"The Princess of China" by Yunya Yang
Zhaodi sat by the floor-length window, overlooking the golden, sun-bathed Huangpu River, on which boats floated like little bugs trapped in water. Further down the harbor, the Oriental Pearl Tower pierced the cloudless sky like the sting of a queen bee.
It was a view that did not yet belong to her, for she was no princess, even though her father repeated to her in his drunken mumblings that she would have been a “gege,” if she were born in the Qing Dynasty. He told her that they would have been royalty then, and how fate had slighted him that he had to come to this world two hundred years too late, when the Red Guards hunted down even the faintest relations to the bygone dynasty as enemies of the people. He’d had to change his family name and hide in this godforsaken village, forced to work as a miner, when he could have lived in palaces with thousands of rooms filled with wine and gold and wives.
He said this as he stumbled around their single-room apartment, kicking at the loosened leg of the bamboo chair, slapping her mother when she tried to take away his bottle.
So it was really a good thing that he died in a mining accident, buried underground forever in the tunnels, like in the tomb of an emperor. Her mother had gotten the compensation for his death — ten thousand yuan, a laughable sum for a life, and far short of the amount that could afford for both Zhaodi and her younger brother, Chao, to go to college.
What else could be done but for her to leave school? The boy of the family, the boy her parents had to pay a fine to bear, needed to go on, for he was their only hope, even though she was just as good at school and just as hopeful. Why couldn’t she go to college as well? She asked her mother. Don’t be so selfish, her mother told her. Think of your brother.
Even her name — Zhaodi — meant “bringing a younger brother,” lest she forgot her purpose. She resented this reminder, so she’d changed her name to Audrey when she moved to the city and started working at Windsor Night Club. She got the name from an American actress; she’d seen one of her movies, Holiday in Rome, in the crammed dorm room she shared with nine other girls from the same club. The girls all had English names — the clients liked them — so she picked one as well. She thought it was fitting because people called the girls who worked at nightclubs “princess.”
It wasn’t the most honorable career, but it made good money, a large portion of which she sent to Chao in college. She told her mother that she’d gotten a well-paid sales position in the city, and in a way, it wasn’t a complete lie. It was there that she met Ming, a wealthy businessman thirty years her senior. He bought her gifts and took her out to dinner. One time he took her to Disneyland, where she wore a plastic crown for the whole day, and the waiter at the Cinderella-themed restaurant addressed her as “your highness.” For a brief, bewildering moment, she was happy.
She knew Ming had a wife and a daughter, and she had no intention of breaking up his family. It was not love she wanted from him. She’d loved once, when she was still in school, in the middle of a summer storm, sitting on the back of a boy’s bike, holding an umbrella over their heads with one hand, and clutching the fabric of his school uniform with another, careful not to touch his body. They rode on the narrow, muddy country road between the rice fields extending to the looming mountains beyond. She felt the warmth that seeped through the boy’s back, his panting as he peddled, and her own heartbeat in the same rhythm as the relentless raindrops on the umbrella. Her heart was full, of what exactly she could not remember. It was no longer important, for what she wanted from Ming was something else entirely. Eventually, without birth control pills, she was pregnant. He was furious at first but then calmed when he learned it was a son. She made sure it was a boy before she told Ming the news. He worried about who would take over his business and was reluctant to give it to his son-in-law. It would be a shame for it to end up outside of my own family, he told her once, as they laid in his soft, king-sized bed. Now it didn’t have to — now he had his own son. He moved her into a condo overlooking the Huangpu River, so she could be kept comfortable while she was making the future heir of his empire.
She leaned back into the cushioned chair, looking at the river beneath inevitably rushing into the eastward ocean. On her protruding belly, she tapped her finger in a rhythm she imagined would be the same as the little heartbeat within, thumping closer and closer to the day he would make his mother a queen.
Yunya Yang was born and raised in Central China and moved to the US when she was eighteen. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Bending Genres, The Los Angeles Review, among others. She lives in Chicago with her husband Chris and cat Ichiro. Find her at www.yunyayang.com and on Twitter @YangYunya.
