Chapter 11 — The Stepmother
Purple Streets of Chang'an · Page 1 of 4
Dou Yan's feelings were complicated.
If this woman who had appeared out of nowhere was her stepmother, and her mother intended to make something of the woman's background, she was likely to be sorely disappointed.
Her stepmother's family name was Wang; her given name was Yingxue, and she was a daughter of Wang Xingyi.
Wang Xingyi, courtesy name Yousheng, was a native of Nanwa Township, Lingshou County, in the Northern Directly-Ruled Province. He passed the imperial examination in the jichou year, the thirty-sixth year of the Zhide era. He first served as a secretary in the Ministry of Personnel, and was later promoted to vice director of the Carriage and Horse Department of the Ministry of War. During this period the Mongol Altan Khan several times led troops across the northern frontier, and Shi Duanlan, the Marquis of Changxing, then commander-in-chief stationed at Datong, petitioned to open horse markets as a means of pacifying him. Wang Xingyi submitted a memorial, "A Request to Abolish the Horse Markets," in which he argued strenuously that Shi Duanlan was guilty of "ten inadvisabilities and five absurdities." Chen Dong, a eunuch of the Directorate of Ceremonial empowered to sign edicts on the emperor's behalf, shielded Shi Duanlan, whereupon Wang Xingyi impeached Chen Dong in a memorial entitled "Five Treacheries and Fifteen Crimes." In the fourth year of Yongming, Wang Xingyi was sentenced to a hundred strokes of the court staff and cast into the death-row prison. Because he refused in prison to write a letter of repentance and endured every torment rather than submit, he became famous throughout the scholarly world. After Chen Dong fell ill and died, and through the many efforts of his patron—Zeng Yifen, Grand Secretary of the Grand Secretariat and Minister of Personnel, and others—Wang Xingyi's sentence was commuted in the sixth year of Yongming to exile in Xining Guard.
In the years that followed, the Mongols continued to raid the frontier, and the horse markets were destroyed.
In the fourth year of Chengping—the third year after her stepmother had married into the family—Wang Xingyi was recalled to office on Zeng Yifen's recommendation.
He was first appointed magistrate of Xintai County in Shandong, then transferred to a secretaryship in the Ministry of Justice, then to a vice-directorship in the Ministry of Rites, then to the Ministry of War's Bureau of Military Selection—four posts in the space of half a year.
By then ten years had passed since his exile, and he had lived through two reigns.
Thereafter Wang Xingyi rose steadily, and by the time Dou Yan fell ill he had accumulated offices up to Grand Secretary of the East Hall and Minister of Rites, standing at the very pinnacle of subjecthood.
The Wang family had originally been a minor clan of Nanwa, tilling the fields and reading books for generations. After Wang Xingyi's downfall, his wife, née Xu, sold off the family property entirely in order to save her husband. After his sentence was commuted to exile, the Wang family's eldest son, Wang Zhibing, attended his sick and failing father to Xining Guard, while Wang's wife kept house with the eldest daughter-in-law, née Gao, who had been married in less than a month, the second son, Wang Zhishao, and the daughter, Yingxue. Since the family had no fixed property, Gao of her own accord sold off her dowry and realized three hundred taels of silver, of which thirty were used to buy four mu of good farmland to live on, and the rest to relieve the food and clothing needs of Wang Xingyi and Wang Zhibing, far away in Xining Guard. Their days were exceedingly hard.
There were those as noble and public-spirited as the Gao family, and there were those as profit-minded as the Lei family, into which Wang Shuying had married.