Su Tong's historical novel explores the rise and fall of an emperor who misunderstands the nature of power.
"My Life as Emperor," by Su Tong, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. 270 pp. Hyperion East.
Reviewed by Sabina Knight
To anyone who has ever felt trapped in a false existence, "My Life as Emperor" is an inspiring yet cautionary tale. This novel, perhaps the most profound of Su Tong's novels ("Rice" and "Raise the Red Lantern"), presents a parable of a banished emperor who finds his soul through an unlikely avocation. His journey is also a variation on the stories of Siddhartha and Voltaire's "Candide," with picaresque elements reminiscent of the sixteenth-century Chinese satirical novel "Journey to the West" (a.k.a. "The Monkey King").
My Life as Emperor
Still, for all its skillful interweaving of Confucian loyalty and self-cultivation, Daoist simplicity, and Buddhist mercy, "My Life as Emperor" tells, above all, the story of a life-saving career change. (Though less poetic than expert translator Howard Goldblatt's choice, the title might be translated as "My Career as Emperor.")
Placed on the throne as a spoiled adolescent, the young emperor Duanbai abruptly loses his tutor before his Confucian education is complete. Woefully ill-prepared for the realpolitik of court intrigue, Duanbai arbitrarily wields power as might a petulant child. Annoyed by the wailing of neglected concubines, he orders their tongues sliced out. Bewildered when presented with 300 prostrate eunuchs, he kicks their backsides. Disheartened by his people's poverty and the rout of his troops, he murders a loyal general, then shudders upon seeing the flayed skin of the general's beheaded brother, killed after attempting to assassinate Duanbai in revenge.
Sabina Knight
All his privileges and prerogatives cannot save the cloistered emperor from discovering that he is a mere puppet, living in a realm of powerlessness. When he realizes the extent of his impotence and the degree to which he has been manipulated, Duanbai breaks down and wails. Yet his developing understanding of the foibles of power allows him to dream of loftier pursuits. After he is deposed, he embarks as a commoner on a journey to find the traveling circus that first enthralled him as a youth.
For all its graphic violence and abrupt losses, "My Life as Emperor" also depicts moments of passionate spiritual epiphany. The most vivid passages describe the young Duanbai's fascination with tightrope walking, the novel's metaphor for hard-earned self-liberation and the precariousness of life. Though as a pampered dandy, his feet blister on his first tour, Duanbai finds on the highwire a practice of physical and spiritual discipline and a path to redemption through self-cultivation and service.
On the tightrope, Duanbai also finds freedom from the nightmares that plagued his youth, nightmares populated by "white demons . . . raising a sad wail." As he comes of age, those dreams pervade his days as well, becoming "one daylight nightmare after another" as assassins pursue him in his "semiconscious state." Only after realizing that "the long search for a dream can become tragic," does he end his drifting, embrace his authentic calling, and find peace. "[O]nly then was I the master of my own fate, filled with the knowledge that balancing on the rope allowed me to cling to life's ultimate dream."
Full of foreboding and impending calamity, the novel alludes both to China's past, particularly the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and to the nation's uncertain future. Of the many avant-garde Chinese writers who debuted in the 1980s, Su Tong stands out for his works' nuanced confrontation of collective trauma through historic or symbolic allegories. A Chinese readership might, for example, catch echoes of Red Guard atrocities in the novel's descriptions of the cutting out of tongues to silence dissent, the severing of a musician's ten fingers, or the details of eleven gory tortures inflicted on a peasant leader.
But the novel's ominous vision of power and powerlessness has a wider application. Whether capitalist or communist, economic or political systems that too often foster ill will, greed and delusion may turn their subjects, as Duanbai understands, into "walking corpses doomed to spend eternity stuck to the mud of the mundane world." "My Life as Emperor", by contrast, ends with a serene image: Duanbai, now an eccentric monk on a tightrope, "walking rapidly or striking a one-legged crane pose," in retreat at a monastery. Perhaps Su Tong, who sets his novel in "no particular time" and cautions against reading it as historical fiction, hopes to bring solace to readers suffering the worries and fears of "people in all worlds."
Sabina Knight is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Smith College and author of The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. Her current research explores questions of health and illness in cross-cultural literary perspective.
