The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 9 - Chapter 7

Chapter 7: Taboo

The next day, the library at the freak strategist’s house had been conscientiously cleaned up. The carpet was back in place, the bookshelves were where they belonged. If anything was different, it was only that the faded carpet had been replaced with a new one.

“Master Lahan told one of the servants to clean things up,” En’en reported.

“Is that right?” Maomao said with relief. She’d left immediately after the events of the previous day and had felt bad leaving Yao and En’en to un-tear the room apart.

“I did indeed, and the least you could do is be grateful, Little Sister,” said someone to whom she very much did not wish to be grateful. He was presently sitting in a chair.

“What the hell are you even doing here?” Maomao asked.

“What a way to talk! With my honored father away, I’m in charge of this household.”

“In other words, you’ve got plenty of time on your hands. Is my father coming or what?”

“Maomao, watch your tone,” En’en said. Yao was already seated and waiting eagerly.

Luomen arrived, announced by the tapping of his cane on the floor. As he entered the library, he thanked the servant who was aiding him.

En’en closed the door. The windows were shut as well; candles had been set out for light, and filled the room not just with illumination but also a sweet smell of honey.

I’m not too keen on using fire in a library... Maomao would make sure to put the candles out and change the air in the room the moment this conversation was over.

She pulled out a chair for Luomen. “Thank you,” he said, but he looked troubled. It probably had to do with the book sitting on the table.

“You don’t mind if I’m here, Granduncle?” Lahan asked.

“You might wish to reconsider where you stick your neck, Lahan,” said Luomen.

“I take your point, but I’d like to be aware of what’s going on in my house. It’s not my style to duck responsibility by saying I didn’t know.”

In some respects, Lahan had a personality the polar opposite of Maomao’s. Perhaps he was simply confident that he would be able to handle any problems that arose from his approach.

“Are we right? Is this Kada’s Book?” Yao asked, rising and propping up the sheepskin tome.

“Yes... I compiled it while I was studying in the west.”

Yao’s face tightened. En’en remained impassive, and Lahan, if anything, looked downright intrigued.

“Did you also make these illustrations, then, Master Luomen?” Yao asked. She flipped the pages, showing the depictions of open human bodies.

“I did. I drew those illustrations, and I did the dissections as well.”

At the word dissections, Yao’s face got even stiffer. Human dissection was not many people’s idea of a good time. Desecrating a dead body was considered immoral, and was forbidden.

“Were they...criminals?” Yao asked.

Luomen shook his head sadly. He stood up and turned to the last page of the book, where there was a picture of a woman. She appeared to be a foreigner; her hair billowed, and her light skin tone was depicted in delicate brushstrokes. Her internal organs were drawn in a realistic fashion, but her face bore the stylized, serene expression of a bodhisattva. There were ink stains here and there; this page was noticeably less clean than the others.

“The land to the west knows much that we do not, and there is a great deal we can learn from them. But it doesn’t mean that everything they do is right. I often saw them mete out punishment to people who had committed no crime.” There was grief in Luomen’s eyes; he seemed to be gazing into the past. “This woman was said to be a witch. To test whether the accusation was true, they tied her to a boulder and threw her in the water, where she sank.”

Maomao shivered.

Luomen didn’t speak much of the time he had spent studying beyond Li’s borders. When he did, it was chiefly to share stories of injuries and illnesses he had encountered.

“If she didn’t float to the surface, it would prove she wasn’t a witch. If she did, it would show that she was a witch, and they would burn her alive. They determined that the woman was no witch, but it didn’t put the breath back in her lungs.”

Yao was pale and her hands shook. She seemed to be debating whether to plug her ears, feeling that she had to listen but not wanting to hear.

En’en asked the question that was on all their minds. “These witches... Are they criminals?”

“No. They might have been adherents of a different faith. So-called heretics. Students of medicine. Sometimes wandering commoners were treated as witches too. In that sense, perhaps I was one of them.” Luomen closed the book, his fingers brushing the word witchcraft on the cover. “She understood why they would accuse her of being a witch. She was the one who taught me the ways of western medicine. She asked me herself to use her for dissection when she died. For the advancement of medicine, she would offer up her own body...” There was the slightest tremor in Luomen’s voice. “Because of her, I was able to save the Empress Dowager and her child.”

The Empress Dowager had become pregnant too young, and hadn’t been able to deliver her child—they had had to cut her belly open.

Yao struck the table with a still-trembling hand. “Then you abandoned your own teacher, Master Luomen?! That’s horrible!”

There was a charge in the air. Luomen didn’t deny it. En’en stayed silent as well.

“No—” Maomao began, but she was interrupted by none other than Lahan.

“I believe my granduncle did the right thing,” he said. “Consider the factors at play. If the woman fled, it would mean she was a witch. If she was rescued, it would show she was a witch. And the one who rescued her—just an itinerant scholar come to their land to ‘learn.’ Witch material, no question. Even if this was back before Granduncle was castrated, what could he have done all by himself? You seem to be imagining something out of a picture book. One man against the world, riding in to rescue the captured princess and defeat the evildoers, and they all live happily ever after. Is that what you’ve got in mind? That’s not what would have happened. The only thing that would have been different is that there would have been two corpses instead of one.”

“But... But...” Yao understood intellectually, but emotionally it was hard to process.

Maomao reached for the book, trying to open to that last page again, but Luomen kept his hand on the cover, holding it shut. “That’s right,” he said, “I was powerless. My teacher would do anything in order to save people. She would dress as a man to attend convocations of doctors, participate in the dissection of criminals. Some people she was able to help, but there were other lives she couldn’t save. She was always asking what more she could do, and she begrudged no answer. The very day before she was arrested as a witch, she was summoned as a physician. She went to the next town to help an injured child, and someone there claimed her methods were unnatural. Her accuser was a woman who was herself suspected of being a witch. To prove her innocence, she offered up my teacher as a sacrifice.”

The story might have seemed like a digression, but Maomao saw what Luomen was trying to say. Two things, in fact. First, that dissection might be anathema, but it was a way to save lives. Second, that heresy would be persecuted.

Kada’s Book, the one my father speaks of, is heretical, but it’s not evil. Yet people insist on equating the two.

When he told them to take up Kada’s Book, he meant that they had to accept the “deviant” practices within it, yes, but also that they must take in that they themselves would step outside the accepted ways of their society.

Women had little status in Li. They couldn’t become doctors, and if they somehow got involved with a dissection, there was no telling how they might be treated. Luomen was worried, not only for Maomao’s future, but Yao’s and En’en’s as well.

En’en’s expression was hard to read. She’d said she would abide by Yao’s choice, but Luomen’s story appeared to shake her deeply. Yao was equally troubled. As for Maomao, she already knew what she had to do.

“Right! Granduncle, a question,” Lahan said, thrusting his hand in the air hard enough to cut the tension in the room. Maomao would have liked to chase those spectacles and that tousled hair right out. “Was this autopsy the reason you came back from your travels?”

“Yes, it was. I dug up her grave and dissected her, and when I attempted to return her to her resting place, I was discovered and nearly killed. If a fellow student hadn’t helped me, I would probably be at the bottom of a river by now. My friend stole a horse and saw me safely to the estate of a merchant with ties to Li. That’s how I survived.”

It turned out Luomen could be quite brave sometimes.

“This friend of yours. Would it be Dr. Liu?” En’en asked.

“I must say... I’ve caused Dr. Liu quite a lot of trouble over the years.”

Dr. Liu! Maomao could picture the physician’s careworn face. She’d always known he was hard on her because she was related to Luomen, an understanding that was now reinforced.

“Another question, if I may,” En’en said. “If I’m not mistaken, Li’s laws only permit the dissection of executed criminals. Yet you make it sound like Dr. Liu has experience with dissections himself.” She sounded like she was choosing her words carefully. To Maomao, it seemed she was already mostly sure about this—but wanted to ask just the same.

“I can say nothing of what’s to come after this. But let me ask: If you are gifted at needlework, does that mean you can sew human skin the first time you’re called upon to do so? Could you cut human flesh as readily as you slice into a fish in the kitchen?”

The answer, of course, was no. En’en perhaps found the questions foolish; she went quiet.

There was a long moment in which none of them spoke. Lahan broke the silence.

“Perhaps a doctor ought to do at least a little dissection, hm? We know for a fact that my granduncle’s experience in such things enabled him to save the Empress Dowager and her child. Naturally, that’s unlikely to be the last time a member of the Imperial family finds themselves in dire straits—ill or injured.”

Maomao wanted to yell at him to shut up, but she had a question of her own that she wanted to ask, so she kept her peace. An injured member of the royal family, huh? It reminded her of something she very much wished not to remember.

Luomen looked troubled again. “I think this requires another story,” he said. Maomao well knew that stories sometimes took detours. “Long, long ago, there was a physician named Kada. Not the Kada of legend, but a real doctor of unparalleled skill. His name came from both his gift for medicine and a distant connection to the Imperial bloodline.”

Was this one of the things that had inspired Luomen to call this text “Kada’s Book”?

“And what happened to him?” En’en asked.

“He did many dissections, or so it’s said, in the interests of medicine. He wasn’t afraid to use his authority as a member of the Imperial family, however marginal, in order to further his work. He didn’t limit himself to criminals; he collected the corpses of any people who had died of unusual illnesses. He trusted to his abilities and his conviction that what he was doing was right.”

Luomen continued. “But he made one miscalculation. Among the bodies he gathered was that of a young prince—the son of the reigning monarch and the apple of his father’s eye. The prince had died young of a mysterious illness.”

Most of the people around the table were quick to see the implications of whatever they were told—only Yao looked like she was having trouble keeping up.

The remains of members of the Imperial family were supposed to stay in the mausoleum for a year after death. It was only too clear the emperor would be furious to discover that Kada had not only spirited the body from its resting place, but then dissected it.

“Kada was expelled from the royal family and executed. His real name wasn’t left to posterity, and even the physician of legend was called Genka from that time forward. Every scroll, every note Kada had made was burned, and doctors were forbidden from practicing dissection. Considering the emperor’s state of mind at the time, I doubt anyone dared to object.”

In those days, it was forbidden even to speak the name Kada.

“Thus this man was wiped out of history—except among physicians themselves, who continue to talk of him and tell each other his story. His actions were the salvation of many patients. But he was neither a god nor an immortal, just a human like you or me.”

Luomen, Maomao saw, was praising the great deeds of this nameless doctor while at the same time censuring his arrogance. “Did that cause medical methods to become dramatically more crude?” she asked, careful to take a polite tone so En’en wouldn’t get upset.

“Very much so. Otherwise, we might have saved the former emperor’s honored siblings. People whisper that the former empress dowager had them assassinated, but we have written records indicating that in fact it was tuberculosis.”

Tuberculosis? Maomao was surprised; she’d heard only that the brothers had died of a spreading sickness. Tuberculosis was notably deadly, yes, but for it to have killed all of the former emperor’s brothers—treatment must’ve been abominably delayed.

Either they failed to isolate the first patient, or they mistakenly thought it was just a cold.

She’d always assumed it was a matter of bloodline that had prevented the former emperor from catching the illness, but perhaps it was because he’d spent so much of his time apart from the other princes. She’d heard that his mother, the one often called the empress regnant, had been one of the lower consorts.

“When study is neglected, there is no limit to how low a discipline can sink. I went to study in the west because the former empress dowager was alarmed by the paucity of medical knowledge we possessed.”

I’m sure she hoped her own son wouldn’t succumb to some illness.

“Much as she liked to make revolutionary changes, though, Kada still made it impossible for her to openly reverse the ban on dissections. I suppose she understood the feelings of a parent whose child had been so deeply disrespected.”

She couldn’t openly change the laws. That was the key: behind closed doors, in secret, doctors were conducting autopsies even now for the advancement of medicine.

“Perhaps we could conclude this conversation here?” Luomen looked at each of them as if it were a genuine question.

Yao didn’t answer.

“Yes, sir,” said En’en, still bothered but drained.

“Very well,” Maomao said, more firmly. There were still so many things she wanted to know, but Luomen looked like he was done answering questions.

“Hmm. So that’s the story,” said Lahan. He had begun this conversation as a third wheel and ended it sounding no more involved.

“If you don’t make this decision, then I urge you to forget everything you heard here today. You’ll be happiest that way,” said Luomen, still conscientious enough to leave them a way out. He trusted that Yao, En’en, and even Lahan would keep the secret to themselves. “I’ll be going back, then. Is there a carriage, Lahan?”

“I’ll have one made ready immediately.”

Luomen tucked the book gingerly among the folds of his robes. “This can’t stay here anymore,” he said, and then made to leave the library, his cane tapping on the ground. Maomao took a handkerchief from her own robes and handed it to him.

“You can’t leave a book that valuable just hanging out there. Someone will steal it,” she said, quietly enough that En’en wouldn’t hear her.

“True, true. Thank you; I’ll be careful.”

She watched him go, the tapping of his cane the only sound. She could have excused herself to see him safely to his carriage, but Lahan went with him, so Maomao elected to stay. She was more concerned about the other two in the library at that moment.

I’m hungry, she thought. The sun was high in the sky by now, but En’en showed no sign of preparing a meal, so Maomao resigned herself to doing some cooking.

“All right, food’s ready,” Maomao said. They’d been making buns in the main kitchen, and she’d induced them to share some ingredients with her. She’d added meat filling to turn them into proper dumplings—and she hadn’t done a bad job of it, if she said so herself. She could have stopped there, but there had been some other interesting ingredients around, so she’d decided to make one more dish too.

Now she stood in front of the other two women, neither of whom seemed to have much appetite, holding the dumplings and something they’d never seen before.

Yao was the first to react. “What’s that?”

“Perhaps we could call it basi hongshu—silk-reeling sweet potatoes,” Maomao replied. In other words, sweet potatoes with a starchy sauce over them. She’d diced the sweet potatoes, peels and all, fried them in oil, and then covered them in starch syrup.

“There seem to be a lot of sweet potatoes in this household. It’s practically a staple food around here,” En’en said.

“I have a relative who’s a potato farmer,” Maomao said. Specifically, Lahan’s biological father.

“I thought I’d been seeing a lot of them in the marketplace. I wonder if Master Lahan is putting them out there.”

“Huh! Basi, is it?” Yao took a piece of potato in her chopsticks. She seemed amused by the way it trailed long threads of starch syrup after it. It looked like Maomao had successfully distracted her.

“They’ll go cold if we don’t eat them. How about we get started?” Maomao took one of the buns from the steamer and took a big bite.

“Here, Lady Yao, use this.” En’en handed Yao a dampened handkerchief. Yao took it, wiped her hands, then picked up a bun.

“It’s good, but I feel like it’s missing something,” she said.

“Please don’t compare my cooking to En’en’s.”

“It’s a very good effort for a layperson, Lady Yao.” Even En’en’s remark was, well, a little bit rude.

I mean, I am a layperson.

Maomao had hoped that the food would provide a bit of conversational lubricant, but the talk never came; they ate in silence. En’en seemed even more shocked by the earlier discussion than Yao.

What would she do if her precious young lady took up dissection?

En’en, Maomao knew, always thought of Yao first and foremost. For the time being she batted away every man who got close like a pesky bug, but one day her thoughts would turn to Yao’s marriage.

I can see it now.

If some lordling appeared who could weather En’en’s gauntlet, Yao would probably be perfectly honest with him about her work—but even a man enlightened enough to accept a woman working would likely struggle to accept the idea of her doing dissections.

Besides, we can’t have her blabbing about the physicians’ secrets.

There was also the question of how long she could continue to be attached to the medical office as a court lady. Newly created posts often vanished again within a few years.

Lot of obstacles ahead, Maomao thought. There were challenges in store for her as well—but she was who she was. As long as she had medicinal ingredients and sick people, she would stubborn her way through.

The three of them were still munching away when the door opened. “Having a snack without me? Now, that’s not fair.” Tousle-glasses was back. Lahan helped himself to the empty seat as if it were the most natural thing in the world and grabbed one of the remaining dumplings.

“Hrm. It’s missing something.”

“Keep it to yourself.”

Why was everyone here so obsessed with flavor?

The sweet potatoes seemed to be received favorably; no one criticized them. En’en’s throat must have been dry, however, for she took a sip of tea. “What are your feelings, Master Lahan?” she asked as she set down her cup.

“My feelings on what?”

“What Master Luomen talked about. To put a finer point on it, I’d like to know what you think about young ladies receiving an education equivalent to a physician’s.”

“Do you want to know what I think, or what people will think?”

“Both, if possible.”

Lahan looked at the ceiling and mulled it over. “As far as dissection goes, I believe it’s necessary. If you fail to move forward, that’s the very definition of stagnation. Water that doesn’t flow begins to rot.” A notably progressive viewpoint. “However, making such a practice public at this moment would invite persecution. People fear the unorthodox and they hate minorities. If you want a nice, quiet life, I would suggest quitting this harebrained practice of involving yourself with the medical staff immediately.”

“I thought you at least would be above such things, Master Lahan! So you believe women should stay at home, then?!” Yao jumped to her feet, incensed. The table shook, and Maomao grabbed the teacups to steady them. “I thought you would judge people on their merits—not their sex!”

“Lady Yao,” En’en said placatingly.

Lahan, for his part, wasn’t bothered. “You’re correct: it’s more difficult for a woman to work than a man. A man can’t bear children—although he can raise them.”

That’s stating the obvious.

Men and women were biologically different, and the roles they took on were likewise different.

“It’s fundamentally not possible for men and women to do the same work. I recognize, however, that there are a great many women of exceptional abilities out there.”

“Then why would you tell them to stay at home?!”

“You haven’t heard all I have to say yet. If you’d be so kind. I believe I prefaced my remark by saying that this was if you want a nice, quiet life. Men and women are not and cannot be on equal terms in the workplace—non-business-related burdens inevitably fall more heavily upon women. If you’re both going to walk down the same road, and one of you is in shackles, then you’ll need something to help you make up the difference: vastly greater knowledge, or physical strength, something. You’ll need more simply to stand on the same ground.”

“That’s right.”

“You already understand, then. Being a doctor is considered demanding work even among men. For a woman to enter that field, she would need much ability and more conviction. Meaning that if your decision can be swayed one way or the other by my opinion, then I think you had better quit and go home.”

Lahan was usually so decorous around women—but when he decided to speak his mind, he certainly did so. Yao and En’en sat frozen.

“I’m in favor of women being allowed to do the same work as men. Yet not every woman can or should go into the working world. Anyway, our society as it stands isn’t very welcoming to working women. There are plenty of incompetent men out there—and women too. Even within a given group there are individual differences, so there’s no way everyone is going to be able to work when they’re already shackled. If you think it sounds too difficult, if you don’t think you can hack it, then isn’t it logical to suggest you should find something else to do with your life?”

Maomao actually found herself agreeing with Lahan, but with Yao there, she decided not to nod openly.

“To hear it from you, Yao,” he went on, “one might believe that going to work is the one true path, and looking after the household is pointless and insignificant. But I think that itself might be a mistake. One often witnesses hardworking officials at a drinking party deride their wives as useless, yet more often than not, they’re actually in the palms of their ladies’ hands. The higher you rise in the world, the more you need class. Clothes, as they say, make the man. Yes, there are exceptions. Of course. A man without any distinguishing talents, however, needs to look good instead, and the less talent he has, the better he needs to look. So his wife puts together an ensemble, puts his shoes on for him, and sends him out the door. If anything, I think you may be a bit too contemptuous of women who can’t or don’t enter the workforce, but stay at home.”

We won’t say exactly who he had in mind when he spoke of exceptions. Yao’s mouth worked like she wanted to say something, but she couldn’t respond.

“My mother was chosen by my grandfather to be my father’s bride. Pride she has in spades. Any tasteful furniture you see left around here, she paid for out of her own pocket, with the last of her financial resources. What grieved her more than anything when she was chased out of this household was that she would no longer get to enjoy the sparkling life of the capital. You might think at first glance that she had no redeeming qualities, but she had good taste. When furnishings from this household were sold off, many of them fetched nearly the same price they had new—some of them had even appreciated! If I’d been a little more clever at the time, I might have found some other means of employment for my mother rather than letting her be shuffled off to the countryside. She would have been much more successful as the wife of a merchant—or as a merchant herself—than married off to a homespun man of the La family. Although to be fair, my mother is much too strong-willed a person to have entered merchantry, or to have ever consented to marrying a mere businessman.”

Lahan had turned quite voluble, yet somehow nothing he said caused Maomao to want to jump in with a sarcastic interjection.

“What exactly are you getting at, Master Lahan?” En’en asked.

“Hah, I’ve been a little too roundabout. My point is simply that I’ve become rather stubborn myself, and hate to see capable people embarking on a path that doesn’t suit their talents. It’s very inefficient, and not beautiful. Both of you are talented, so whether you work in the public eye or offer support from the wings, I’m sure you’ll do well. Whether you’ll achieve mastery is another question. To see someone pursue what they really want, though—questions of efficiency aside, the passion itself makes the pursuit beautiful.”

In sum, for Lahan, the matter seemed to come down to whether or not it agreed with his aesthetics.

He sipped some tea, then rose from his seat looking quite pleased with himself. “If you don’t mind, I’ll excuse myself now.” He wiped his glasses and promptly made his exit.

Maomao rested her chin on her hands and watched him go. No one scolded her for her uncouth behavior—En’en was looking at the ground. Yao, though, was staring straight ahead; she offered Lahan’s departing form a small bow.

I see. She thought she saw which of them Lahan had really been expounding to. How very thoughtful of him.

Maomao knew what she was going to do, no matter what answer Yao or En’en gave Luomen. She had no right to intervene in their lives, whatever path they chose.

She took the remaining piece of potato, which sat untouched, and ate it up, then drank the last of her tea.