A Song to Drown Rivers

by Ann Liang

She just nodded, her gaze still on the river. It was not the reaction a normal child would have to pain. Then again, perhaps there could be no normal children raised in an age of war.

People always prefer the beauty who is oblivious, unaware of her own power, who blushes easily and is taken aback by strangers’ approval, who is soft and demure and lacking in just enough confidence so as to seek it out in the opinions of men. But these are such lies.

One could live with almost anything, so long as they had something to live for.

“We are most tempted by what we cannot have. Men will dream of the mountains they have yet to scale, the rivers they have yet to set sail upon, the plains they have yet to conquer. They are told from birth everything belongs to them, and so when something does not, they view it as a personal challenge.” I thought about it longer. “But also, from a distance, everything looks more beautiful; we are better able to conjure our own fantasies about them. Sometimes the fragrance of a feast is better than the taste itself.”

“The heart is a fickle thing; it takes and takes. It is easily swayed, and tempted, and made weak. Too many have fallen victims to their own irrational desires. But the mind—the mind is dependable, accurate, deadly. It destroys the enemy, not the self, and ensures that we do what we need to, not what we want.”

But of course I did not correct him. When men say they want a lover, what they often mean is they want a mirror; they wish to see themselves reflected back at them in the best light.

They must have been from noble families; only the wealthy could show such joyous carelessness in an age of war and instability. They assumed their money protected them from everything. The ultimate injustice was that sometimes it did.

“I have always believed that knowing when to yield is even more important than winning.

One cannot save the world and live in peace. That’s not how these things work.”

These were the rules that shaped our lives from when we were born: Be beautiful, be charming, be the most coveted girl in the room, or else you will be nothing. For men, it was so easy; the path to power was so direct. But we had to manipulate and maneuver and claw our way to gain half of what they did.

How many women throughout history were blamed for the weaknesses of men? We made such convenient scapegoats. We were raised to be small, to be silent, to take whatever we were given and no more.

But were there good things? Of course. Even when life was terrible, there was still my mother’s comfort, my father’s presence, Zhengdan’s ringing laughter, the budding peonies and the flowing river.

Fuchai was meant to be the problem, his downfall the one solution. But now he was gone, and the world remained the same.

“The kingdom will soon forget about her and move on, but I will not. They have swapped one king for another, but this—this is real life.” She motioned to the food, the tables, the villagers. “The men will fight for their thrones and their power and their legacies, but to them we are nothing more than crickets and ants, insignificant, expendable. We will continue to worry over the rice and soy sauce and oil, three meals a day, how to escape the cold in the winter and the heat in the high summer, the holes in the roof and the bedding and the taxes. What does it matter who wears the crown, if they will not change any of this for us?”

“He was not killed by the Wu,” she said harshly. “He was killed by the war. By the will of kings.”

But King Goujian is not the answer to peace. None of them are. So long as we continue to put mortal men on thrones and hail them as gods, sacrifice our lives to their legacies, history will repeat itself. Just as the ocean tides ebb and flow beneath the moon, empires will rise and collapse, wars will start and cease, and the rest of us will be left to struggle against the currents.