Xiaolan's story, Part I
I finally bought Xiaolan’s story and started to read it. It takes some time as my Japanese language skills are still pretty basic, but at least it’s easier for me than the Light Novels as there are furigana so I know how to read unknown kanji. (I still try reading LN 16 as I want to have another perspective as there are scenes who got mistranslated in the past, so now I want to mistranslate them myself. 🤣)
I thought it would be nice to take a closer look at it and perhaps pick up some smaller details that will give us another point of view of the known story.
The “prologue”
My heart broke at this already.
We see this positive and kind girl taking care of her two younger siblings, all of them obviously malnourished. And one day her parents just sell her off out of the blue to those two persons who already took other girls of their village with them.
What made me especially mad was that her mother couldn’t even look her in the eyes when calling her and all she says is that she now has the chance to eat delicious food. And Xiaolan is happy about this perspective although she also starts to realize what all of this means.
She looks at her father receiving a small sack of money from that man and the contrast couldn’t be more stark. Her father malnourished like the rest of the family, thin, shoulders slumped, defeated. The other man overweighed, self-conscious, giving off a superior attitude.
I don't like what the parents did to their daughter, but I can only imagine how desperate one has to be to sell their own daughter so the rest of the family has the chance to live and not to starve to death.
Those people judge that young girl before them, call her infantile and childish. Nevertheless they take her with them, together with three other girls. Xiaolan is the only one of them who doesn’t look like she’s completely done with the world. She sits rather upright and thinks to herself that this is the first time she’s leaving her village. They don’t have a school there and it seems she doesn’t know much about the world outside of her home.
Then the woman explains to her where they will bring her, that this is the place where the princesses are, and that she has to work hard, behave properly, be lively and energetic, because otherwise she would be sent to a brothel like the others. But when she works hard that place where the princesses live would bring her meals and a place to sleep and looking at the alternative I guess this is the better outcome for Xiaolan.
Can you imagine sweet and innocent Xiaolan to be sold off to become a courtesan? Gosh, the idea alone gives me cold shivers. But for that time it was sadly very common, right? Girls and women who couldn’t work properly just would get thrown into the next best brothel to prostitute themselves, or they went there themselves to earn money (like we saw with Zulin's sister) and given her illiteracy I can imagine she would have been forced to sell off her body immediately. 😖
Chapter 1
There is a time skip of a few months. Xiaolan already looks better, she has gained weight and we get a look at her daily life at the rear palace.
She’s still very innocent and kind and there is that one woman who takes advantage of it. That woman feels superior because she can read and it seems like she keeps passing the buck to Xiaolan who takes on all the workload. There is another girl who sees how she does all the work again and wonders why Xiaolan puts up with that behaviour.
This girl is it who tells Xiaolan about the children of the Emperor and that there seems to be some kind of curse because they all die. We also learn that Lihua has given birth to a son and that this boy is supposed to become the next Emperor.
This is something we already heard, right? So now we know where Xiaolan’s knowledge about the children comes from as we only see how she tells Maomao about it.
Speaking of Maomao, of course she’s part of this story, too. We see how Xiaolan and Maomao have lunch together and Maomao shares her fish with Xiaolan.
From their conversation we can tell that we’re in the middle of the first episode right now. Maomao asks her if she has heard of other stories than just the gossip about the Emperor’s children and Xiaolan tells her about that beautiful eunuch who looks like a Heavenly Maiden and turns every woman in squishy puddles. I just love how Maomao is completely unaffected by this news. 😆 (Sorry Jinshi!)
Xiaolan then notices that Maomao’s skirt is torn and wonders if she perhaps got stuck somewhere. Maomao goes along this story and tells her it seems like that but that it’s impossible for her to get a new skirt.
Of course we know Maomao is lying because she used the fabric of her skirt to write the messages to Gyokuyou and Lihua to warn them about the poisonous face powder. We also know that her skirt was sewn when Jinshi finds her, but she didn’t do it herself.
Instead Xiaolan explains to her there is a woman who could sew it for her but apparently her health condition isn’t good (she broke her shoulder or something like that, if I understood it right), so Maomao starts pondering how she could help that woman and then goes into raptures over Luomen and his skills.
Maomao eventually leaves after giving Xiaolan another piece of fabric on which she has written the characters for the numbers from 1 to 10 so Xiaolan could use it to identify flowers and numbers in combination to deliver the laundry to the right place. I love how she already started to teach some things to Xiaolan and that we can see that she used the fabric of her skirt for more than just the messages to the High Consorts.
Next we see Xiaolan delivering laundry to the place of a concubine and that she notices how she ended up being close to Lihua’s palace. And then she hears a desperate scream and knows what all of this means. It starts raining and she runs away while the rain is hiding her tears.
I couldn’t help but wanting to give her a hug. 🥺 She thinks about how it’s always sad when a child dies and her thoughts shift to her siblings, she tells herself that she cannot cry all the time, that she has to work, that she has to live. Because she wants her siblings to have meals to eat and that they can grow up without the next child being sold off.
It just makes me really sad and I want to tell her everything will be fine. We have to keep in mind that the manga tells us she was only 13 years old when her parents sold her to those people. Given the old Chinese system regarding age she was more likely 12 years old at that time. Nevertheless she’s still so positive and gives her all to protect her siblings from having the same fate as she had, tells herself that she has to work even more and harder, that she has to live so her siblings can live as well and won’t die so she wouldn’t have to shed more tears. She gets bullied by some of the women, but she also sees that there are nice girls like Maomao and tries to concentrate on that. And this is a very mature attitude and a contrast to her still very girlish, innocent and sweet character.
I find it fun to pick up little details and to get a bit more background information. I now understand better why she’s so focused on food and is especially happy when Maomao shares treats with her. And we get to know where she picks up the gossip she shares with Maomao. It’s also surprising that Xiaolan was there, right on the other side of the wall to Lihua's palace, when the prince died and heard Lihua’s desperate cry.
What I also found very interesting is the literary style. I haven’t read the manga of AD / Knh in Japanese to compare it to this manga, but I noticed how Xiaolan always “speaks” and “thinks” in hiragana.
The Japanese language has three different kinds of characters they use for writing—hiragana, katakana and kanji. Hiragana are original Japanese characters that are supposed to be an easy form of the more complicated kanji. Katakana are a variation of the hiragana characters that are used for foreign terms. Kanji are the characters that have their origin in the Chinese language.
The easiest characters are obviously hiragana and katakana and this is where everyone starts in school before gradually learning the complicated kanji.
So I think Xiaolan only using hiragana emphasizes her illiteracy and perhaps also her still rather childish and carefree attitude and this is a really interesting style.
Okay, that’s it for now. I’m looking forward to continue with chapter 2!
