My Life as Emperor Review

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My Life as Emperor ReviewAlong with Mo Yan and Gao Xingjian, Su Tong is widely regarded as one of mainland China's premier novelists, and with good reason. MY LIFE AS EMPEROR, the third of Su Tong's works to be published in English (after RAISE THE RED LANTERN and RICE), tells a brilliant and compelling tale of fate, decay and decadence, and palace intrigue fueled by the whims of a fourteen-year-old and his manipulating grandmother, a figure strongly reminiscent of China's famous Qing Dynasty dragon empress, Cixi. Yet within this bleak context of impending doom, the author gives us a phoenix tale, the story of an unlikely rebirth into a life of peace and contemplation.
MY LIFE AS EMPEROR is set in an unknown place at an indistinct time, although the author closes by locating the renamed imperial capitol as Changzhou in Jiangsu Province, not far from his own Suzhou birthplace. At the death of his Emperor father, fourteen-year-old Duanbai - the fifth of his father's sons - is unexpectedly called by his grandmother, Madame Huangfu, to assume the throne of the Xie Empire. Sun Xin, an alchemist and his deceased father's attendant - now reduced to madness - proclaims that calamity will soon befall the Empire. And it indeed does as Duanbai's ascendancy sets off a chain of palace intrigues among his half brothers.
Duanbai himself is feckless and capricious, immature and utterly unprepared for his responsibilities. Duanbai's sleep is filled with night demons, and he is given to acts of pettiness and stunning viciousness alternating with acts of deep sympathy and love. The only person he can trust, his mentor Juekong, is banished from the capitol to live out his life as a monk on Bitter Bamboo Mountain. He befriends a palace eunuch named Swallow and falls deeply in love with a concubine, Lady Hui, but his empire is beset by enemies from within and without. He ultimately loses his throne to his oldest brother, Duanwen, and is banished from the capitol to live life as a commoner as his punishment. The balance of the novel tells the story of Duanbai's life after his fall from power.
Written in 1992, MY LIFE AS EMPEROR offers an engrossing story line filled with memorable characters and fascinating insights into imperial life. As in his other works, Su Tong can be brutally cruel and explicit, but wondrously lyrical and richly symbolic. As he suggests in his Preface, this story is a dream from within the dream world in which he lives and writes. It is a dream filled most notably with birds and bird images: the foreboding white herons on the book's opening page, his eunuch Swallow, Lady Hui's Singing Oriole Pavilion, the birdlike feeling of tightrope walking, and the Double Eagle crest of the invading Peng Empire among others.
From young Emperor Duanbai's favorite cricket cages to his escapades with tightroping walking, MY LIFE AS EMPEROR is a tragic story of unasked for imprisonment and deeply sought freedom. In the end, stark military power prevails in the public sphere, but the wisdom of Confucius' ANALECTS provides the one true way to peace. Sadly, the path to Bitter Bamboo Mountain is littered with mistakes, needless suffering, and tragedy. Life is bitter, indeed.
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