the need to preserve. In an effort to rid him of his anger and assuage my guilt, I encouraged him towards cruelty in our lovemaking. Night after night I had bite marks down my back and on my thighs. There were purple bruises on my buttocks where he slapped me, thrusting so violently into me that I had to bathe in salt water twice a day. When his mood finally improved and he was returned to his old self, I felt like a child who had been chastised, her father appeased of his anger at last. I believe I enjoyed the releasing of his anger more than Tanaka did himself.

  I could not, though, regret the presence of Doihara in my bed; it was his report on me that had secured me my rank and might achieve further promotion for me in the future. Everything worth having has its price, and sex with the Colonel was a small one to pay for such magnificent gains.

  With Tanaka mollified, I was once more able to revel in the delights of Shanghai. I overspent on clothes and jewellery, continued to indulge in a varied love life and when dark days returned to me, I saw them off with sleep and opium dreams.

  There are no dreams like opium dreams. Colours are like no colours you see in your waking hours, the food you eat is that of the gods and the sake you drink is smoother than the skin of seals. You are as one with tigers and those you have loved appear to you as uncritical as a twin. So seductive are the gifts of opium, that if I were not a stronger person than WanJung, I would have joined her in her addiction years ago.