I turned to study the surroundings. The bedchamber was pitifully small and unadorned. The only furniture was the low table where the other Selects sat. The walls were bare, without a single painting or mural. The famous palace seemed more austere than a servant’s quarters in my home.
Two servants brought trays and bowls that contained supper: several bamboo shoots, some soybeans, a chunk of winter gourd, two buns made of corn. No meat. I was disappointed and surprised too. In Wenshui, I had eaten meat and eggs for every meal.
When night fell, the room became so dark that the other girls turned into blots of shadows. They spread out on the floor, sleeping on small bamboo pallets. I looked around. There was one pallet left in the corner, so I took it, spread it out, and lay down.
“Have you ever wondered,” said the girl with almond-shaped eyes, who I later learned was the daughter of the Xu family in the capital, “what the Emperor looks like?”
So she had not met the Emperor either. But she seemed to be the one in charge, speaking in such an authoritative tone, and all the other girls fawned over her, calling her Older Sister Xu, although she was neither old nor sisterly.
“They say his skin shines like gold,” the Select with a flat nose next to me answered. “He also has the mind of a sage, the strength of a steed, and—”
“The heart of a lion,” another added.
Waves of giggles followed.
I did not understand what the joke was, but the tone of their voices confirmed something I had already suspected. I was not the only one who had come with an ambition to win the Emperor’s heart.
I slept shallowly and rose before dawn. Watching the others rolling up their pallets, I did the same and put mine away in the corner. The girls sat in front of their bronze mirrors, dabbing red tinctures on their faces, plucking their eyebrows, binding their hair in Cloudy Chignon, a ridiculous style with their hair piled loosely on top of their heads like black clouds. I dressed, wiped my face, and was ready.
“Will we meet the Emperor today?” I asked a girl beside me, trying to start some small talk, but she was too busy to talk to me. With nothing else to do, I simply sat and watched them.
Someone shrieked, pointing at a pimple on her face. The others rushed to her, gasping and groaning as if a tumor had grown on her nose.
The sun rose and poured a pond of golden light through the chamber’s open doors. I was getting impatient waiting when an order told us to go to the courtyard, where a woman with hair shaped like a conch and a group of eunuchs stood. The woman would teach us the morning lesson of the Code of Courtly Conduct, she said.
“Conduct, courtesy, and compliance,” she said, the tip of the conch hair shaking precariously as she paced in front of us, “share similar sounds but bear one name, the name of virtue. Wear them like your finest gown, carry them like a gold ingot, paint them on your face in the brightest hue, because it is by your courtesy that your goodness is so judged, and, by your compliance, your honor is weighed. Now, repeat after me.”
I had never heard of the words before, but I followed her order and repeated them. Then the woman instructed us on the details of the daily court ritual, protocols, etiquette, and taboos. After she was finished, the head of the eunuchs, a man with a bald head, stepped up and said, “If you fail to obey the Code and disrupt the court’s peace, you will receive a reprimand, twenty lashes by thick rods, or worse—be sent to the Ice Palace for punishment.”
Father had told me about the Ice Palace. It was a euphemism for court prison, the last place a palace lady wanted to go, where the eunuchs stored rods and torture tools. It also, I remembered, had a chamber of reptiles that feasted on the most wicked sinners.
The sun was burning the top of my head by the time the head eunuch finished his speech, and another group of eunuchs came in with baskets that contained threads and needles and piles of handkerchiefs. They all needed to be embroidered in five days, the woman with conch hair said and dismissed us. No one mentioned a word about meeting the Emperor.
“This is it? We’ll embroider for five days?” I followed the girls as we returned to our bedchamber, our arms full of handkerchiefs.
For all I knew, embroidery was a craft where women could have an excuse to practice stabbing—not just the fabric, but people as well. I had heard of some embroidery techniques from Big Sister, but I was not interested in it, and Mother had not forced it upon me.
The Xu Girl, the girl with almond-shaped eyes, glanced at me. “Come, Selects, let’s take a look at the embroidery technique on the sample handkerchief. Here, I have the sample.” She gathered us around her, and I sat across from her in the outer circle. “We will start with the partridge. Let’s look at the satin stitches used in the feathers. Isn’t this fabulous?”
Nodding, the girls stroked the partridge’s tail.
“Look how even these stitches are.”
“And the threads are so shiny!”