The Red Queen Read Free Page B

a depression. I, too, was unhappy because of my paternal grandfather’s death – I had been fond of him, and he had always made much of me. But what upset me most, I have to admit, was the fact that during his last illness I was banished to my great-grandmother’s house. I hated it there. She was a stout, ill-tempered, tyrannical old woman, and nothing in her household seemed to run smoothly. And, of course, I missed my parents. But when I returned home, after grandfather’s funeral, all was at odds there, too. As I have said, my parents were quarrelling, and my mother was insisting that she wanted to go home to her own family – and indeed she did leave my father for a while, taking me back with her to Pansong-bang. As I recall, my father was enraged both by her desertion and by her refusal to take some medicine that he believed would alleviate her depression. Her rejection of it he read as a rejection of him. He was also angry that I had been taken away; he came to collect me and took me home with him. (Strangely, I cannot remember what happened to my little brothers at this time. Were they with me and my mother in Pansong-bang, or with my father and the wet nurse? It is immaterial, but it is strange that I cannot remember. My memory is full of gaps.) Mother then returned home also, but for a while she and father were not on speaking terms. Angry messages were sent from one to the other from different parts of the house. The domestic atmosphere was cold and deadly, and I wished mother and I were back at Pansong-bang.
Mother wept day and night, and she developed an eating disorder that made her refuse all food. I suppose she was depressed. Was it a form of postnatal depression? Such a condition was not officially recognized or named in those days, though it was common enough. It was midwinter, and an icy wind blew through the eaves. The door frames and screens rattled, and icicles hung from the roof tiles. Soon my father’s anger turned to sickness, and he too began to refuse food – and so, in consequence, did I. I had witnessed too much; I was too close to them. I could not choose but to partake of their misery. I could not stomach the meals I was offered: they filled me with nausea. Was this an imitative filial piety or a form of incipient anorexia? I remember that a lump of my thick black hair fell out: I had a bald white shiny spot on my scalp, the size of a large coin. I was fascinated and appalled by this physical manifestation of grief. So were my parents. They had been in the grip of a mutually exacerbating and competitive despair, but eventually, for my sake, or so they said, they were reconciled. My father claimed that he could not bear to see me in decline, so he began to eat again, and encouraged me to do the same. He even offered the spoon of ginseng to my lips with his own hand. My mother also rallied. They said they were reconciled for my sake, but how am I to test the truth of that? What was I to them? What of my brothers? Where were my brothers during this dark time? Am I so selfish that I have forgotten the part they played? Why was I the close and chosen one, the spy within the bedroom?
When this grim winter episode of marital conflict came to an end, and spring returned, my parents gave me a toy pan and a toy pot to cheer me, and to reward me for having been so sensitive to their misery. And it is true that by the end of this grief-and-anger period, I felt that they had transferred their misery to me. I had taken it into myself. One should not, I believe, expect so much of small children, though I note that, in this respect, even greater emotional burdens are now placed on children by parents than was common in my day. But I liked my new toys, and I played with them, dutifully, seriously, happily, as a small child should. I still remember them clearly, that little bronze pot and that little pan, because I did not have many toys. Busily I filled and refilled them with water and flower petals and