How Would You Write a Story Beginning with “Prince Consort, the Princess Was Beaten to Death. A Piece of Jade Fell from Her—the One You’ve Sought for Ten Years”?

“Prince Consort, the princess has been beaten to death. A piece of jade fell from her body. It is the one you have sought for ten years.”

My husband showed no reaction to these words. I knew he had always been good at keeping his composure.

Although I was dead by now, just a wisp of soul planted in front of him, seeing him so unmoved still made me a little angry.

People love jade. Mine was a piece Father had happened to pick up off the ground back when he was campaigning in the desolate northwest. After the palace’s skilled craftsmen carved it, he bestowed it on my husband’s old man, Yang Jie.

Before I married the prince consort, I had already heard that his whole family was poor, and that the cause was this very piece of jade. It was said that when Father bestowed the jade on Yang Jie, the old man was so moved in front of my old man that snot and tears poured down his face. Overflowing with gratitude and weeping buckets, he swore he would be a loyal subject of our Zhou family for life and pass this wretched jade down as a family heirloom.

I truly never imagined that less than ten years after my father-in-law said those words, he would overturn our Zhou family’s realm with his own hands.

When I married him, the prince consort did not like me. He looked down on everyone and was good only to his mother. His mother was a woman with a bitter fate. I had only just married him when she kicked the bucket. She never got to enjoy the honor I brought the Yang family, and somehow that became my fault. From then on, the prince consort found me even more of an eyesore and suspected I had jinxed his mother to death. Although he never tormented me with cold, cutting words, he still would not give me a good look.

Later, his father’s rebellion succeeded, and swarms of soldiers poured into the palace. I still remember the sky was clear that day, with sunshine that was rare in winter. Huaijue and I had gone into the palace to visit the dowager consort.

Before long, the palace attendants came running into the dowager consort’s palace in a panic. After that, Huaijue and I were separated by the surging crowd. All along the way, I saw Imperial Concubine Xia and several out-of-favor consorts dragged under the corridor eaves by the rebel soldiers. There was crying all around.

Just then, I seemed to hear the prince consort calling me.

But when I think about it carefully, I must have heard wrong. And even if he was calling me, he probably only wanted to kill me with his own hands.

I stumbled along all the way and, unexpectedly, saw the empress near the palace quarters.

It was like grabbing a life-saving straw. “Empress…” Before I could get the word niangniang out, someone not far away slit the empress’s throat with a sword.

Translator’s note: Niangniang is the honorific for an empress or imperial consort, roughly “Her Ladyship.” The narrator keeps using it for Consort Zheng.

When I looked more closely, lying on the ground besides the empress, whose head had been parted from her body, was my father.

The man sliding his sword back into its sheath was none other than my prince consort.

The prince consort I had been married to for six years, as good as strangers.

2

The Zhou was a short-lived dynasty. From its rise to its withering, it lasted no more than sixty years.

Recalling all this, I feel the world is very impermanent.

Only later did I learn that my elder sister Huaijue had more pride in her bones than me. After the rebels separated us, she climbed the Youxian Terrace alone and leaped from its hundred-zhang height, giving her life for the country.

Consort Zheng niangniang, who described this to me, hadn’t gone mad yet back then, and she spoke in a mocking, sarcastic way. “Huaijue fell into a pile of mashed flesh. No one dared go near her. Only the prince consort charged forward like his life depended on it. You and Huaijue are blood sisters, similar in build and similar in looks. I’m guessing he definitely mistook Huaijue for you.”

I said, “Exactly. He had to see whether I was thoroughly dead before he could rest easy.”

In the third month after Consort Zheng niangniang and I escaped the palace, she went mad.

After she went mad, I kept watch over her day and night. But one day, I went out to pick some fruit, and when I came back, I never saw her again.

I lived alone by Yehua Lake. The first to find me were not the current Son of Heaven’s lackeys, but the remnants of the Zhou dynasty.

This bunch tried to sweet-talk me into rebelling and promised me all sorts of benefits. I didn’t agree. They asked why, and I said since ancient times no woman has ever been emperor.

“Then let it start with Your Highness.”

I was a teeny tiny bit tempted. But after thinking it over, I really wasn’t the material for it, so I turned them down.

If I had known that not rising up would get me killed, I might as well have agreed back then.

3

A lot of things are chain reactions.

To give a simple example.

If I hadn’t looked down on the Yang family for being poor, Father wouldn’t have bestowed a large fortune on the Yang family.

The prince consort and I wouldn’t have fought over it on our wedding night, and the prince consort wouldn’t have flicked his sleeves and left.

The prince consort’s mother wouldn’t have been summoned into the palace by my consort mother and deliberately served cold tea and cold rice for three days, and my poor mother-in-law wouldn’t have fallen ill and never gotten up again.

The prince consort wouldn’t have treated me with cold eyes ever since he started tending her sickbed.

I wouldn’t have hurled vicious words at him, and he wouldn’t have slapped me across the face.

If I hadn’t suffered such a great humiliation, naturally I wouldn’t have gone crying to Father.

And Father wouldn’t have gotten so furious that he wanted to behead the prince consort.

I still remember how the prince consort held his neck stiff as a board in the palace back then, refusing to admit fault to my emperor dad no matter what.

I was turning chests and cabinets upside down at our residence, with a whole crowd kneeling outside the room, and my father-in-law wailing like a mourner, begging me to spare his family, old and young.

I nearly turned the prince consort’s room inside out before I found the jade Father had bestowed on the Yang family back then.

Afterward, when I pleaded with Father and put in a good word for the prince consort, I used this very jade as my pretext. “Yang Xuan is the Yang family’s only son. If Father orders him to die, who will this jade be passed down to? Yang Xuan gave the jade to his erchen. Does Father want his erchen to live as a widow?”

Translator’s note: Erchen, “child-subject,” is how a prince or princess refers to themself when speaking to the emperor.

The day after I brought the prince consort home, his mother finally gave out.

In a single day, the Yang family swung between great joy and great grief, and the whole household was angry with me but didn’t dare say it.

I think my father-in-law’s later rebellion against my dad was at least partly because of this.

4

I fully believed the second half of my life would rush by, and that the prince consort and I would have nothing more to do with each other.

But reality is often not as one wishes.

After the authorities caught me, I was locked in the yamen for half a month before I saw the sun again, and coming in with the light was an old acquaintance.

I once had a close friend from my maiden days.

To sum her up simply: a little better-looking than me, more elegant in conversation, more tasteful in dress, a bit better than me at everything, except that her birth was lower than mine. So in the old days, she was the close friend I always kept a head below me.

Now she stood unhurriedly before me.

Now she was the current Son of Heaven’s adopted daughter, Princess Yuanzhen.

And I was just a prisoner.

Yuanzhen had first married my father. After the new emperor seized power and took the throne, he took her in as an adopted daughter and made her a princess.

When my close friend first turned into my young stepmother, I truly couldn’t accept it for a while. Now that my young stepmother had worked from the inside with the rebels outside to kill my dad, I couldn’t accept it, and there was nothing I could do either.

Yuanzhen said a lot to me: how she had schemed for years, how much she loathed me, how she despised the empress and Father. It went on and on like an old lady’s foot-binding cloth.

In the end, she had the jailers break my hands and feet and slash my face with a dagger.

She threw herself into figuring out what else would make me suffer more. From the dappled sunlight of morning to the gloomy chill of evening, pain piled onto me without a break.

5

I knew those hands. They were Yang Xuan’s hands.

I was covered in blood, sticky and reeking.

I shoved him away with all my might. “Get lost!” Then I noticed his lips opening and closing, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I had gone deaf.

Yang Xuan hid me in his private residence. I tried to escape, to no avail.

In truth, I didn’t know what point there was in staying alive, and I didn’t understand why he kept me either.

Leaving me to live or die on my own with my body full of wounds should have satisfied his hatred better.

One night, I woke up from a nightmare, shivering all by myself, and couldn’t even wrap the quilt tightly around me.

My hands and feet had been set, but I couldn’t put any strength into them. I had become a cripple in the truest sense.

The physician could do nothing for the scars on my face. Yang Xuan stood on the other side of the curtain for a long while, and in the end he came in.

Shaking, I hid against the inner side of the bed, not daring to meet his eyes.

He came two steps closer and held me tight, allowing no resistance.

I wanted to push him away, but my powerless hands did nothing at all.

I think I shouted at him at the top of my voice, “Get lost!” I could feel his whole body go stiff in an instant.

But I couldn’t stop trembling. My throat was so tight it hurt, and I screamed, “Get lost!” Sadly, after a whole childhood of pampering, poetry, books and etiquette, I couldn’t find anything nastier than “get lost” to say to him.

6

I lived in the prince consort’s private residence for six years.

He didn’t come to see me often. When he did come, I mostly kept the door shut tight.

One night he got drunk and burst into my room. He was talking, and I had no idea what he said.

Then he cried. Such a big grown man, crying like his mother had died.

Although, thinking about it, he hadn’t cried much when his mother died. Or maybe he had and I just didn’t know.

I stood in front of him, trembling, thinking: I’m already this miserable and I haven’t cried, so what the hell is he crying for?

What did he have to cry about?

He wrote on paper: “Huaibi, I hate you so much.”

Translator’s note: Huaibi (huai2 bi4) means “holding a jade disc,” so her name echoes the jade the whole story turns on.

So melodramatic.

Of course he hated me. I knew that better than anyone.

In the days after that, I felt my body getting worse and worse.

I didn’t know where Yang Xuan found her, but he brought back a maid who had served me since I was little.

But although she had looked after me while I grew up, she could no longer recognize me.

In her eyes, I was just an ugly deaf woman with bad hands and feet and a strange temper.

Not a trace of the princess’s old grace was left.

Until one time, while she was helping me bathe, she saw the birthmark on my shoulder. She touched it in disbelief for a long while, then hugged me, crying, her scalding tears falling on my shoulder without stopping.

7

After Huanniang came to my side, my body slowly got better.

Yang Xuan also seemed a bit gentler than usual and never again said anything about hating me. Sometimes I would ask Huanniang, “What exactly is the prince consort keeping me for? To fatten me up and then kill me?”

When Huanniang first heard me call Yang Xuan the prince consort, she seemed a bit surprised. Later she got used to it and would just smile. She knew I was deaf, and that even if she said something, I wouldn’t hear it.

When I saw my father-in-law again, it had been almost ten years.

He looked at me kindly, and I couldn’t understand a single thing he said.

I tried hard to make out the shapes of his lips and recognized only one word: “jade.”

Jade?

What did that mean?

I was a little lost.

Then Yuanzhen came into the palace. She knew better than anyone how I went deaf.

So she had someone write it out for me to read.

Yuanzhen: “Yang Xuan has gone to the border. He won’t be back anytime soon.”

Me: “Oh.”

Yuanzhen: “His Majesty remembers that back then you carried the jade disc into the palace and saved Yang Xuan’s life, so he promised Yang Xuan that if he could find the jade disc too, he would spare your life as well. But Yang Xuan has searched all these years and never found that jade. It must be Heaven’s will.”

Me: “Mm.”

Yuanzhen: “I remember your sister died jumping off the Youxian Terrace. Why don’t you take after your sister and be a princess whose name goes down through the ages?”

Me: “Uh?”

Can I not die?

I still haven’t seen Yang Xuan even once more.

I wanted to tell him that although he hated me, I didn’t really hate him anymore.

8

Afraid that a long night would bring many dreams, Yuanzhen had people stuff me into a sack and beat me, only stopping once I’d stopped breathing.

By the time Yang Xuan came back, I couldn’t have been any more dead.

The female official who laid out my body was good at her job and tidied me up neatly. Only after I died did I discover that what I had looked like while alive was not really fit to be seen.

No wonder Huanniang couldn’t recognize me back then.

Yang Xuan rushed back from a thousand li away. When he looked at my body, his face was exceptionally calm.

Huanniang handed him the jade and choked out, “Prince Consort, the princess has been beaten to death. A piece of jade fell from her body. It is the one you have sought for ten years.”

He looked at it and took it in his hand. Not a trace of grief showed on his face. He was plainly, clearly unmoved.

I died like this right in front of him, and he didn’t say a single word. I had to hand it to him.

The cool night wind kept blowing.

While I waited for Black Impermanence to take me away, I wanted to go up and take a look at the prince consort.

We had been husband and wife, after all. Even if he wouldn’t wail at my funeral, I’d still accept him.

The lamplight was dim. My body was not in a coffin, but in the prince consort’s room, on the bed.

He sat by the bed, holding the jade pendant.

The flame in the oil lamp jumped. Suddenly, he flung the jade pendant clenched in his hand hard against the floor.

He threw up a mouthful of blood.

Then, unable to stop himself, he threw up several more mouthfuls.

9

I lingered by Naihe Bridge for a while. Meng Po had run out of soup and was heading home to boil more.

Translator’s note: Naihe Bridge, the Nai River and Meng Po belong to the Chinese underworld: drinking Meng Po’s soup makes a soul forget its past life before reincarnation, and Black Impermanence is one of the ghost officers who escort the dead.

While I was waiting, I ran into Consort Zheng niangniang.

When Consort Zheng niangniang wasn’t mad, she was extremely beautiful. Dressed all in white, she asked me what was under Naihe Bridge.

I answered, “The Nai River.”

Consort Zheng niangniang kept asking me whether she would drown if she jumped.

I said, “You’re already a ghost and you’re still scared of drowning? Can a ghost die twice?”

She said, true.

But a ghost officer beside us told me, “The Nai River is divided into upper, middle and lower reaches. The upper reaches lead to the future realm, the lower reaches lead to the past realm, and this stretch under our feet is the present realm. This water is murky, full of countless wronged souls. A living soul that throws itself in will be torn to shreds in a moment.”

I stood on Naihe Bridge gazing at the moonlight, and in a moment of carelessness, I missed my step and fell in.

I drifted downstream. Scenes from the past flashed by, stopping at the day Yang Xuan got drunk.

10

He staggered drunk into my room.

From beginning to end, he was really only asking one thing.

“Do you hate me that much?”

Back then, I stood trembling in front of him, watching him ask this over and over, so scared I was about to cry.

But he started crying before me, sobbing and aggrieved. “Why won’t you take your medicine? Do you hate me that much?”

He held my shoulders, and what he was roaring at me was: “You know full well I love you, and you still trample on yourself. Do you hate me that much?”

As he spoke, he wiped his tears dry and pulled me tight into his arms. “I don’t regret it. If I hadn’t killed the emperor and empress, Father would have killed you. I’d rather you hate me.”

So I had gotten it wrong.

Before the rebels stormed the palace, he and I had once had a stretch of easy, peaceful days.

I was the one who forgot.

Every year at New Year, I was always afraid of the sound of firecrackers, and he would come find me to play chess.

When firecrackers went off all around, he would quietly reach his hands over my ears and say in a low voice, “Don’t be afraid.”

That’s why I remembered his hands so clearly.

I had forgotten a lot of things. Most of all, I had forgotten that I loved him too.

When I fought with him, wasn’t the thing I said most often: “You only bully me because you know I like you. Just you wait. The day you come home wrapped in horsehide, I’ll remarry on the spot.”

Back then he did answer me: “I’ll be waiting.”

And I forgot all of it.

11

The ghost officer thought I had thrown myself into the Nai River because I couldn’t get over a broken heart, so after fishing me out he gave me a good long lecture.

Consort Zheng niangniang was even more the type to talk while standing without a backache. “Girls these days, my, aren’t they something.”

The next day, I saw Consort Zheng niangniang off to be reincarnated, then strolled through the sea of red spider lilies.

The flowers here were boundless, stretching beyond where the eye could see. I picked one to play with, and in a daze, I seemed to hear Yang Xuan’s voice.

I turned my head. Ten-odd years swept past in an instant, and Yang Xuan seemed to still be the young man of those days, brushing past flowers on a galloping horse, unrestrained and wild.

The way he looked in my memory, which I had almost forgotten.