To Embers We Return — Chapter 35
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Now that she had some idea of what Bian Jin’s tactility scores were, Shen Ni stood at the workbench, seemingly lost in thought. Her palm wandered downwards. Without her consciously meaning to, it glided over Bian Jin’s right hand, which was clutching tightly at the edge of the worktop.
Bian Jin happened to open her eyes at that very moment, just in time for her liquid gaze to fall on Shen Ni’s hovering palm.
Shen Ni’s hand was a classic machinist’s hand. It had repaired thousands upon thousands of machines, devices and implants, and saved just as many lives. The tips of her fingers were lightly callused and a little work-roughened, but this did not mar their beauty. They were long and shapely, the joints well-defined.
At this moment, Shen Ni’s palm was half-spread, her fingers slightly curved, as if she were on the verge of reaching down and crushing Bian Jin’s hand in hers.
Shen Ni’s palm scanner flashed white. Out of the corner of her eye, Shen Ni could see that Bian Jin’s tactility score had shot up again to two hundred and fifty-four. She realised then that she’d unwittingly run the scanner over Bian Jin’s supposedly ‘sensitive’ right hand, and that the tactility score that had yielded was even higher than the ones from her face and neck. It was, in fact, almost as high as the scores Shen Ni’s clinical subjects had recorded during love-making.
Well. This was unexpected.
Bian Jin’s fingertips throbbed with something akin to an electric shock. She let out an urgent, repressed moan, her voice trailing off into a broken murmur. The force of the sensation sent her body tilting forward.
Fearing that Bian Jin would slip completely off the workbench, Shen Ni raised herself immediately on tiptoe and flung both arms around Bian Jin, holding her close. No matter how high this would send Bian Jin’s tactility score rocketing, it was still better than her falling off her perch and injuring herself.
Shen Ni propped up Bian Jin’s slender back with her right hand and steadied Bian Jin’s waist with her left, her fingers pressing against her shijie’s hot, silken skin through her coveralls.
Shen Ni’s scent engulfed every single one of Bian Jin’s senses. Her chin was tilted upward by the angle of Shen Ni’s shoulder. She compressed her lips, trying to hold back the sensations that threatened to overwhelm her. Her brows knotted tightly together, a faint yet obstinate line forming between them. Her knees, which had been pressed up against Shen Ni’s hips, parted under the force of Shen Ni’s sudden embrace.
Bian Jin’s heart began racing uncontrollably. She felt suddenly very exposed; the place between her legs felt shamefully hollow. She tried to bring her knees back together, but Shen Ni was standing between them, making that impossible. The insides of her thighs were burning with a fierce need to be touched; reflexively, she found herself rubbing them against Shen Ni’s hips.
‘Shijie, is that too much?’
Shen Ni’s voice wound its way into her ears — already flushed blood-red — and into her overheated consciousness, which was sinking rapidly under the weight of her desire. Those clear, melodious tones lifted her mind back to momentary lucidity. She realised then that not only had she nestled deeper into Shen Ni’s embrace, she was also clutching desperately at Shen Ni’s back. She realised, too, that she was rubbing herself against Shen Ni, her legs tangled around Shen Ni as if in invitation.
Bian Jin immediately went still. But her tactility score had already leapt even further upwards, to two hundred and eighty-one.
Shen Ni’s gaze lingered on the figure on the screen. To her shijie, this simple embrace felt as intense as the most heated throes of love-making. Bian Jin was trembling in her arms, and she could sense a wet heat through the thin material of Bian Jin’s coveralls.
‘I can give you some relief,’ Shen Ni said. Unable to bear the sight of her shijie’s suffering, she made the same soothing movement Bian Jin had always used on her when she’d been a child. She put her hand at the base of Bian Jin’s spine and ran it gently up her back, hoping to take the edge off the tension Bian Jin was feeling.
‘Don’t,’ came Bian Jin’s voice. She was leaning her forehead limply against Shen Ni’s shoulder. The caress had left her quivering and wet, like a dew-soaked flower. With a gasp, she seized hold of Shen Ni’s arm, stopping her mid-motion.
‘You don’t want this?’ Shen Ni tone held only gentle enquiry, though there was a hint of disappointment in her eyes.
Bian Jin was silent for a good long while, trying to collect herself. When she finally spoke, her ears were still as brilliantly red as before, and she still felt that molten ache at her core. ‘Don’t…’ she breathed again.
‘But,’ Shen Ni went on, with a sly glance at the glowing white numbers on the screen. She did not remove her hand from Bian Jin’s back. ‘Your tactility score has dropped, which means it worked.’
Bian Jin said nothing.
Shen Ni carried on, cajoling her patiently. ‘The more I try not to touch you, the more difficult it is for you to bear. Once I do put my hands on you, you’ll find those sensations beginning to settle down. This is how we began the process of desensitisation, shijie.’
Still Bian Jin said nothing. Her hand was still wrapped firmly around Shen Ni’s wrist. Shen Ni’s hands were dangerous indeed, she thought, the way they could so easily rouse such tempests of feeling within her. Her red-rimmed eyes tilted backwards, towards the screen that hung behind her. She’d been brought to the edge of her self-control again and again by those wet, hot waves of sensation that left her feeling deliciously weak; she fully expected her tactility score to have risen to some absurdly high level. To her surprise, however, she saw that it had fallen slightly, just as Shen Ni had said, and now hovered at two hundred and sixty-three.
It was hardly Bian Jin’s fault that she was so sensitive to Shen Ni’s touch. Even had Ni’s Heart not been implanted in her body, even without the mystical resonance that now bound her and Shen Ni together, she was still completely unaccustomed to the kind of caress that Shen Ni had just given her. The type of physical contact she was most familiar with was that which occurred on the battlefield: the scrape of cold hard steel, the tearing of flesh and the spilling of blood. That was the path she’d trodden for much of her life, full of pain and wariness. Never had her body known such a touch so tender.
Trembling on the verge of losing all self-control, Bian Jin recalled what Shen Ni had once said. That Bian Jin was nothing more than a broken-down piece of equipment, nothing more than a patient requiring treatment. There was no way Shen Ni could have any designs on her; she ought not to let her imagination get the better of her.
But still… Shen Ni’s touch had felt far too good. That maelstrom at the bottom of her heart was beginning to whirl again, yearning to suck something in, to fill up the hollow that lay at its core.
Out of habit, Bian Jin bit down on her lip, hoping the sting would awaken some vestige of her reason. A shame, then, that she could no longer feel pain.
She braced a hand against Shen Ni’s shoulder, trying to prop herself up and pull away from Shen Ni at least a little. Shen Ni’s arm still lingered around her waist, as if reluctant to let go. For few moments, the two of them were locked in a silent, motionless struggle. Then, sensing Bian Jin’s determination, Shen Ni finally loosened her grasp with a little inward sigh of disappointment, allowing Bian Jin to sit up straight. Her hands, however, remained hovering on either side of Bian Jin, ready to catch her should she falter again. Their body heat, which had been so closely commingled just moments ago, stretched out invisible tendrils across the tiny sliver of distance that separated them.
Bian Jin exhaled; her breath was sweet and hot. She gathered herself together before she spoke, and even then her voice still had a faint huskiness to it. ‘Is there any other method of desensitisation?’
A row of bite marks stood out clearly on her lower lip. She’d made them just now, when she’d been trying to stop herself from tumbling over the edge of her self-control. Shen Ni’s gaze lingered on them, and the sight made her heart melt and ache at the same time.
That was how Bian Jin had always been. She never showed any gentleness or compassion towards herself. How could she have brought herself to mistreat those lovely, fragile lips so?
Shen Ni wanted to reach out and run the pad of her finger gently across Bian Jin’s lower lip, to smooth away those bite marks, to wipe every single trace of them away.
Bian Jin realised that Shen NI had been staring at her lips silently for some time. She could guess what her shimei was thinking. Her own gaze drifted away from Shen Ni for a few moments, then settled back again. ‘Shimei?’ she prompted.
‘Perhaps,’ said Shen Ni.
‘Perhaps?’
‘Perhaps there is some other way of desensitising you. I just don’t know what it might be at this moment.’
That was, of course, an almost completely meaningless statement, just like the ‘mm’ she’d given Auntie Wan when the housekeeper had come into her workshop earlier. Though this time, her tone was at least somewhat less perfunctory, because it was Bian Jin she spoke to.
‘Then is there a way of finding out?’ asked Bian Jin. ‘Perhaps through experimentation?’
She did not want to turn into a melting, whimpering, disgraceful mess every time Shen Ni touched her. She’d brought Shen Ni up herself, nurturing her and caring for her as if she were a little sister. Yet now, Shen Ni’s lightest touch stirred up such depths of lust and desire within her. Bian Jin could not help feeling shame, distress, humiliation.
Just as Bian Jin’s sense of mortification were building up to such a point that she barely knew where to look, Shen Ni leaned in even closer. Her eyes were distant, misted over. Bian Jin’s first thought was that Shen Ni must be too exhausted even to stand up straight. And no wonder: not only had she spent the last few days poring over the intricacies of ‘Qin Wushang’s’ corpse, she’d just fought a hard-won battle and given Bian Jin a full-body examination as well. For all her youth, there were limits to her stamina, especially since she did not have a warrior’s Talent for endurance.
That was what Shen Ni had always done. As a child, whenever she was tired or drowsy, or if someone she disliked was bothering her, she would cuddle close to Bian Jin and look up at her with beseeching eyes, hoping Bian Jin would chase away whatever ailed her.
Just as Bian Jin’s first instinct was to protect Shen Ni whenever the latter was in danger, her first instinct now was to soothe Shen Ni, no matter how much shame she felt at the uncontrollable waves of desire that surged up within her every time the child she’d raised from babyhood touched her. She reached out and placed a gentle hand at the back of Shen Ni’s head, just as she’d always done in the old days, and said tenderly, ‘Mm? Aren’t you feeling well?’
Shen Ni, of course, could sense what Bian Jin was thinking. Six years ago, when Bian Jin had dragged her back from the front lines and forced her to kneel before the gates of Shuangji Hall, that had been as much to keep her safe as to punish her. Her shijie had always cherished her deeply.
Of course, she also remembered all too well how her shijie had rejected her feelings. Still, the way Bian Jin had been rubbing up against her so seductively before, and the way Bian Jin was looking at her so indulgently now, filled her heart with the clamouring confidence of the well-loved.
In the years since she’d come of age,[1] Bian Jin’s lips had always been forbidden territory, even in her imagination; she had not dared even to dream of them. Now, however, they were within such easy reach. She only had to lean forward a little to taste them. Possessiveness throbbed suddenly through her, and once again she wrapped her arms around Bian Jin’s waist.
A look of surprise crossed Bian Jin’s face, just as it had done six years ago when Shen Ni had uttered that declaration of love. This time, however, her expression did not immediately turn glacial. Her lashes drooped softly over her eyes, fluttering with some indefinable emotion.
The heat and fragrance of Shen Ni’s lips flooded Bian Jin’s senses. Just as those lips were about to meet her own, however, Bian Jin turned her face aside.
Shen Ni paused in the act of leaning forward.
‘We agreed not to overstep each other’s boundaries,’ said Bian Jin. ‘If we do this now, how are we supposed to divorce in two years’ time?’ Her voice was as calm as the surface of a motionless lake; not a single ripple of emotion disturbed it.
Shen Ni listened to Bian Jin quietly, gazing all the while at her shijie’s ears, which were now completely blood-red. What a pity, she thought. She had fully expected this rebuff; she had not really believed that Bian Jin would allow herself to be kissed. What did surprise her was that Bian Jin’s refusal had been anything but forceful, and there was no sign of revulsion to it. On the contrary, there was a softness in her manner that seemed almost like an invitation.
Shen Ni’s own lips were puckered slightly. Her alluring eyes were misted with desire; they looked even more captivating than ever. What a pity, she thought again. She’d come so close to parting Bian Jin’s pure lips, so close to drenching her shijie — that perfect statue on her lofty pedestal — in the wet heat of sensuality. She couldn’t help but feel a little hard done by, especially as her own need had sharpened to a point that was almost unendurable. Her shijie had left her wet and yearning, but seemed completely unaware of that fact. Doesn’t she realise that I might have needs too?
All Shen Ni could do was try to take her mind off it.
When Bian Jin had mentioned divorce, Shen Ni’s first impulse had been to retort, ‘Then let’s not divorce.’ But that would have sounded too childish. Her shijie was so reserved, so strait-laced and old-fashioned in many ways, that it would be difficult enough to coax her into what she clearly considered a taboo relationship with the child she’d brought up. Heaven knew how many times Shen Ni had cursed the fact that she’d been born so many years later than Bian Jin. It had been agonising enough for her to have to wait until she came of age, to mature into the ripe, full-figured woman she had become. Now, her shijie finally deigned to treat her as an adult, at least every now and then; she couldn’t afford to lose that tiny bit of progress.
Shen Ni still had a hand pressed against Bian Jin’s lower back, keeping Bian Jin pinned where she was on the workbench. ‘It could have the same effect as a calming drug,’ she told Bian Jin. ‘If you don’t like the idea, I’ll think of some other way to bring you relief.’
By ‘it’, Shen Ni meant — of course — kissing. In other words, to hear Shen Ni tell it, the only reason she’d been about to crush Bian Jin’s lips against hers was to offer her shijie what she thought might be a soothing remedy.
Bian Jin found she had no idea how to respond to that. She closed her eyes momentarily.
Shen Ni was clearly teasing her shamelessly, yet in the same breath she was proclaiming herself to be the panacea for what was ailing Bian Jin with a completely straight face. She’d been exactly the same as a child: her impertinence had often left Bian Jin speechless, yet at the same time, Bian Jin could not help being struck by how adorable Shen Ni looked when she was at her cheekiest.
She did not reply to Shen Ni’s ludicrous statement. She could not find the energy to argue with her shimei any further.
Bian Jin’s tactility score had gone down, but not by much. Her breathing was still heavy, her eyes still glazed. Feebly she tried to peel Shen Ni’s arms from around her waist, and failed even after two attempts.
In the end, it was Shen Ni who ‘thoughtfully’ took her meaning and let go. Reluctantly, she unwound her arms from around Bian Jin’s waist. She did not, however, move very far; her arms remained leaning on either side of Bian Jin, ready to steady her again if the need arose.
Bian Jin’s tactility score was falling slowly, and now hovered uncertainly in the range of sixty to seventy. This meant even if Shen Ni did absolutely nothing, her mere presence was enough to trigger some sort of response from Bian Jin.
What a marvelous bond it was that linked the two of them together, thought Shen Ni. She managed to stop herself from smiling too openly, tried to put her thoughts into some sort of order, and said in the most rational tones she could muster, ‘Ni’s Heart is impossible to reforge. The only thing we can do now is to carry out a full-body scan on you to see which of your connectors are showing signs of abnormal activity. Then we’ll see if we can lower your levels of hypersensitivity, while also trying to restore your ability to feel pain. That puts you into so much danger on the battlefield, not being able to feel pain. You could easily be wounded and not realise it.’
Bian Jin asked the question she was most concerned about. ‘And how precisely would you go about scanning for abnormalities?’
‘With my palm scanner, as I did just now,’ replied Shen Ni. ‘I’ve already identified a few areas that need fixing. We can do that without needing to open you up at all. I can run a connection directly from there’ — she pointed at the tiny socket embedded in Bian Jin’s hip — ‘and correct the errors manually.’
Bian Jin’s next question had been, ‘And can we complete the full-body scan now, so we don’t have to go through this again?’ But she could see that Shen Ni was squinting in discomfort, and that her eyes were bloodshot and swollen, so she did not ask.
Shen Ni, however, could guess what Bian Jin had been about to say. ‘After the scan,’ she explained, ‘I’ll still need to make the necessary adjustments to your connectors, and after that, I might still need to carry out another scan to make sure all is as it should be. This means I’ll have to check your tactility score at least twice, which might not be very comfortable for you.’
Once again, Bian Jin did not feel equal to a response.
‘We’ll make the first set of adjustments today. After that, we’ll carry on with a full-body examination every seven days, exactly as we agreed before.’ Shen Ni smiled elegantly. ‘That should put a little less stress on you, shijie, and perhaps allow you to gradually become less sensitive to my touch, even without resorting to… other methods.’
‘I understand,’ said Bian Jin weakly. She could not help feeling that there was a trap hidden behind Shen Ni’s smile.
Good girl, thought Shen Ni. Out loud, she asked, ‘Do you need me to lift you down from the workbench?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
Bian Jin resisted the urge to reach out and give Shen Ni’s cheek a reproachful pinch. All she said was, ‘Take a step back, you’re in my way.’
Shen Ni wanted very badly to put her arms around Bian Jin again and carry her down from the workbench. What a pity it was that that particular wish seemed destined to go unfulfilled for now.
Shen Ni took a step backwards. Now that Shen Ni was no longer standing between her knees, Bian Jin was finally able to bring them back together again. She stretched out her long legs and slipped gracefully from the workbench. Shen Ni had no choice but to retreat grudgingly behind her desk.
Behind Shen Ni’s back, Bian Jin stole a stealthy glance at her own right hand. A long time ago, she had realised that her right hand was particularly sensitive to outside contact; it was one of the reasons she shunned most forms of physical contact with others. She had never mentioned this to anyone.
Rather selfishly, Shen Ni found that she did not particularly want to rectify Bian Jin’s hypersensitivity to her. After all, it was born of the strange resonance her blood had created between them; it was their own unique bond. But she knew Bian Jin would never agree to that. And if Shen Ni deliberately neglected to fix that particular cybernetic bug, that would be tantamount to taking advantage of Bian Jin.
By now, Shen Ni was quite certain that Bian Jin’s heightened sensitivity towards her would cause her shijie no physical harm. On the contrary, it could bring her unimaginable pleasure. Both her personal curiosity about Bian Jin and her professional curiosity as a machinist made her wonder: If we really had kissed, how high would her tactility score be?
And if they took things even further…
Shen Ni cupped her chin in one hand to conceal the flush that was spreading across the lower half of her face.
Bian Jin plugged one end of a cable into the socket in her hip. The other end was connected to the workstation on Shen Ni’s desk.
Shen Ni’s full attention was on the three screens in front of her, on the rows of white numbers scrolling ceaselessly upwards. She was so completely absorbed in her work that she barely even blinked.
Bian Jin remained standing next to the workbench, her ears still red-hot. Furtively she rubbed her hands over them in the hopes of cooling them down. ‘What should I do now?’ she asked Shen Ni.
‘There’s nothing for you to do,’ Shen Ni replied a little distractedly, her hands still tapping away at her keyboard. Her brows were knotted in deep thought. ‘It’s going to be a little dull for you, but you can’t leave the workshop. You could sit on the sofa until I’m done. It should take a little less than an hour. The sofa’s very clean, I haven’t sat on it since I disinfected it last time…’
Shen Ni trailed off, her attention caught by an anomaly she’d detected in one of Bian Jin’s connectors. She flung a hurried, ‘Don’t unplug the cable,’ at Bian Jin, then began typing even more rapidly on the keyboard.
It was half an hour[2] later when she finally looked up. ‘How does that feel?’
Bian Jin pressed a hand to her spine, allowing herself to experience the sensation in full. ‘A little numb.’
‘You’ll feel a slight stinging pain — that’s perfectly normal. It will be over in three seconds. Three, two, one… done.’ Shen Ni blinked her dry eyes strenuously. ‘There. Does that hurt?’ she asked.
‘No.’
Shen Ni’s eyes were giving her trouble again, and her vision was blurry. As she put some eye-drops into her eyes, she went on, ‘That’s all right then. I might have to repeat the same procedure a few more times. Tell me if you start feeling any discomfort.’
‘Mm.’
As she called up a module on her workstation and waited for it to load, Shen Ni tilted her head back and closed her eyes, snatching a brief rest. When she sat up again, a sudden sharp pain stabbed through her back, and she let out a low hiss.
Bian Jin, who was idly reading something on the extranet on the screen she had projected from her digital watch, looked towards her.
Wincing, Shen Ni moved her shoulder experimentally. She felt as if all the muscles in her back had been twisted together; the pain was becoming intolerable. Most of her cybernetic implants were in her arms. She did not care for over-augmentation, so her torso was fragile, unmodified flesh and blood. She’d forgotten that she’d injured her back in the battle against that mutant beast, and now she hardly had the time to deal with it. All her thoughts were on Bian Jin. She rolled her shoulders about in a cursory fashion, then went back to her task.
‘Shen Ni.’ Bian Jin called out to her, but she did not respond. Her eyes were fixed unblinkingly on the screens before her.
Not wanting to interrupt her train of thought, Bian Jin said nothing more.
Tap, tap, tap…
The only sounds in the workshop were the laboured breathing of the two silent women, and the gentle tapping of Shen Ni’s fingers on the keyboard. The seconds drifted past like the fluttering white flakes in the snow globe nestled among the screens on Shen Ni’s desk.
Shen Ni was concentrating so intensely on her work that she did not realise how terribly bloodshot her eyes had become. ‘Come, shijie,’ she said. ‘Let’s try that again.’
Now that she’d recalibrated that rogue connector of Bian Jin’s, Shen Ni gestured for her shijie to come closer, so that she could measure Bian Jin’s tactility score once more.
Bian Jin duly went over to the desk. As Shen Ni ran the palm scanner over her once again, she distracted herself by counting the grains of sand in the snow globe. That made everything just a tiny bit easier to bear.
As the white glow in her palm swept over Bian Jin’s skin, Shen Ni glanced up at the tactility score on the display, and fell silent.
‘What is it?’ Bian Jin could tell that Shen Ni was holding something back.
‘It’s odd.’ Shen Ni pressed a knuckle beneath her lower lip. ‘Your tactility score hasn’t changed much. It’s gone down, yes, but only by a statistically negligible amount. And even that slight drop might be due to the desensitising effect of carrying out a second examination so soon after the first.’
Bian Jin did not need to see the figures to tell that the recalibration had not been successful. She had felt all too clearly that she was just as sensitive to Shen Ni’s near-touch as before. Slipping her fingers beneath her coveralls, she loosened the close-fitting collar a little, so that the cool air circulating through the temperature-controlled workshop could extinguish the flame that had ignited so easily within her.
‘It’s odd,’ said Shen Ni again. As she racked her brains, she reached up reflexively and rubbed her aching eyes.
Bian Jin seized hold of her wrist suddenly. ‘Don’t do that. You’ll only get bacteria in your eyes. They’re so pretty as well — do you want to lose them?’
Her tone was irritable, yet somehow indulgent — a combination that Shen Ni was very familiar with.
Shen Ni blinked in discomfort, but did not rub her eyes again. ‘I’ll put in some eye-drops,’ she said.
‘No. You shouldn’t keep using those so often either. And what about your back? Is it hurt?’
Shen Ni was about to say, ‘I can hold on for a little longer, until I figure out why your tactility score isn’t going down.’ But Bian Jin spoke again before she could.
‘You won’t be doing any more work tonight. Go and rest.’ Bian Jin’s tone brooked no argument. She let go of Shen Ni’s hand. Beneath her glove, her knuckles had flushed pink.
Shen Ni had always insisted on having things her own way, so Bian Jin was fully prepared for her to object. Unexpectedly, however, not only was there no objection forthcoming, Shen Ni even uttered an obliging, ‘Yes, shijie.’ She smiled at Bian Jin, looking at her out of those red-rimmed eyes. ‘I’ll do that.’
Her shimei’s surprisingly docile response gave Bian Jin a momentary feeling of unreality. Shen Ni was not naturally rebellious. As a rosy, chubby child of twelve or so,[3] she had followed Bian Jin around like a loyal little puppy. Of course, sometimes she could be a stubborn little puppy, but most of the time she did what Bian Jin told her to without much demur. Back then, Bian Jin couldn’t dote on Shen Ni enough; her main worry had been of not lavishing sufficient care on her shimei.
‘I’ll continue tomorrow.’ Shen Ni resisted the temptation to rub her eyes again. No matter how dry and painful they felt, she simply screwed them shut.
She liked it when Bian Jin took charge of her. The memory of the last six years of loneliness, those dark days when she barely saw the point of keeping herself alive — all that ended with one fell swoop at Bian Jin’s sharp, forceful ‘command’.
She had a shijie to love her again.
‘Shijie.’
Shen Ni hooked a finger through Bian Jin’s belt, kneading gently at the underside of the material, warm from Bian Jin’s body heat. She said entreatingly, ‘I’ve sprained my back. Could you take a look at it for me?’
***
Author’s Note:
Shen Ni: I’ve examined shijie, now it’s her turn to examine me *blushing smile emoji*
***
Footnotes:
- In the original text, 锦瑟年华 (pinyin: jinse nianhua), literally ‘years of the brocade se’. A se (瑟) is an ancient plucked string instrument dating back to the Western Zhou period. The expression refers to the years of a woman’s life between the ages of eighteen and thirty. It originates from the Tang Dynasty poem ‘The Brocade Se’ (锦瑟) by the poet Li Shangyin (李商隐). [return to text]
- In the original text, 一炷香 (pinyin: yi zhu xiang), literally ‘one stick of incense’. This is a historical measure of time based on how long it takes for a stick of incense to burn down completely, and is said to range from fifteen minutes to an hour. [return to text]
- In the original text, 金钗之年 (pinyin: jin chai zhi nian), literally ‘the age of the golden hairpin’. In the context of a girl’s or woman’s life, this refers to the age of twelve, when girls in imperial China would begin wearing jewellery and learning the art of self-adornment. The expression originates from the poem ‘Song of Water in a River’ (河中之水歌, pinyin: he zhong zhi shui ge) by Emperor Wu of Liang, the founding emperor of the Liang Dynasty during the Northern and Southern dynasties period. [return to text]
douqi 随笔 