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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 301 – A Very Long Malaise by L.J. Lee

Saturday, November 30, 2024 - 07:00

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 01 – A Very Long Malaise by L.J. Lee - transcript

(Originally aired 2024/11/30 - listen here)

This episode concludes the 2024 fiction series with a story set in late 18th century Korea, among the attendants of the court. The author, L.J. Lee has contributed a guest blog giving some of the historic background that inspired the story, which you can find on the website. L.J. Lee is a translator living in Korea, and writes stories that center queer and marginalized people in Asian history. This is her first fiction publication, but she also has a book review published in Exchanges, a journal of literary translation. She has a Mastodon account at @ljwrites@writeout.ink and blogs about history, translation, and more at ljwrites.blog. See the links in the show notes.

Our narrator this time is Bailey Wolfe. Bailey is a Korean American voice actress based in Minneapolis, who relishes playing characters with playful confidence–and big stompy death robots–but also enjoys adventures in commercials, branding, narration, and direction. She notes, “Not every voice actor you meet has experience in medicine, vaccine development, and biomedical engineering, but maybe you just haven’t realized you need one that does.” Bailey notes that when not doing voice acting, you can find her outside on a river somewhere. Unless it’s cold. Then she’s on the ice. You can find her online at https://bbwolfevox.com/. As usual, see the show notes for a link.

I’d like to give credit to the Bluesky network of voice actors for helping me locate vocal talent that matches the voices and character backgrounds in our stories. My experience in connecting with Bailey indicates that this part of my job is going to be much easier in the future! And remember that we’ll be opening for submissions for the 2025 fiction series in January.

This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.


A Very Long Malaise

by L.J. Lee

 

The smooth body of the cup suddenly too heavy in my nerveless fingers, I bring it down on its saucer before I can drop it. The warmth of the sparrowtongue tea sloshes over my hand, but I don’t spare it a glance.

Instead I hunker down, my words a frightened squeak. “You would have me spy for you again?”

“Lower your voice!” Aji, Attendant Han that is, looks over at the closed door of her chamber, as though to seek shadows blotting the paper panes. A spy would be wary of spies, wouldn’t she?

“Of course it’s nothing like that.” Turning back to me, she takes a square of folded cotton to wipe my hand. My fingers are colder when she draws away to wipe spilled droplets from the table. “The Minister simply wishes to learn more about the events that shook the palace at the time, out of concern for His Highness’s well-being.”

“By digging into the circumstances of—” I clamp my voice down and lean closer to her, catching a whiff of cool apricot, “—of the death of His Highness’s father? That was decades ago. How does it help anyone to bring it back up?”

“Let me be the judge of that.” She pats my hand, the half-moons of her eyes narrowing to the crescent moons of a smile. I pull my hand away, still feeling her lightly-scented touch on the skin. A sudden surge to my feet makes my bad back twinge.

“I’ve heard enough. Thanks. For the tea and snacks.”

Dull-witted wench that I was to come running when she invited me for cakes and tea. I don’t know what I expected from her, from us when us is a long-closed dusty book. The rasp and tap of wood as I slide the door shut feels like finality.

###

Stepping into the hall, I am swallowed up by the whisper and hum of the palace. Eyes down, make myself small. White-sheathed feet fall on wooden boards with no more sound than snow on snow.

Is that— it is, it’s her!

Attendants split like a wave of indigo and green to either side of the hall, making way for a Senior Lady of the Inner Sanctum. We bow to her as she sweeps by in rich dark skirts, though we know enough to steal unobtrusive glances that miss nothing. The black cap high on her head, held up by the gilded frog pin of her rank, seems to look down from the pinnacle of power. Other Senior Ladies greet her on her way, yet Senior Lady Bak of the Inner Sanctum, though in her thirties and young for her rank, merely acknowledges them with short nods as she moves on with her Attendants in tow.

Senior Lady Bak, huh. A kinswoman of this Minister Aji spoke of and the newest of the Senior Ladies of the Inner Sanctum who serve His Highness and the royal family up close. And, they say, a shoo-in for Chief Senior Lady should the Minister’s star continue to rise as it does.

Is that Aji’s angle here? To get in Lady Bak and her family’s good graces? That she’d think to use me to that end, just because I have the ear of a few old ladies—

“What are you standing there for, Honored Sister?” A younger Attendant elbows me as she passes. “You’ll be late for shift!”

I nod and hurry after her. Of course. Don’t even think about getting involved in spying or the affairs of higher-ups. I know the consequences all too well for sticking my neck out.

Run that rat mouth, burn that rat mouth! The words are in my ears as we bustle into the embroidery hall. A memory of blinding torchlight thrusting into my face overlaps the neat worktable overspread with embroidery pieces. I try to blink the image away; that was a lifetime ago, nothing for a fully-fledged Attendant to fuss about.

The lapse costs me dearly when I prick a finger and smear blood on the white hollyhock needlework, earning me a lecture from the dour Senior Lady on duty and five days of workroom clean-up.

###

That is why I am late, late, late by the time I’m free to hurry to the gate to meet my visitor.

She hovers outside the visitors’ house, huddled around a package in her arms and eyes darting to and fro as if she expects to be arrested or berated any minute. I flinch at the patched and worn top she wears. I can’t help it; even the servants who clean and carry water dress better in here.

“Mother, it has been too long.” My bow is hurried and stiff, in part because my back aches from the frantic pickup and wiping down of the workroom, in part because I don’t want to be seen with her in the open. Noblewoman she may not be, but we—they—get by with Father’s herbalist business, especially with the cocoon-boiled silk and finely-woven hemp I send them out of my wages. Why would she go around looking like this? I wish it were a different visitor I were meeting, though it’s too soon for her to come around and I shouldn’t think this way. “I apologize for my tardiness. Please, come inside.”

“No, it seems I’ve caught you on a busy day. It’s my fault, when you’re working so hard all the time for the King. Here, I brought you a little dried pollack.” She thrusts the cloth-wrapped package at me with its faint fishy aroma. “It’s not much, but you can share with your friends and…maybe your superiors, so they’ll look kindly on you?”

Oh, Mother. Of course she has no concept of the kinds of gifts the Senior Ladies get from Ministers and Great Houses seeking their favor. Not even the common Attendants here would look twice at the grade of pollack she could buy at the lower markets of the capital.

Still, I give a tight-throated nod. “Thank you, Mother.”

She turns away after a few more words, with the look of one who has unfinished business.

Let her go, I tell myself. Let her go, don’t ask why she came, don’t give her that opening. Let her waste her time coming all this way to visit the eldest she never comes to see unless she wants something. It’s the least she can do, isn’t it, after wasting my whole life by throwing me in here, never to have a mate or a house of my own. Don’t ask her—

It’s the sad sag of her shoulders, like a pillar bowed under the weight of a roof, that defeats me.

“Was there anything else, Mother?”

###

It was about money. Of course it was.

Your youngest sister iswasto wed in the spring.

Was, that is, until Father fell ill and the family slid into debt.

A wedding! Apparently it’s something women still have, in the world outside these walls. You face your groom across a laden table in the yard of your girlhood home and you each bow down to the ground, the weight of your layered skirts and wide-sleeved garment dragging at you so your kinswomen have to help you up after every bow. In the morning you are carried in a litter to a place where you belong, a home to call your own. I watched those ceremonies myself as a child before I came here, raising myself on tippy-toe to see over the heads of the crowd while the smells of the wedding feast filled the charged air.

I suppose I had a wedding of sorts myself, midway into my twenties. The memory swims up as I walk past ponds and gardens toward the boisterous calls of an arrow-throwing game. I was nervous and stiff-necked when I bowed before a table of food and drinks, not wanting the rented flower-cap to fall off my head and roll in the dirt. There was no groom filling my sight as he would fill my life from that moment on, only deep obeisance across waves of walls and tiled roofs toward His Highness’s house of high office, the only man in my life and our theoretical husband. Thank the Lady of the Moon the prospect remains a theory for almost all of us, and I am certainly no exception. Life here is precarious enough as a faceless face, never mind a royal concubine.

Your sister swears she’ll put off the wedding and take care of your father until he’s well, but… Mother’s words disappeared into the tie of her top as she pressed it to her mouth, but I didn’t need to hear more. What parent, what elder sister, would want a young girl in the family to squander her best marriageable years? Having one unwed daughter in the family is more than enough.

Walking into the sunlit yard where I was told Attendant Han would be, I watch as Aji herself takes her turn. She flits up to a log on the ground marking the distance, stretching out an arm as though to show off the line of her jade-colored sleeve. Her entire body thrusts after the throw of a red-plumed arrow, narrowed to one single aim and purpose. She seems ready to tilt over in its wake and oh, won’t she fall on her face for once, flat on the ground with the rest of us that she treads on so blithely on her flight to the stars?

She does not fall, and the arrow cuts a neat arc into the waiting jar. Aji cheers and laughs with the other Attendants she no doubt has in her hands, as she had me. Look how fake she is, bowing to the Senior Ladies and eunuchs, and how they fall for it. Even Senior Lady Bak, watching surrounded by Attendants and servants, gives her a small, graceful nod.

I slink around the back of the crowd to Aji when she is away for a moment from her adoring crowd. “A word, Attendant Han?”

“Souri!” Her face creases in mirth as though we were still the best of mates. “Did you see my throw? Why don’t you join in?”

“No, thank you. I only need a moment.” I draw her aside, looking around for any listeners. “Your offer from yesterday. Does it still stand?”

Her face smooths over into a pane of ice. “So you’re in.”

“If you can make it worth my while.” I don’t have the luxury of being picky, Not with Mother so frayed and patched, bowed by the weight of the world. I bow with her to share her load.

Aji pats my shoulder as though I’m some intimate or lackey of hers. I clench my hand in my skirt before I can scratch that condescension off her face. “Oh, don’t worry on that account. It’ll be just like old times!”

Will you abandon me, just like old times? The words push up to my chin, but instead I say:

“Thank you, Attendant Han. I will speak to you again with what I learn.”

“Is it to be Attendant Han all the time now? People would think us strangers.”

“Oh, I wish we were.” The words are a grumble behind my lips but she hears them, for her face flicks and falters like a pennant that has lost its wind. Why does that make me ache, as though I were the one who wronged her? I nod a bow and stalk away before she can respond, my back stiff again and making the movement awkward.

Burn that rat mouth!

###

“Is it winter again? When you’re my age, you know, the cold sets in the bones.”

The old Senior Lady Roh coughs and stirs, trying to lie comfortably in the swathe of her bedding. Her bones feel fragile as a bird’s when I help her writhe to lie on her side yet she is also heavy, borne down by her own helplessness.

“It’s still autumn, but they’re keeping the floors warm. You should be fine.” Indeed, it is so warm and close here my armpits pool with sweat and I wish I could take my top off.

“Oh, fires won’t help this kind of chill.” Senior Lady Roh cackles, wrinkles cracking her face in all directions. “Now, when my Danhyang and I would lie together until dawn doing very little sleeping, that was some real heat! Have you a special friend, too, young lady? You should, you know. Not much else in here for the boredom.”

My head jerks around to steal a look at the door, not all of the sweating from the temperature now. Of course, no stern-faced and stone-fisted Inspector-Attendants burst in to haul this sick and wandering woman away, to have the dread letters 違法交朋 위법교붕 “friendly intimacy in violation of the laws” carved on her bony chest. No one cares what she did or what she might rave about. She lives the future that awaits all of us, cast out to unvisited back rooms and gathering dust like forgotten bits and ends.

“No.” My answer is soft as I push away a stray thought of pleasant afternoons in the visitor’s house with a pretty widow. “I don’t have anyone like that.”

What I once had with Aji, my laughing sharp girl, was dashed to pieces years ago when I fell running from the guards and she ran on, the dark wave of her skirt as one with the blue winter night. We would both have been caught, were her words when she visited me where I lay recovering from my punishment. I can’t let a charge of spying stain my record.

I shifted under the sheets to turn my back on her, though my wounds burned and stabbed. When she reached out trying to help I struck her hands away, though I almost cried at the pain that shot along my spine. That was the end of our illegal friendship.

Yet her ambition marches on and I rattle along to it, like a doll of grass in a child’s hands. Taking a breath, I start digging for the kind of memories only a woman whose mind is half gone would share, and only with someone familiar to her. Someone who seems harmless, like me.

My mouth opens, but no sound comes out. I think of my sister promising to put off marriage for our parents’ sake, and that pushes the words through. “How long have you known Danhyang? You must have weathered some dangerous times, given the years you lived through.”

Senior Lady Roh’s clouded eyes widen and I glimpse the woman she must have been decades ago: young, strong, and deeply afraid. “Oh, there was so much, some fearful times indeed! Who could ever forget Year Nine of the Ox when there was such trouble, death everywhere…”

###

“She really said that? She heard the Minister telling the eunuchs that the Crown Prince must die?”

I look down to my lap at Aji’s question, a lump in my throat. Senior Lady Roh’s tale came away like thread from a cocoon once she was properly warmed up. And here I am, dragging the whole dripping mess to Aji, running my rat mouth for a bit of coin and cloth.

“Well.” She lets out a huff of breath and stands. “Thank you, Sou— Attendant Kim. I will extend my full thanks, obviously. I believe you will be well-satisfied.”

Questions spill from my mouth the moment I raise my head to face her. “What do you plan to do with this information? Will you really take it to the Minister, telling him there is evidence implicating him in the death of His Highness’s father? You know it will make the Minister afraid for his safety. Even a rat will bite when cornered, and he is no rat but a fox.”

She heads to the door with barely a rustle of her skirts. “That is really none of your concern, is it?”

My voice stops her before she can open the door to leave. “Wait. This job turned out more dangerous than I thought. Our lives on the line if the Minister finds out who knows what, and I want one more thing.”

“I told you, you will be well-rewarded. I advise you not to let greed get the better of—”

“Not for me. Senior Lady Roh talked about Danhyang, her intimate friend. She’s retired to the Palace Village, hasn’t she?” Retired, meaning sent there to die. It is unclean for any but a royal to die within the palace walls and bring that shade to His Highness’s own home. Palace Village is our final stop once we are too old and sick to be of use. “Senior Lady Roh misses her fiercely. They are both old and ill, let them meet before it’s too late.”

Aji shakes her head. “You haven’t changed at all, have you.”

“We dragged a frail old woman into this terrible affair, using her trust in me. Isn’t this the least we owe her, to see her friend once more in life? If you have ever known what it is to love someone—” I do not say, if you ever loved me, “—couldn’t you do that much for her?”

She fidgets with the end of her sleeve and I feel her need to throw me some kind of bone, the instinct of the ambitious and popular. I push on.

“You know people. Senior Ladies, the elder eunuchs, Ministers even. I know your plans always reached toward the ranks of the Inner Sanctum, to serve by the Queen’s side.” In the end, maybe that was what frayed and snapped the fabric of our connection—she wanted to fly higher and higher still, while I was content with my feet planted in the earth.

The plump triangle of a mouth whose taste is a faded memory works for a moment. “Well, I’m not there just yet. But I’ll see what I can do.”

###

“Oh, it’s something of a jape played on the first-year girls,” I tell the pretty widow who has come around at last on one of her supply visits. Maybe my laugh will make me seem confident and unshaken, everything I am not. “On the last night of our first year in the palace they stood us in a row in the yard, masked with wheat cakes in our mouths, and the junior eunuchs thrust torches in our faces, shouting ‛Run that rat mouth, burn that rat mouth!’ It’s a warning to keep quiet about the goings-on in the palace. That’s why I said it in reply to your question, as a joke. Not a very funny one, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, no, no. It’s funny, now that I know.” Mulgoldaek the widow touches her smooth pale fingers to her lips as she titters, as though to hide the gap between her front teeth though she really shouldn’t. We have been meeting for nearly a year now over embroidery threads and sweetmeats and I don’t think I’ve seen her look this sadly at me, the corners of her eyes drooping even while she lifts her cheeks in a smile.

I don’t like that. I am not someone to be pitied, and the widow is prettiest when she laughs. “I mean, we were never in any danger! I found it amusing myself the next year, watching the first-year girls wailing and carrying on.”

“But you didn’t know that at the time, did you? Everything was new and you didn’t know what to expect.”

“No…I suppose not.”

Neither of us makes a show of laughing any longer. Her eyes are clear as though looking down a well at noon, and in turn seem to look into mine right to the bottom. I look away, not wanting to think what she might find there. “Thank you for the sweets. The old ladies in the back rooms like the street tastes from their girlhood best.”

“That is kind of you, to visit them.”

Kind? Maybe I should tell her it started out as punishment, when I was ordered to wait on them after I was caught eavesdropping, though barely recovered enough from my flogging. Over time seeing them became something to do, since I also lost Aji and any thoughts of advancing through the ranks. “I suppose it became habit. I can talk to them like I can’t to others in the palace.”

And that ‘habit’ became Senior Lady Roh’s peril, because Aji found out what old history she might yet wring out of the discarded old woman. Because I didn’t have the strength to tell her no.

“Please don’t be hard on yourself, Attendant Kim. Giving comfort to the lonely is no small thing in a cold world.” Mulgoldaek’s hand closes over mine, warm and soft with a scent of the winter cypress oil she uses in her hair. The pounding of my heart feels like the footfalls of something both unfamiliar and old.

###

“Senior Lady, ma’am?” I am already sweating as I walk into her sickroom. “I got that pumpkin taffy you wanted, and a few other things besides—”

Who’s that kneeling next to the old lady’s bedding with a tray? I know who brings the Senior Lady her herbal infusions, a servant with a slight limp. This is a completely different woman, one who moves in servants’ roughspun with the incongruous grace of a predator. Less gently than I like, she shakes the old woman who blinks and stirs as she wakes from her nap.

“Is the usual servant on break?” I sink down on Senior Lady Roh’s other side, laying aside the packet of sweets. “And where might you be from, did one of the Departments of Healing send you?”

The unfamiliar woman murmurs vague assent and takes up the bowl to make the invalid drink, but if she is a servant with the healers she is either new, or bad at her job. The medicine laps at the edge of the bowl in her right hand while her left fumbles getting the Senior Lady to sit up. Is it just me, or does the medicine smell different than usual? It may be almost two decades since I was an herbalist’s brat running in and out of the shop and helping to steep the mixes, but some early impressions last a lifetime.

Whatever, I might as well do something. It’s not as though I have a record or reputation to lose.

“Here, let me help.” I ‘helpfully’ put my hands to the bowl—and then my fingers stretch a little too far, tipping it off balance. The whole thing goes flying, its contents splaying over the floor in a burst of brown whose scent clings oddly to the inside of my nostrils. I’ll be spending some time cleaning the floor up if I was wrong here.

The serving woman stares down at the mess, not even angry, but tensing up as she coils to spring. I flinch back when she looks up with a glare, but it’s not me she’s looking at. It’s the old Senior Lady.

A claw flashes, no, that’s steel, a knife! I should get away from here, scream for help, stay very still so this tiger passes me by in the night.

The old woman wanted to see her Danhyang one last time. She’s alone here and forgotten, just like me, just like—

My arms are around Senior Lady Roh as I fall with her away from the gleaming arc of the knife. It skids like a hot-cold lash across my back, leaving wet fire in its wake.

So this was Aji’s game, to rat this sick old lady out to the Minister so he can carve out the danger at its root. The friend I once knew soars upward on hungry dreams, higher and higher to the stars while I plunge to earth flailing and shrieking.

I crawl away from the assassin and her knife, dragging the flopping old lady with me, but a muscle in my back yanks like a string on a doll and tumbles me flat. The pain pierces through to the tips of my toes, leaving me gasping and unable even to scream.

Senior Lady Roh, weeping, tries to push me off her. “Run, you stupid young thing. Save yourself!”

A crack from the doors and a scuffle—hands are pulling the wide-eyed and blubbering Senior Lady from my clutching arms. No no, please spare her, she didn’t do anything wrong!

“Souri! Attendant Kim! It’s all right. The royal guards are here.”

My mouth opens to speak and then just hangs open as Aji cradles me, the red stain of my blood vivid on her sleeve while she shouts over a shoulder that I need a healer. Behind her eunuchs and guards drag away the assassin, who fights every inch and is gagged around her bloody mouth to keep her from biting her tongue and killing herself before she can face the Royal Interrogators.

“It’s all right.” Tears shine in Aji’s eyes, as though she cares. “You did so well. You can rest now.”

Obedient even now, my head falls on her shoulder while my mind falls away, the mayhem of the room darkening before my eyes.

###

“So we were bait the whole time, to make the Minister overreach and be caught red-handed in the palace.”

“If you must put it that way.” Aji lowers her gaze with a small pout. “I do apologize for not being speedier.”

“Oh, spare me. You came in exactly when you needed to, so nothing could be plausibly denied and you could take the credit. Senior Lady Roh’s and my lives were acceptable wagers.”

Aji raises a coy eyebrow and says nothing.

“I suppose congratulations are in order. Everyone says you’re next in line to enter service in the Inner Sanctum, with one of their number to be sent packing.” It’s still hard to believe Senior Lady Bak smuggled the assassin in, but I’m not one to speak about holding firm against bad influence.

“Oh, you know.” My bad influence plays with the hem of a sleeve. “It would be an honor if I were given the nod, but I would never presume to be worthy of it.”

“Well, in case you are chosen, I have one final boon to ask. I think I’ve earned that much, don’t you?” The wound in my back throbs under the bandages, a mix of old aches and new.

###

The wind blows differently here in Palace Village, running free unchecked by high stone walls. Little about it is palatial, just a cluster of modest tiled-roof houses under a hill. It is named not for its size or importance, but for the former palace attendants who live here: Women like Senior Lady Roh and her Danhyang, who I left dozing hand-in-hand and face-to-face as they love to do through the languor of the lengthening afternoons.

I never saw two people weep the way they did when they laid eyes on each other on Senior Lady Roh’s arrival, each taking the other’s papery cheeks between veined hands. That first shock of reunion since settled down to the softness of routine, and the healer who comes around to see the sick marvels at how much better the Senior Ladies are doing since.

I just want you to be well, Mother told me when I sent her away with coin, silk, cotton, hemp, fish, and rice for a wedding I will never see with enough left over to ease my parents’ hardship—so much in goods that a cart was hired to carry it all—telling her it might be the last help I can give the family for a while.

Am I well here, as she wanted? Spring winds brush my forehead as I walk to the edge of the village on dirt paths. It unsettles me to feel the seasons again, as though the palace walls had the power to block the passage of time itself.

My back twitches without rancor as I step over mud puddles from recent rains. It’s more the old wound than the new. The knife-wound is so well healed, after all, that I took up embroidery again for something to do. These bits might also supplement the small stipend we get from the palace, if I can find a way to sell them.

How strange, to be thinking of a future here. Yet seasons turned with no summons from the palace, long after I have been able to work again. Did Aji manage to convince the bureaucracy, as I asked, that I was close to death and unfit to return to service? She does have reason to want me gone and forgotten with all I know, so this may well be a meeting of the minds between us. I hope it is.

At the end of my meandering walk, there outside the guesthouse waits the merchant I was told might be interested in my needlework. Wait…do I know her? My eyes follow the peeking hems of underpants and petticoat below the jaunty lift of her skirt, the curve of breasts under green-trimmed collar and the sloping line of shoulders draped with an outer frock. At the sight of me her mouth falls wide in such joy, she forgets to cover the gap between her front teeth.

“I was informed by a maid of Senior Lady Han of the Inner Sanctum, that I might buy some good embroidery here?” The widow Mulgoldaek lowers her gaze, her cheeks glowing like the apricot buds dotting the trees around us.

“She always was a nosy one.” The spring warmth fills me, too, rising to the tips of my ears. “Come inside, the air’s chill and we have tea.”

Show Notes

This quarter’s fiction episode presents “A Very Long Malaise” by L.J. Lee, narrated by Bailey Wolfe.

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

Links to Heather Online

Links to L.J. Lee Online

Links to Bailey Wolfe Online

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