The Red Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

much of filial piety, in an effort to restrain our natural impulses towards parent-murder.
King Yŏngjo was a strange man, a complex character. He was a powerful monarch, known as a reformer, but there was something vacillating and at times hysterical about him, something almost effeminate. I remember that he spoke to me about intimate details that shocked and surprised me. Never, he said to me when I was yet a child, a pre-pubertal child, never leave traces of red cosmetic on a white cloth. Keep your linen white. Men do not like to see the red smear, he told me. Do not let men see your artifice. It seemed a curious matter of concern for so great a monarch, and I was disturbed by his mentioning it. I still think it would have been more fitting for one of the three Queenly Majesties, my mother-in-law Lady SŏnhŬi, or the Dowager Queen Inwŏn, or even the king’s first wife, Queen Chŏngsŏng, to have spoken to me about these things. I do not know why he took it upon himself. His words shamed and embarrassed me.
I now think, with the benefit of maturity and an afterlife, and in light of my readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropological and psychoanalytical literature, that he was speaking of men’s fear of menstrual blood. But did he know that? Did anyone, at that time, know that? I think not.
How eagerly we women may watch for the smear of blood. And how, at times, we, too, may fear to see it.
The king also warned me to be wary at court. He said I should pretend not to see some of the things that I saw. However strange I found them, I should ignore them. He did not say what these things were. It was a good and useful warning.
But he was also generous to me, in many ways, and gave me some lavish and delightful gifts. How I loved the eight-panelled painted paper hwajo-do screen that was installed at his command in my apartment in the Detached Palace. This fleurs-et-oiseaux screen was of a subject and style considered traditional for the lady’s chamber, but it was of extraordinarily beautiful and delicate workmanship and muted subtlety of colouring, and I would gaze at it, entranced, for hours on end. It portrayed slightly stylized but familiar birds, in an idealized landscape of small rocks, slender flowering peach trees, pines, peonies, vines and ripe pomegranates; in the foreground and middle ground of two of the panels, plump spotted carp floated amongst ducks and herons. The soft tones were predominantly green and brown and rose and plum, against a natural ochre-brown background, though in my favourite panel a family of mandarin ducks, symbols of domestic happiness, took on a lighter blue-green as they swam amidst a bed of flowering lotus. It was a happy family – a mother bird, a father bird, and three ducklings, above whose heads fluttered two little blue birds of happiness.
When we were little, the Crown Prince and I played games together. We played, like the children that we were. Prince Sado had toy soldiers and toy armies, and I had little toy horses to ride, as well as dolls and kites and shuttlecocks. Many gifts had been lavished upon him, perhaps unwisely, by the ladies-in-waiting of his late aunt, the widow of the late king, that king who was or was not killed by the poisoned mushrooms. The Crown Prince was much indulged – too much indulged – by the late king’s faction. The palace matron, Lady Han, in particular, had encouraged him in his love of military games: she was good with her hands, and she made him swords and scimitars and bows and arrows of wood and paper. She also invented an all-too-thrilling game in which young ladies-in-waiting would hide behind screens and doors, then leap out at him, brandishing their paper weapons and crying martial cries. Naturally, he was enchanted by this sport, and at the time, when he described it to me when I was a child, I saw no harm in it. It was only later that I began to see its dangers. His father and mother had been remote and cold towards