Gyokuyo Quotes

Gyokuyo's gratitude is the reason Maomao was caught. The warning reached her unsigned, which is how Maomao wanted it, written on cloth torn from a maid's skirt. Gyokuyo wanted to thank the writer, so she entrusted the cloth to Jinshi, and Jinshi went looking (pp. 40, 42–43). By the time the consort bows, the anonymity Maomao chose is already gone. Her protest that she has done nothing to warrant it is partly modesty and partly one last attempt to remain a stranger. Gyokuyo refuses both. She names the daughter, and seven pages later turns the debt into an appointment as her lady-in-waiting (p. 48). Thanks from someone that powerful cannot be declined. It is generous, and it is also a claim on the person thanked.

Gyokuyo reports it brightly, and Maomao's reaction does the analysis: asking this of someone with Gao Shun's status is curious enough, she thinks, and his accepting it is more curious still, since at the banquet he sat where a high-ranking official would. The easy reading is a consort's whim. The better one is a household keeping its own order. Gao Shun has been waiting all morning for a lady-in-waiting who overslept after spitting out poison, and Gyokuyo's ladies had ordered that patient back to bed. Gyokuyo even tells Maomao she could have taken the day off. In this palace the sick girl rests and the visiting official makes himself useful. The weeding joke is where Gyokuyo's authority shows: she overrides rank inside her own walls, cheerfully, and the only protest on the page is Maomao's stunned "You made him weed......?"

Serving the honey was Gyokuyo's own idea. She served honey boiled with citrus peel because it was cold, and Consort Lishu, who had just said she loves sweets, froze at the sight of it while the ladies nearby whispered that she won't even eat the honey she's being offered (pp. 26–27). Maomao asks for a word; Gyokuyo says "Oh my, my!"; the page never shows what passed between them. Then the fault moves to the pot. The obvious objection is that this is statecraft, not tact. The chapter's captions say tea parties are a way for the ladies to feel out each other's true intentions, and that Gyokuyo writes down what she learns and sends it home to help her family (p. 23). Both readings hold. Taken as a pretext, which is how the page stages it, the excuse costs her nothing and spares a guest a public humiliation, and Maomao, who had begun to doubt her report that Lishu's ladies bully her, now concludes it was accurate after all (pp. 25, 29). Gyokuyo's kindness is also how she gathers evidence.