The Red Queen Read Free Page A

destiny, my downfall?
I was indulged as a small child. Was this in prospective recompense for the later sorrows, which they could hardly have fully foreseen? My older brother was brought up very strictly and coldly, but I was often permitted to share my mother’s room at night. This was not usual, and perhaps it was not wise. I think First Brother resented the favours that he thought were shown to me.
From childhood, I was acutely conscious of family resentments. I was unnaturally attuned to them, to my sorrow. But this awareness kept me on my guard. And I was to have need of my guard.
My father claimed he had dreamed of a black dragon the day before I was born. It had appeared, or so he said, entwined about the roof beam of my mother’s bedroom. My father had therefore assumed that I would be a boy, for a dragon portends fame and distinction in public life. Was it this dream that dictated my fatally favoured upbringing? I can hardly think so. Our legends and histories are full of dragon dreams. (Even today, Koreans claim to dream auspicious dragon dreams.) My father may have invented that dragon. Our dreams do not lie, though they may deceive us, but we may lie about our dreams. In our culture, even so late in history, dreams could be cited in justification of or in explanation of strange acts. We had left behind the rites of our distant forebears, who superstitiously sought meaning in the cracking of turtle shells, but we dwelled still, when it suited us to do so, in the dark ages of the mind. We toyed with dragons and yarrow stalks and hexagons and magic books of jade; we saw messages written on stones and etched on leaves. We listened to oracles; we invoked spirits; we consulted geomancers and shamans. (As, I note with some surprise, you do today. There has been little progress there.) And some of us cast our minds forward, though perhaps not very successfully, to the more interesting speculations and interpretations of Jung and of Freud.
My father, during these years of my early childhood, was exhausting himself by preparing for his state examinations. Mysteriously, he at first failed his examinations at the Confucian Academy, but he received an official appointment nevertheless, as custodian of a royal tomb, and redoubled his intellectual efforts. Our society – or perhaps I should say our section of society – was obsessed with academic success and with the passing of these time-honoured examinations. Even those who did not seek public life, even those who became scholars of the woods and the mountains, were obliged when young to share the obsession with examinations. You may think that your society lays too much emphasis on grades and tests and examinations, and some of you may argue that they cause much psychological damage – well, all I can say is that I believe that our society, in this respect, was even worse. You inherit only a shadow of the oppression. It was impossible to rise or even to survive in our world, if you were a man, without passing through a rigid sequence of military or civic examinations. You had to pass through them before you could escape from them by achieving the respected status of mountain-scholar – a path which one of my brothers was obliged to choose. But my father did not wish to retire. He was a very ambitious man, or so I have now come to think. During his life, he held many prominent ministerial positions. In his later years, he could rightly be described as the power behind the throne.
The time came when my parents began to quarrel bitterly. I think this was after the birth of Third Brother, the second of my younger brothers, in 1740 or 1741, when I was about six years old. (Second Brother, the first of my younger brothers, was born in 1739, an event of which I have no memory.) I do not know the reasons for my parents’ disaffection, but I could see its results. My mother had recently lost both her mother and her father-in-law, and upon the birth of Third Brother she fell into