Chapter Thirty-Seven Revolution Within the Revolution

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

REVOLUTION WITHIN THE REVOLUTION

In the end, I decide not to seek out Auntie Wei. Since no one involved me in the conception, it’s not my problem. That is Qin Zheng and Yizhi’s baby for all I care.

The idea of going to battle gets easier to stomach, knowing I’ll endure six or seven more at most. Taking down the gods will have to be my best contribution to stopping the war. How it ends will be up to those in the future.

After Yuhuan’s frontier-saving performance in the Plum Blossom Deer, more female pilots debut on the battlefield in their own Chrysalises, drowning out the voices of doubt one by one and alleviating the pressure at the frontiers. Even some female conscripts to the infantry are getting fast-tracked into officers. I thought this was what I wanted, that I’d be vindicated to see women make it into positions of power, yet I can’t stop thinking about the words that may or may not have come from my sister’s lingering spirit: “Only three percent of people have Chrysalis-capable spirit pressures. How does this help the ninety-seven percent of women and girls who don’t?”

I have to face the facts. What has me becoming empress done for the average woman just trying to get by? Does my rise to power mean anything to them beyond a shock and a curiosity, when they can’t replicate what I did?

The revolution is supposed to help them, of course. Everyone can breathe easier with basic levels of food, shelter, education, and health care provided for free. But those are being handled by Qin Zheng’s government, with varying degrees of efficiency and sincerity across Huaxia. If I were still a peasant girl in my village, no matter what inspiring slogans hung in my local government, I’m not sure I’d trust whichever guys are now in charge to not laugh in my face and send me back to my family if I asked for help to start a new life in the city.

Through my lessons with Wan’er, I’ve learned that there are two different types of freedom. Negative freedom is the absence of external interference against doing something, while positive freedom is having the resources to actually do it. Removing the ban on girls going to school doesn’t make a meaningful difference to a mountain peasant with no easy way of getting to one.

Maybe it’s up to me to create the force that would’ve given my past self the resources to be free. If I’m really gone in seven months, I need to leave the women and girls of Huaxia with something more substantial than images of female pilots to look up to.

Inspired by the great public response to my aid tour to typhoon-ravaged villages, plus the long tradition of wives of prominent officials making themselves look good with charity work, I entertain the idea of establishing my own organization: the Phoenix Alliance. If I can find a way to fund it independently of the government, it won’t have to answer to Qin Zheng when it comes to every little thing.

On the advice of Wan’er and Taiping, I start by consolidating a bunch of existing women-centered nonprofits. They serve as the Alliance’s base structure, giving me an idea of how these things work and what kind of support is most urgently needed by which women. Single mothers, old women with no family left, “azure tower women” out of work after Qin Zheng’s militant ban on prostitution, young girls being coerced or rejected by their families for whatever reason. Women trapped with men they wish they could leave.

Once we have some solid plans in place, I record a broadcast announcing the Alliance’s founding. It’s my first formal speech, standing at a podium with the Dragon Head Flag draped on either side of me and everything.

I’m no stranger to studio lights and production crews, but I’ve never talked at length to a camera. Less than five lines into the script Wan’er helped me write, I become wildly thankful that this can be edited before it goes public. I’m suddenly self-conscious of the way I speak. I mean, I always sound eloquent and sophisticated in my head, but apparently that is not true in real life. Even though I can’t hear it myself, everyone says I have a noticeable rural accent. That’s not supposed to matter after the revolution, but still…

I don’t know how Qin Zheng does this live for several hours straight without once stumbling over his words. Practice, I guess. And a tragic lack of people willing to tell him to shut the fuck up.

Despite Wan’er’s encouraging smile beside the cameraman, with every stutter and pause, I grow closer to dragging her into my place. But if I’m to go down in history as a leader, I must master the ability to rally people beyond just shouting slogans. This, as I’ve unfortunately discovered, is what ruling is all about. Speeches and paperwork.

Citing the higher poverty rates women face, the amount of our labor that goes unpaid, the number of us who get abused or killed by those who are supposed to love us, and other harrowing statistics, I call for donations to the Alliance. Using my empress powers to force people to contribute would make it a government action, so the funding has to come voluntarily.

My script ends there. Yet as I stare into the camera, knowing Huaxia’s attention will, for once, be on my words alone instead of a sensationalized moment of me, I keep going. Truths spill like bile out of the depths of my mind. I speak of the way my grandfather used to get drunk and call me and my sister shameful disappointments for coming out as two daughters in a row, products of a weak woman he shouldn’t have let his son marry. I tell of how we were made to clean the house and scrub the family’s laundry from the time we were little, while our brother got to go out and play with friends before coming back to point out the stains we missed. I recount the time our grandmother fell sick and shouted for us and our mother every ten minutes with a new grievance, keeping us up through the night, never content until our father peeled himself away from a cùjū match on his screen for two minutes to bring her a single mug of hot water.

“Sons are more reliable after all,” she remarked.

It feels like emptying myself of lifelong rot, turning myself inside out for the world to see. My gaze strays to Wan’er, who’s standing with her hands clasped before her chest and a wet shine in her alert eyes. I no longer hesitate to confess my darkest impulses—I admit to enlisting as a concubine-pilot explicitly to kill Yang Guang.

“The truth is that he beat my sister Wu Ruyi to death in a fit of rage,” I say, gauntlets pressed against the podium. “A lifetime of caring for others, doing everything asked of her, and this is what she received in return. It made no sense to me. Isn’t following the rules supposed to keep us safe? The only conclusion I could reach was that we, as women and girls, are given the wrong manual at birth. The rules taught to us were never meant to guide us to a good life. We follow them out of some blind hope of being rewarded with the same love and effort we give out, but how has that worked out for our mothers and their mothers before them? How many of them got the devotion they deserved for their sacrifices? Have any of them ever served their way into true respect?”

The flow of my words amazes me as they run free, charging my voice with a power I thought I could feel only when towering over enemies in a Chrysalis. The fury that used to erupt from me as indignant shouts and violent outbursts weaves into smooth rhetoric with surprising ease, now that I understand why the world is the way it is. I didn’t spend months reading all those books with Wan’er for nothing.

“We may stand with our laboring brothers against exploitative profitizers, but even among revolutionaries, there are men who claim to fight wholeheartedly against subjugation, only to become blind to it as soon as women are involved. In the same way that bosses treat workers like dirt, despite needing them to lay every brick and produce every necessity in society, these men attempt to convince women we can’t live without them. Except, in reality, it’s they who can’t exist without us . At some point eons ago they figured out that if they isolate us, withhold resources we need to live, and call us worthless, they can extract all kinds of labor from us without respecting us for it. Yet if being on our knees was natural to us, why would they have to put so much effort into holding us down? The private home was the first institution of ownership, and women were the first class of people to be exploited as servants. We cannot dismantle the old order without dismantling this foundation on which it was based!

“There is an anger I know we all feel, an anger that tells us we deserve more for the work we do. But this anger too often gets unleashed on daughters, daughters-in-law, poorer women, or women from a different people. Targets safe to abuse without much fear of retaliation. This is a cowardly way of finding false relief. There will be no end to our misery unless we aim up at those with true power over us. I took justice into my own hands because the old order wouldn’t give any to my sister, but doing it alone was always a fool’s errand I survived by chance. Only together can we break the powers that so easily destroy us as individuals. For this very purpose, I am forming the Phoenix Alliance. Join me in this revolution within the revolution, and may it set us free. Power to all laboring women! In solidarity we rise!”

I raise my fist in salute.

After several seconds of no one moving, Wan’er says, “Cut!”

She gives a small clap, beaming.

A lungful of breath goes out of me. The production crew snaps out of their daze to join the applause, though their eyes are directed firmly at the ground. I should assemble my own female crew for future speeches. It’s very inconvenient that these men have to work with me without coming near me or meeting my eyes.

The cameraman pulls back from his lens. “Your Highness…Well done, but I’m not sure His Majesty will approve of that last portion.”

Something deflates in my chest at the reminder that, after all I’ve said, no one will hear it unless Qin Zheng decides they can. Because he will always be on guard about what I reveal to the masses.

“Send it to him,” I say. “We’ll see.”

Qin Zheng lets the broadcast air, though not without unsolicited critiques once I arrive in the throne room for the night.

“Rely less on your papers. Relax your shoulders. Vary your cadence. Enunciate. Your efforts improved greatly in the second half, but in the future, do try to…” He trails off when I lie down sideways on my bed in the sheerest night robe I could get my hands on.

Although he’s kept his word to focus on training while in our dream realm, I can tell it pains him to be stuck alone in his quarantine chamber. I have not been above exacerbating his misery. It’s very petty revenge after everything he’s done to me—and probably doesn’t even make sense outside my head—but I do not care.

He clears his throat, eyes flicking everywhere except my body. “Do…try to use rhetoric that’s less divisive of the working class. You have seen that women of the old order elites are some of the revolution’s most fervent opponents. They only bemoan not being able to take part in the exploitation as actively as their male counterparts.”

I don’t bother arguing that this doesn’t mean women’s issues don’t deserve special attention. I’m certainly not counting on him to pay that attention.

“Understood, shīfu ,” I simply say in my sultriest voice while trailing my fingers across the glass between us.

He shuts his eyes and bites his lip. “One of these days…”

“You’ll come over here?” My breath fogs against the glass. “It’s too bad that Your Majesty can only look, not touch.” I run my hand over my hip. “That you can never hold or kiss anyone again for the rest of your life.”

A chuckle rolls from deep in his chest. When he opens his eyes, they’re dark with warning. “Neither can you, my sweet empress.”