Little Emperor

Late one night, after making love on a faux leather mattress in a bathhouse on Ann Siang Hill, Julius told me the secret his family had guarded with their lives for the past five generations.

“Ravi,” he whispered. “I am the Emperor of China.”

“That’s nice.”

“Stop it. I am being serious.”

“Me too. It’s so nice to think I’ve fucked an Emperor of China.”

He wriggled in my arms, annoyed, but I clutched him tighter, buried my face in his hair, and started tickling his scrawny ribs. We both ended up giggling, rolling around on the mattress, our laughter piercing the thin walls of our cabin into the unlit corridors beyond.

This was back in the early 2000s, a good time to be a young gay man in Singapore. I’d spent the last twenty years scared stiff of my body: what it hungered for, what God and my parents and the government might do to me if they found out. Now the police raids on clubs had stopped and the PM had said we were humans too, so to celebrate we were holding all-night dance parties, signing up with mailing lists and gyms and saunas, venturing out into the world in search of love, in search of sex, in search of ourselves.

Later, after mopping up, showering and soaping off, Julius and I sat together in the downstairs bar sipping our jasmine green tea. “You should not have laughed just now,” he told me soberly, as he stirred his drink.

“Hey. You laughed too.”

“You made me laugh.” On further reflection, he added, “Maybe that is why I like you.”

This was pretty romantic of him, I thought. After all, it was only the second time we’d met, and the second time we’d slept together. I’d met him just a month before, prowling the dark rooms of another bathhouse at River Valley. We hadn’t really been each other’s types: he was one of those typical Coke bottle-glassed windbreaker-wearing mainland Chinese students we made fun of in the university, skinny bodies and bad hair and bad breath, and he’d never been with an Indian guy before. Still, our bodies somehow understood each other, and we’d ended up spending hours in each other’s arms, fucking, falling asleep, talking, and finding our way back to fucking once more.

Then around 5am, we’d exchanged each other’s mobile numbers, promised to meet, and never got round to calling. It was only by coincidence that we’d spied each other this time, locked eyes and decided, yeah, in this case familiarity trumped the thrill of the unknown. Now, in the half-light of the bar, he was holding my hand, telling me all his secrets in halting, painfully correct English.

“My real name is Aishin Gioro Juren,” he began. “I am not Chinese—I mean, I am not Han Chinese. I am Manchu, the same race that overthrew the Ming Dynasty and founded the Qing in 1644.”

As the night wore on, the rain beating its steady tattoo on the roof, he told me the history of his people: how they had been horse-riding nomads, battling a timeless empire that called them barbarians, ultimately winning the throne for themselves. For two and a half centuries they’d ruled their former overlords with wisdom and prudence, bringing their culture to unprecedented heights, only to be toppled by the forces of opium, gunboats and a short-lived spell of democracy.

“1911 was a dark year for us,” he told me. “My great-grandfather Puyi was only five years old: a puppet king, the tool of the eunuchs and the Empress Dowager. He didn’t understand what was happening, why his people suddenly wanted to cut off their pigtails and dress like white men. He spent the rest of his life as a prisoner, first of the Republicans, then the Japanese, then the Communists.”

For the sake of survival, the true heirs to the Forbidden City had gone into hiding, changed their names and disguised their origins. But the forces of the revolution had been cruel. His grandfather had been rounded up by uniformed teenagers in a show trial and denounced as a feudalist, then ritually beheaded to the applause of a roaring schoolyard. His father had been sentenced to hard labour, and by the time economic reforms came in the 80s, he was already dead of a lung infection, choked by the dust he’d inhaled every day in the gulag’s coalmines.

As for Julius, he’d been raised by his grandmother, who’d kept him safe from prying eyes in a freezing hut in Liaoning province, teaching him his history, speaking to him only in the forgotten Manchu language, whose script resembled falling knives. He’d excelled in school and eventually won a scholarship to a steaming tropical country where he would no longer have to fear the wrath of Maoist maniacs; where he might learn the skills of kingship, preparing for the inevitable day when China longed for the return of its rightful ruler.

“But that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why would the Chinese even want an emperor again?”

He furrowed his brow and crushed the ice in his glass with his straw.

“How old is Singapore?”

“You mean since independence? Two oh-oh three minus sixty-five… We’re thirty-eight, thirty-seven, I guess.”

“China is five thousand years old. We are the oldest civilisation in the world. Not Egypt, not the Middle East. Those cultures, they went up and down, they rose and they collapsed; invaders came in, natives went out. We are unique because we have been the same people, the same culture, for five thousand years. So it does not matter if the People’s Republic lasts for one hundred, two hundred years. We have always been an empire. The emperors will return.”

There were a few things I could’ve said at this point. For instance, I could have pointed out that once monarchy fizzles out, it’s generally gone for good. Singapore used to have Sultans, but then colonisation happened, and then immigration and the whole damn 20th century, and now the descendants of the royal line were taxi drivers and manual labourers, and no one was begging for them to hop back on the throne. The same was true of the Maharajahs of India, the Shahs of Iran, the Khans of Mongolia, the Tsars of Russia and Serbia and Bulgaria. As far as we knew, the progress of history was a one-way street.

Anyway, if—and this was a big if—the people of China all decided en masse that they wanted a new emperor, they’d hardly go back to the Manchus; they’d seek out Han Chinese, like themselves. In fact, the new ruler could be any old peasant rebel who took over the government and claimed he had the Mandate of Heaven. The issue wasn’t the royal blood; it was who had the balls to take power.

But, I didn’t say any of that at the time. Truth was, I didn’t feel any particular compulsion to behave like a dick to Julius there and then. He was looking cuter than ever, actually, in the glow of the muted lamps, his glasses in his lap, his towel round his shoulders, his brow furrowed with an absurdly righteous pride. So I changed the subject.

“How’s Singapore been for you, then?”

He stopped frowning, and a warm smile crept over his face. “This is not a bad place,” he said. “You Singaporeans, you like to complain, but you have good lives, you know? You do not have villages full of the poor. You do not have prisons full of people, waiting to be executed for believing the wrong thing. You have good food, not just your Chaozhou porridge, your Fujian noodles, but also your curries, your laksas, your chendols, your, what do you call it, your murtabak. You have apartments where everyone lives together, different races, different faiths. You have shopping malls that sell everything, from America, Europe, Japan.

“And you have your parties. I remember the first time I walked into a club, you know? All those handsome men dancing with men, hundreds of them, and that funny show with the tall woman in the wig and the feathers and the sari. I felt I had walked into what we call the Peach Blossom Garden, a paradise on Earth.”

He leant back in his seat, thrusting his feet forward so his toes began to brush against mine beneath the table.

“This is a place where a man can forget, you know? That he is an emperor, that the entire Chinese Communist Party wants to see him dead and buried in an unmarked tomb, so that not even future generations will be able to kneel at his shrine and mourn the death of a living god.”

“This is a country,” he said, moving his lips to mine, “where a man can be free.”

I didn’t keep in touch with Julius. It wasn’t because I was prejudiced, not really. I mean, there was a lot of xenophobia back then, but I could’ve joked about a PRC boyfriend: fresh off the boat, but good in the sack. I even had a few activist friends who would’ve squealed at the sight of us: an Indian guy and a mainland Chinese guy, ebony and ivory, a racial harmony poster come to life. But of course, he’d had to tell me this crazy story about his relatives all being dead royals, and that meant drama of epic proportions, probably involving visits to IMH and a regimen of antipsychotics. No, I thought to myself, even on nights when my balls ached and the thought of texting him surfaced in my brain. Not worth the heartache. Not worth the headache. Not worth the time.

As it turned out, I wouldn’t see him again for another whole decade. It was in a dance club in West Hollywood, one of those endless caverns full of huge sweaty men and flashing lights and choking clouds of dry ice: an imitation of the metropolis of smog and neon that lay outside. Every stripe of queer was there: skinny Pinoy twinks, Cuban leather daddies, Midwestern drag queens, hipster boys, lipstick lesbians, butch Goth girls, baby bears, tank-topped volunteer students offering on-the-spot HIV tests.

It was past 2am and I was bored, residually jetlagged, sick of being sexually ignored by the rainbow society that paraded before me, 98 per cent convinced that I might as well taxi back to my fag-hag friend’s apartment for some beauty rest on her couch. Then my eye wandered over to a circle of shirtless gym bunnies, more out of curiosity than any real desire. And out of that mass of flesh, someone waved.

“Ravi! Oh my god! It’s been like forever!”

It took me a while to figure out it was him. He still had the same cheekbones, the same small almond eyes and short lashes, but everything else had changed. He’d bulked up, pecs and glutes, et cetera; grown taller even, cultivated a trendy buzzcut and decked himself out in designer underwear that peeked out from his Armani jeans. As he grinned, I noticed he’d even fixed his crooked teeth.

He pulled me over to the VIP lounge for cocktails. Since we could finally hear ourselves think, he gave me a run-down of what he was up to. His accent was now classic Californian, effortless.

“So I’ve been running a little import-export business between Shanghai and Seattle, food and fashion, for the nouveau riche market of course, but we’re expanding horizontally into manufacturing, reaching out to the lower middle classes, and it’s really coming together, you know? Did I give you my card? Here’s my card. Do you have a card? You should have a card—here, I know this great designer, let me give you his email, Yaakov introduced me, he works in private banking, isn’t that right Yaakov, we met at this prostate cancer fundraiser, a big afterparty at Bryan Singer’s house, coke and strippers and all, classic Americana, and Yaakov here, he was lounging by the pool, totally rocking these orange tangas…”

Yaakov was his boyfriend, an Israeli media lawyer with designer stubble who looked like he’d walked off the cover of GQ. He spent most of his time on his Blackberry, only raising his eyes now and then to acknowledge me, briefly, or give Julius a requisite peck on the cheek. I noticed the two of them had matching cubic zirconium rings.

Eventually, Julius ran out of breath and took a long sip of Fiji water to rehydrate.

“And what are you doing?”

“Nothing much. Graduated. Teaching maths and physics at Crescent Girls School. Coach of the handbell choir on the side. It’s not so bad. They just sent me for an international conference on maths education in Anaheim. That’s how I got here.”

“Ohhh, exciting. And is there a lucky man?”

I shrugged, trying to play it cool. Even though I’d had two bad breakups in a row in my late 20s and not a date since. Even though I hadn’t been laid in 18 months. Even though my hair was thinning and my paunch was thickening, while all the other gay boys at the bar still looked pretty much like teenagers. I couldn’t grumble, after all. I’d had a few good years with men who actually loved me, which was a lot more than some folks in this world could boast of.

“Oh, you poor baby.” He squeezed my hand, which hurt, and turned to his boyfriend. “Yaakov, can you get us some Cristal? That’s my boy.”

Talking did actually become easier once we popped open the champagne. I might’ve drunk mine a little fast, though, because soon I was laughing at everything that came out of this guy’s mouth, never mind that I couldn’t even be sure if he was Julius really, with his weird hair and water polo player’s body and spray-on tan. At some point, a tow-haired Ukrainian go-go boy came over and insisted we do body shots off his navel, which turned out to be less sexy than it sounded, given how his skin stank of rank sweat and old cheese.

After a couple of hours, I found myself lolling about, eyes half-open on the leather upholstery of a red Cadillac, speeding past the countless illuminated billboards that punctuated the highway with sports and liquor ads. At some point we swerved hard, and my head fell into Julius’ lap. I felt his left hand descend from the steering wheel to stroke the fuzz of my cheek.

I only started sobering up properly once I was in his bed. It dawned on me that I was naked, while he was between my knees, trying to suck my none-too-erect cock. I managed to slur out the words, “What about Yaakov?” but he just let go of me with his mouth for enough time to reply, “What about Yaakov?” and continued with his ministrations.

Luckily for both our dignities, I did manage to get hard eventually, and a semblance of sex took place. It was strange, I thought distractedly, running my hands down his back, how his body was by all accounts more attractive now, and how that didn’t actually stop me from missing his old twiglike frame. Reaching for his rock-hard ass, I noticed the skin was subtly looser than it once was, and passing my fingertips over his pelvis I could tell he’d been waxed, the very fibres of his hair ripped out by their roots so it was impossible to tell where even the pores once lay.

I woke up properly around noon, the West Coast sunlight falling through the French windows onto my face. My head was pounding, but through the pain I could see the luxury of his mansion: marble floors, gilt mirrors and Andy Warhol prints on the walls, certified with his signature scrawl. Groping about, I made my way to the bathroom where I cleared my bladder and tapped out a lengthy apology to my fag-hag friend, who’d made fifteen missed calls since that morning asking where the hell I’d gone, and if I hadn’t been mugged, congrats.

Julius was downstairs making brunch. He had an apron on and a spatula in his hand, like some vision of a Stepford husband. “Hey doll,” he said, and set down an Eggs Benedict and an orange juice. “Drink up. It’s squeezed fresh.”

“Thanks.”

“So you’re leaving tomorrow, huh? No plans to come back?”

“No plans.”

“I wanted your advice on something.” He pulled up his iPad, unlocked its passcode, laid it on my lap and began scrolling through photo after photo of girls: wide-eyed teenagers, some holding peonies in their hands, some so unnerved by the camera they’d forgotten how to engineer a smile.

“Which one would you marry?”

“Huh?”

“They’re my wives, Ravi. My grandma chose them.”

His fingers kept scrolling till he reached the end, then he scrolled back, running through the nameless 18-year-olds in reverse order. “They’re waiting for me in my Liaoning village, she says. Waiting for me to go through with the ceremony. She’s already bought the pigs and chickens to be slaughtered, found the sedan chair bearers, chosen the tea. Everything’s ready. All they want to know is, which one should be the head queen. Which one will rule the harem.”

There wasn’t much to say in reply to that. I stared at my Eggs Benedict, at the little flecks of herb in the Hollandaise sauce dripping down over the smoked salmon and muffin.

“Have you tried asking Yaakov?”

“Yaakov doesn’t know. No one knows but you.”

He picked up my orange juice and drank it down, then poured himself another with a shot of vodka in it.

“You don’t have to go through with it.”

“No, no. It’s only fair. It’s what emperors have to do.”

He opened another album on the tablet and showed me the shots of the Italianate palace he’d built his mother and grandmothers, using the riches he’d earned in this new age of Chinese prosperity. He spoke, matter-of-factly, of the bribes he’d paid, of the nights he’d had to host feasts for county officials at his residence, French wine and snow crabs and goose liver pâté. How he’d learned to master the panic that burrowed into his stomach every now and again, that they’d suddenly leap on him and lock him away, leaving no heirs to the throne, no sons to continue the line for another century or five.

“I keep telling myself, no one cares, you know? The government’s gone soft now; they hardly execute anyone anymore. They put their rebels under house arrest these days, like they’re the daughters of Burmese generals. But then I remind myself, they’re Chinese. They can’t change. For five thousand years, we’ve never changed.”

He paused, and I realised how broken he looked, how weak and trapped within his armour of body-built flesh. He looked bizarrely beautiful like that, and I felt all protective suddenly, so I wound my skinny-fat arms around his muscled body, as if the warmth and pressure of another human being could make everything all right.

“Come back with me.”

I assumed I hadn’t heard him right, so I buried his face closer into the crook of my armpit. He squirmed out of my embrace and held me by the shoulders, gazing unblinking into my eyes.

“The time is coming, you know,” he continued. “When it’ll be safe to come out, to tell everyone we’re here, we’ve been waiting all this time. We’re rich again. We have order, progress; we own half of America, whether they like it or not. We can have the good old days back again, when China ruled the world, and when one man ruled China. You’d live like a prince. You’d be a prince. You’d raise my sons, my grandsons, to be emperors themselves…”

The silence lasted five seconds, ten seconds, as I searched my brain desperately for a silly new subject, a joke, a diversion, an excuse. But he wasn’t stupid. He studied my expression and he knew.

When his mobile went off, blaring Miley Cyrus into the dining area, he didn’t even hesitate. In a single motion, he plucked the handset from his apron pocket and waltzed away from me, singing, “Hey girl! Yeah, uh-huh, we’ve tickets for the premiere tonight, but what am I wearing, oh, you’ll never guess what Yaakov bought me, it’s a Level Ten secret…”

Suddenly, he pressed his phone to his chest. “You can’t stay long, okay? I’d drive you, but Yaakov’s coming, and he doesn’t always like to see what I’ve done the night before.”

I dialled for a cab. This was before Uber, so the voice said they’d only be there in twenty. In front of me, the Eggs Benedict had gone cold and rubbery. To pass the time, I ate it, masking the texture with gulps of orange juice and vodka.

I was in the lamasery the next time I heard about Julius. News reached us slowly in the Himalayan colony, where I taught the children of fellow climate refugees: Singaporeans, Hong Kongers, Macanese, Maldivians, Seychellois. We didn’t have computers, lab equipment or calculators, but it was surprisingly satisfying work, drilling the kids in their times tables, instilling in them a sense of order while the world below us fell apart.

At night, we’d huddle in the communal hall, light the fires and listen to the radio. The early years were the worst. Remember: we were optimists then. The flash floods of the 2030s were minor ones, with only a few hundred people killed. We’d thought our relocation was temporary, a bit like a camping trip that’d come to an end when the levees were rebuilt. But as we drank yak butter tea, we’d hear how the familiar nations of our maps were splintering apart, their cities besieged by marauders, their coastlines erased by the advancing tides. Some of us wept, and the monks rushed to comfort us in our sorrow, but many of us thanked our stars to have been evacuated so early, to a place so remote that the superpowers would hardly be bothered to touch us. Here, we would be left alone, we thought. Up here, we were safe.

The radio announcers didn’t call him Julius, of course. They simply spoke of a “foreign-educated Manchu warlord” who was among the many factions battling for power in Beijing, ruthlessly defended by his all-female troop of bodyguards— his wives, one of them said. Then one day, one of the senior monks showed me a newspaper one of the novices had brought with him when he came: a last remnant of the world beyond. There on page one was a photo of him, dressed in a Mao suit, a cigar clenched between his teeth, which had somehow regained a little of their old crookedness. The monk asked me why I was smiling, and I tried to explain, in my halting Tibetan, the story of a lover long gone, the ghost of young desire.

Gradually, I grew accustomed to the life we led in the mountains. I improved my Tibetan, and fostered a few orphans before the monks found them suitable families in the villages below. I even had the occasional dalliance with a younger Bruneian gentleman—married, I’m sorry to say. He was one of the handful of us who never managed to adapt: who missed his old stilt house so much it hurt him like a wound. One morning his wife discovered him lying outside their hut, dead from exposure, face down in the snow.

By the time the last of the radios broke down, I barely noticed. The news had long become mere background noise: a murmur of foreign voices in the distance, a pointless distraction from my students’ exercise books, which I marked every evening by candlelight. The passage of time only struck me when one of my former adoptees turned 16 and joined me as a teacher in the lamasery, reading the children extracts from the Jataka Tales, assisting me in the task of instructing them in long division. It was then that I noticed how my bones had begun to creak after chopping firewood, how my knees ached when I prostrated myself in the altar room.

Then, suddenly, history caught up with us. Soldiers were sighted in our hills, and the sounds of cannon fire boomed none too far away. I woke one night to find the eastern wing of the lamasery on fire, the younger monks rushing to put out the flames with what little water they could find unfrozen in the winter. A week later I was meditating when the assistant teacher roused me with his hand on my shoulder. The colony, he told me, had fallen to the Emperor’s armies.

A month went by without further news. Then, the day came, heralded by a silk-robed messenger who bore a scroll of parchment marked with words like falling knives. I decided to shave for the occasion, and asked the Abbot for a pair of scissors and a mirror. It was an unexpected pleasure, observing myself as I clipped away at my beard, revealing the clean, round face of a smiling old man I barely knew.

It was barely dawn, but already, there was a sound of trumpets outside. I dressed myself in my least ragged robes, put on my sandals and opened the flap of my tent. All about me in the snow were the people of the colony, come to gawp at the imperial retinue of machine-gun-toting soldiers, filigree-haired servant girls and eunuch officials. At the centre of it all was a gilded palanquin, plated on all sides with the mark of a five-clawed dragon. A collective gasp rustled through the throng, bringing them to their knees as they saw the door open and a pair of fur-lined boots step out.

Age had withered him. He was rake-thin again, with wrinkled eyes and liver spots on his skin, and as he walked he placed all his weight on his ebony cane. And yet his smile seemed charming, even mischievous, as he proceeded down the dirt path into my tent.

“How are you doing, Ravi?” he asked as he closed the flap behind him. I’d extinguished my lamp already, and now we were in darkness.

“Not bad. You’ve done well for yourself, I’ve heard.”

I could hear his feet and cane stepping around my tent, his hands brushing against my belongings.

“You have a nice place here.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m telling the truth. The air is poisonous in Beijing now. Riding into the mountains with my troops was a revelation. I didn’t know there was anywhere left on this Earth where you could still breathe.”

His hands were in mine now, his fingers interlaced with my own. He stepped forward, and the tips of his boots kissed the ends of my sandals.

I grinned, and let my lips speak his next sentence.

“This is a country,” I said, “where a man can be free.”