A NABOKOVIAN ROMP LOVE IN THE FORBIDDEN CITY
Da Chen sets his ‘Lolita’ against the backdrop of the waning days of the corrupt Qing Dynasty
A Da Chen novel set in the waning days of the Qing Dynasty,
My Last Empress, the new novel by Da Chen, is a Nabokovian romp that extends from the Connecticut coast to the lantern-lit passageways of the Forbidden City during the waning days of the Qing Dynasty. The story is recounted by Pickens, a New England aristocrat whose destiny — “Phillips Andover followed by Yale, then days at the family law firm and evenings at the club” — is derailed when at the age of18, he falls for Annabelle, the 19-year-old, China-born daughter of a missionary.
In one of many overt allusions to Lolita, Pickens’ Annabelle, like Humbert’s childhood obsession, Annabel, dies a premature death and Pickens is left chasing her ghost, finding her in depraved trysts with mannequins, in bouts of insomnia and in fragmented dreams. Like Lolita’s Humbert, Pickens is trapped in time, his heart ensconced in pubescent amber that leaves him with a “penchant for the young, the tender, or the ghostly.”
Pickens is convinced that it is Annabelle’s posthumous will that he go to China, a place she had romanticized and to which she had longed to return. With her “subliminal consent,” he studies Chinese and unsuccessfully signs up for service as an overseas missionary upon graduating from Yale. In a series of improbable events that Pickens ascribes to “the underbelly of a busy loom that wove the fabric of coincidences, making them seem so conveniently and banally coincidental,” Pickens is eventually hired to tutor the young Qing Dynasty emperor.
Even within the walls of the Forbidden City in Peking, he continues to seek his Annabelle, finding her quite suddenly — “In a green-lawned backyard, a dazzle of a nymphet blonde, 13 and no older, was straddling over a beastly motorcycle, sun in her face, goggles in her hair, thin thighs apart, one long and booted leg resting on the gas pedal, the other on the ground.”
The nymphet is Qiu Rong, the fourth consort to the emperor, a precocious girl of mixed blood whose mysterious origins form the novel’s backbone. To Pickens, she is his “pubescent siren,” the reincarnation of Annabelle, and he pursues her with all the strength of his “ape heart, thawing and melting all in one monstrous beat and phantasmal rhyme.”
Their affair is but a part of the general palace intrigue: the emperor is merely the puppet of an ancient dowager, pejoratively called “Grandpa,” and inside the gilded and insular walls of the Forbidden City, the eunuchs and concubines who grovel and tremble before the throne actually dictate the corrupt rot that slowly eats away at the entire regime. Pickens, together with Qiu Rong and a few allies, attempts to uncover the depths of corruption as the anti-Western Boxer Rebellion plays in the background and the inevitable end of dynastic China looms just outside the palace walls.
Da Chen was born in China and emigrated to the U.S. in his 20s to attend Columbia Law School. English is his second language, but like Joseph Conrad, and to some degree Nabokov himself, Chen has achieved a subliminal command of the language that seems to channel his cadence and imagery through a heretofore undiscovered prism.
With My Last Empress, Chen has crafted a novel that bravely delves into the darkest nooks of the emotional spectrum through the eyes of a narrator whose own sense of depravity collides with his earnest will to love. Against the beautifully rendered backdrop of the almost mythical Forbidden City, Chen employs the surreal and the taboo to shed light on nostalgia, betrayal and the dichotomy of the human heart. Jason Beerman lives in Hong Kong.