I’ve always taken great pride in going to every place I write about. I couldn’t do that for this book. (As I write this, China continues to have lockdowns in major cities, and the quarantine period for visitors is three weeks.) However, when I researched Peony in Love, I went to several water towns in the Yangzi delta. I was confident about writing about a water town, but I still felt sad that I wasn’t seeing Wuxi with my own eyes. Serendipity came to the rescue once again. One day when I was looking at Twitter, I saw a post about a Ming dynasty building in Wuxi. I sent a direct message to @TheSilkRoad inquiring what else they might know about Ming dynasty sites that still exist in Wuxi. Within a day, Zhang Li sent me links to forty-three Ming dynasty buildings, gardens, and waterways that have survived in Wuxi, along with photos, history, and, in many cases, videos. Soon enough, I was on a boat floating on Wuxi’s canals—during the day, at night, and in a black-and-white documentary made in the 1950s. You can find many of these links on my website in the section called “Step Inside the World of Lady Tan” at www.LisaSee.com.
The garden for which the fictional Garden of Fragrant Delights is named is modeled on two gardens, both of which I’ve visited many times: the Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou and the Garden of Flowing Fragrance at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. The Garden of Fragrant Delights compound is very much inspired by the Qiao family compound near the ancient city of Pingyao, which I visited many years ago. The home boasts 313 rooms, six large courtyards, and nineteen smaller courtyards. You might recognize it as the setting for the film Raise the Red Lantern. The marriage bed has been in my family since long before I was born. Generations of See children have played in it. When I was a little girl, the drawers were filled with clothes and shoes so I could play dress-up. My children and their cousins used to watch television in the first antechamber, where a servant once would have slept on the floor. Today, all these years later, I marvel at the beauty of the window paintings, the carved vignettes, and the three separate rooms—all held together without a single nail. You will find photos of the two gardens, the Qiao estate, and the marriage bed on my website. My author photo was taken at the entrance to the marriage bed, so you can see a bit of it there too.
As we all know, works of fiction can create mind pictures and give us emotional experiences. During the first year of the pandemic, I decided to reread the David Hawkes translation of Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber), which is considered to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Chinese novels. While the story is set in the Qing dynasty, it does give a stunning portrait of what life was like in a grand household with many courtyards and gardens and inhabited by a large family, countless concubines, and retainers of every sort. My reading was further enhanced this time around by listening for hours to a podcast called, aptly enough, Rereading the Stone. The weekly conversation between the hosts, Kevin Wilson and William Jones, led to my further understanding of Chinese culture, history, literature, and philosophy.
For information about the Ming dynasty, I read A Ming Society by John W. Dardess, pertinent sections in Chinese Civilization and Society edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Censorial System of Ming China by Charles O. Hucker, and a collection of short stories, Stories from a Ming Collection compiled by Feng Menglong and translated by Cyril Birch. But sometimes trying to find a detail for a story can be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. I’m here to tell you those needles can be found… with lots of help. I must begin by giving my heartfelt thanks to Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. Over the years, I’ve asked him numerous times for help and advice, and he’s always gone above and beyond. While I was writing this novel, he acted as a go-between, connecting me to people who helped me with details I couldn’t track down myself. (Remember, the big research libraries were closed.) He first introduced me to Emily Baum, a professor of modern Chinese history at UCI with a subspecialty in traditional Chinese medicine, who discussed with me the differences between western and Chinese medical traditions. (Western medicine is focused on material structures. You can hold a heart in your hand and see bacteria through a microscope. Traditional Chinese medicine is more focused on processes and interactions in the body.) Professor Wasserstrom also connected me to Christopher Rea, Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of British Columbia, who answered many questions I had about the Ming dynasty: If there was a mail system in China five-hundred-plus years ago, how did it function? How long would it have taken to travel from Wuxi to Beijing on the Grand Canal in 1490? He sent me Chelsea Zi Wang’s in-depth essay “More Haste, Less Speed: Sources of Friction in the Ming Postal System,” and pointed me to a diary kept by Ch’oe Pu, a newly appointed Korean Commissioner of Registers on Jeju—the island I wrote about in The Island of Sea Women—who was shipwrecked off the coast of China in 1487 and was taken to Beijing on the Grand Canal. I then found John Meskill’s translation of Ch’oe Pu’s Diary: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea. The diary is filled with wonderful details about clothes, food, customs, and, of course, how long it took to get from here to there each day exactly three years before Tan Yunxian, Miss Zhao, and Poppy make their journey.
Last, when I was struggling with the differences I found in various texts—what were the responsibilities of a Prefectural Judge, Magistrate, and Chief Investigating Censor, and who would preside at an inquest or a re-inquest?—Professor Wasserstrom made a wonderful email introduction to Michael Szonyi, Professor of Chinese History at Harvard University and the former director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Professor Szonyi shared with me his article “The Case in the Vase: Legal Process, Legal Culture, and Justice in The Plum in the Golden Vase.” We also had a fascinating correspondence, a tiny bit of which I’d like to share with you. When I wrote to him because I was confused that some sources used Ministry of Punishments (or Justice) while others called it the Board of Punishments (or Justice), he replied with the following:
On the Board of Punishments, I can’t speak to the motivations of other translators, but I think the real issue is just the degree to which we are confident about inserting our own assumptions into the terms we use. The standard reference work for official titles, Hucker’s Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China, uses Ministry of Justice. But that came out in the 1980s, based on earlier work. From my perspective, it’s not reasonable to infer that some notion comparable to our idea of “justice” is embodied in the original Chinese term. But the notion of punishment certainly is. Board vs Ministry is easier to explain—in the British system, a Ministry is headed by an elected official who also serves on the Cabinet. The Chinese office we’re talking about here is a high-level office headed by a senior bureaucrat. So it can’t be translated as a Ministry. If more early Sinologists had been American, we might use the term Department of Punishments to indicate a very high-level administrative body headed by a senior bureaucrat. But somehow we’ve settled on Board.
Complicated and nuanced, but fascinating.
For all matters concerning tea, I turned to Linda Louie, the owner of the Bana Tea Company. She has created a tea package for book clubs, featuring some of the teas mentioned in the novel, which you can find on her website at www.BanaTeaCompany.com. I also want to thank Linda for acting as the liaison between her sister, Meiyin Lee, and me. Meiyin sent along interesting material on traveling in the Ming, Thin Horses, and Tooth Ladies.
This is a novel, and I took some liberties. While the method of writing a message on a baby’s foot during labor to send it back to the child palace is real, it did not happen to Tan Yunxian. There is also nothing in the historical record to indicate that Tan Yunxian ever left Wuxi, let alone traveled to the Forbidden City. But I wanted her to make the trip for three reasons. First, to give a possible answer to how and where Tan encountered the tiller woman. Second, I was fascinated and intrigued by the details of the true story of a “matron of medicine” named Peng, who gave birth in 1553 to a son right before Empress Xiaoke, the fourth consort of the Jiajing emperor. When he heard that his beloved’s eyes had been sullied by seeing such a sight, he ordered the midwife to be executed. The consort and other ladies of the court fought for a lighter sentence and won. The emperor sentenced Peng to thirty strokes and expelled her from the Forbidden City. Third, and most important, including the interlude at the Forbidden City allowed me to write about women in every level of society—from a servant up to the empress. And, as a side note, the story of the eunuch shooting arrows at passersby on the Grand Canal is true.