Summary
Samuel Pickens, a blue blood from Connecticut's Gold Coast, narrates this tale of obsession, lust and love from his home within the walls of the Forbidden City. Pickens fell in love with his headmaster's daughter, but she tragically died. Visited by her ghost, Pickens had to return her body to China.
Author Notes
Da Chen was a brilliant story teller who wrote about the hardships he suffered as a child growing up in the middle of China's Cultural Revolution. As a child he was forced to watch both his father and grandfather often beaten and stoned in public.
After Mao's death in 1976, Da Chen took the country's college entrance exam, on which he scored among the highest in the country. He was admitted to the prestigious Beijing Language and Culture University; upon graduation he joined the faculty teaching English. Offered a scholarship to Nebraska's Union College, Da Chen arrived in the United States with little more than $30 and a bamboo flute. He supported himself as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant." He then received a scholarship offer from Columbia University in New York City.
Da Chen earned a law degree, then worked as an investment banker on Wall Street. He tried his hand at writing a legal thriller, but was unsuccessful. After his second attempt, his wife suggested he write the stories he'd told his family about his early years in China. The result was "Colors of the Mountain". His other books include Sounds of the River; Brothers: A Novel; Wandering Warrior; and his most recent work, Girl Under a Red Moon.
Da Chen passed away on December 17, 2019 at the age of 57.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Chen's (Brothers) 19th-century tale of obsession explores the line between love and madness. After Samuel Pickens's first love, Annabelle, perishes in a fire a month into their adolescent romance, her spirit stays with him through Yale and beyond, an invisible partner who reigns over him. Later, an adult Pickens acquires a position as tutor to the teenage emperor of China's Qing Dynasty and travels to the country where his beloved spent her childhood. There, he finds a royal palace overrun with corrupt eunuchs and led by a callow and unprepared emperor. Pickens is soon befriended by his effeminate pupil, but the tutor becomes enamored with 13-year-old Empress Qiu Rong, fourth wife of the emperor and Annabelle's doppelganger. Their ensuing perverse love affair is complicated by the schemes of various parties, but together they navigate the traps set for them, seeking assistance from a local warlord and other shady individuals. Steeped in the language and colors of an Asia long gone, this florid, Lolita-esque tale focuses too narrowly on the narrator's lost love and misses its potential to be a sweeping historical epic. Agent: Alex Glass, Trident Media Group. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
A nineteenth-century Yankee blueblood from an upright Connecticut family finds his world upended when he is captivated by an exotically free-spirited young girl. After engaging in a whirlwind affair with Annabelle, a missionary's daughter who had been raised in China, Samuel Pickens is heartbroken when she dies in a tragic accident. Annabelle's spirit torments Samuel and compels him to travel to China, where he works as tutor-advisor to the emperor. Still obsessed by the memory of Annabelle, he falls for her Orientaldoppelganger , Empress Qiu Rong. As Samuel and Q eventually discover, their clandestine romance is only one of many secrets embedded within the labyrinthine walls of the Forbidden City. Chen's lyrical prose enhances and deepens the eerie tone of this atmospheric melodrama.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Nabokov meets Dream of the Red Chamber. Chen (Brothers, 2006, etc.), a Chinese-born writer and now resident of New York's Hudson Valley, has a profoundly developed feel for the sweep of history--though here, unlike in Brothers, he compresses what might have been a saga into 300 pages. His story has an epic feel all the same: Samuel Pickens, a Yankee born into wealth and privilege, falls into head-swooning love with the daughter of a New England missionary who has spent her youth in China. Alas, their young love is fleeting, but events pull Samuel across the ocean and into a web of mystery, not least the fact that, years later, Samuel comes into contact with a young woman in the imperial court who looks very strangely like his lost love. The discovery turns Samuel's world upside down, of course. Chen is a master of suggestion by telling detail: Of the man who teaches Samuel Chinese, for example, he writes, "No one had taught us more with less," while Samuel's plans first come a cropper with a potential employer's being "choked to death by butterflies in his throat"--a neat allusion to Madama Butterfly there, perhaps. Chen sets up the enigma that Samuel must decipher before the first act closes, and though the solution isn't deeply buried, he takes his time in uncovering it elegantly. For those with an eye for such things, Chen also does a nice job of serving up literary erotica of a sort to do Colette proud: "Then she rode with gentleness, as if the horse beneath her was trotting on a soft path; her rosebud breasts heaved and her hair tossed with each motion." A lyrical tale of crossed borders, boundaries and destinies, expertly told.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Author of the best-selling memoir Colors of the Mountain, Da Chen sets the principal action of his latest novel amid the corruption of 19th-century China. The plot gathers momentum when narrator Samuel Pickens leaves New England for China to become the young emperor's chief tutor. Among the emperor's consorts, Pickens encounters Qio Rong, who strongly resembles his teenage lover, Annabelle. Annabelle's ghost has been driving him mad since her tragic death during a youthful tryst. Pickens at first resists his lust for Qio, but their eventual affair places them in opposition to a court dominated by lies, thievery, and murder. Interestingly, the couple seeks protection from a warlord with a surprising connection to Annabelle. VERDICT Da Chen has written a wonderful tale of passionate obsession. Pickens's desire for the youthful Qio won't suit everyone's taste, but the prose is elegantly inviting, and Pickens's insane fixation on reincarnating Annabelle will hold readers' fascination to the end. Recommended.-Faye A. Chadwell, Oregon State Univ. Libs., Corvallis (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
9780307381309|excerpt Chen / THE LAST EMPRESS 1 There was no evidence or early trace of my penchant for the young, the tender, or the ghostly. Every branch of my family tree has been upright and shadowless, even in the afternoon slanting sun. Father worked at the family law firm of Pickens, Pickens & Davis, and he summered on his white yacht off the Connecticut coast with his white-shoed friends who doted over me, my father's only heir, a navy-suited blinking boy with blond eyelashes. Early memories are of standing in a ring of cigar smoke puffed from the admiring mouths of my father's friends, and the manly breath of whiskey amidst slurred New England syllables. Mother, a buxom matriarch, was the fruit of an even taller tree, the linear descendant of Elihu Yale, the founder of the famed college that bore his name. It was never debated what the path of my own life would be: Phillips Andover followed by Yale, then days at the family law firm and evenings at the club. I too would drink whiskey and puff cigars and ogle the help while my bride, a thin blond wisp from a similarly upstanding family, would look the other way. It was the path that my father had followed and his father before him, and who was I to veer from it? It started so innocently while I was still at prep school, culminating in my maiden encounter with one ripened maiden. Mrs. D was the barren wife of the stiff-necked librarian. She idled her days away in the New England sun, devouring forbidden romance novels while her poodle, a big-snouted pooch, licked between her stockinged thighs. She had the dazed look of disillusion, her hazel eyes full of anguish and unknowable pain, which the entire campus unanimously blamed on her childless state. Mr. D had the look of a seedless man, pale and thin, without a boisterous moustache or prickly chest hair, as seen on occasion during his reluctant and awkward participation in the faculty cricket games. Just as surely, gossip posited that she could be the culprit, for she had the docility of a guilty mute. They both could be conspirators in the childless game, each as barren as the other, or they both could be endowed with potential to bear, but the fire of lust had never been lit or lit rightly in their cold, separate bedrooms. It was a longstanding uncurriculumed subject that every Phillipian dabbled in during the last drowsy minutes before sleep stole our souls after the lights were shut. I felt a certain stir whenever the word barren was mentioned in the same breath with the sullen Mrs. D. Her hair, not always neat, had an occasional strand falling over the bridge of her nose, fringing her often parted lips. Her hips were wide with the sacrificial openness of a fertile woman. How could anyone blame her for anything? My heart still thumps at the memory of the first touch of her trembling hand. It was my first Thanksgiving spent at school, away from the snowfall of Connecticut. The silence of the campus was deafening. Mr. D had gone to the mountain to hunt deer, leaving Mrs. D all alone in the company of an empty house. My duty that afternoon was to dust the small collection of toy yachts, canvas sails, and bamboo masts encased in the draped library of Mr. D's home. I arrived to find Mrs. D just awoken from a nap, lying starfished on a couch, book at her bosom, legs apart. The pooch wasn't around, though its stench hung thin in the air. Mrs. D greeted me, cupping my face with her soft hands. I melted like a snowman in the sun, burying my face in the valley of her bosom. Her breasts were firm, her buttocks soft. She swayed to the crazed crawling of my fingers, her breath whiskied like the summered memory of my father's white yacht. In a blur of scenes--birds flying, windowpanes reflecting, pooch sniffing somewhere in the corner of the house, my mast tenting--she whispered her dearing words, and I felt the warmth of her hand hungering over my sword. Silky stockings ripped and I plowed blindly in the mud of her. Oh, that long ago Thanksgiving Day, that woe of my youth. We mated a few more times under the veil of Mr. D's suspicion till we could bear the suspense no more--I faced expulsion, and she the foreseeable loss of Mr. D's vocation, but the memory of her came to form the basis of my youthful arousal. Parted lips, loose strands of hair hanging over the face, an empty house, a cold sky laden with the angst of oncoming snow, and my heart would ache as it ached that dreary day, and my groins would burn with the flame of that afternoon. I often plotted trespassing the ivied residence of Mrs. D again, impinging upon her shaded vulnerability and unearthing her muffled screams that she stifled under bookish breath. We came close only one last time at a pompous school event whereby all wives of the academic faculty were demanded at the angular dining table for the benefactors of the school, the elder Pickens included. I sat three heads and a table corner from Mrs. D and watched her chew her London broil. I smiled at her with code of our love, but she avoided my gaze. A ball ensued. Old chaps of the school borrowed the young wives of others to hold in their arms, and I got to whirl her around the room in the guise of a waltz. She stayed silent with sullen face and begged me to stop halfway around the ballroom. Leaning on my shoulder with the world swaying on tiptoes, she uttered the three most horrifying words: "I am pregnant!" I nearly let her fall out of my hand. I held my breath for the next three long and dying seconds until I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard the congenial Mr. D whisper, "Let me take over." Was it relief or burden that I felt? I could not tell--the ring of her words still echoed in my ear. I swiped two tall glasses of some liquor from the dark corner of the ballroom, downed them, and rushed back to my dormitory. This must be my punishment from God: fathering a bundle of sin. What would she do with him or her, the little me? After a long week of fearing, the campus was suddenly abuzz with news of Mr. D's departure. Mrs. D's pregnancy had fulfilled a longstanding clause in his late uncle's will, a liquor dealer from Boston, bequeathing him, the only living heir of the Ds, a minority stake in a brewery on the condition that D produce an heir of his own blood and flesh. The Ds rushed off rather unceremoniously, and I have lived in cloudy ambiguity ever since. For weeks after their departure, I was haunted by nightmares; each time, I woke up sweating and panting. Headmaster Herbert had called Father twice with mild compliments of my sporting verve but expressed concern over my general well-being. My eyes were circled with dark rims, and I was dispirited in religious assembly. A school nurse, after checking my pulse, scraped the moss from my tongue, tapped my echoing ribs with her knowing but misguided knuckles, and declared me a slight case of depression that a home visit and some sun should dispel. But it was the uninduced confession from another virile classmate of mine, one Samuel Polk III, the son of a mean-spirited financier, that cleared my guilt in toto. One insipid Sunday afternoon after I had scorched my throat with much hymnal singing, Sam Polk strolled with me along a patch of lawn near the school chapel that afforded a slice of Mrs. D's former garden. The dreary day produced a dreary chat, and soon the New York boy was regaling me with his ventures with Lower East Side foreign whores whom he described as not only good with their craft but with their tongues. "Got it, Pickens?" He chuckled at his own wit. "But you know, Pickens. I had more fun and less trouble right there behind those hedges." He pointed his toe at Mrs. D's garden. "You what?" I sputtered. "I had my way three times with that barren Mrs. D. Only made two trips to her house; the other time, I had her behind the hedge before it was trimmed and the leaves cleared." I nearly choked the boy with my own hands. I was let out of the jail of burden and breathed the fresh air of a sonless youth, but in that freedom I yearned for her--the hedge, the garden, the white house, the possibility that she would forever gaze at her child's face and think of me. Excerpted from My Last Empress: A Novel by Da Chen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.