The Empress Letters [Paperback]

With its opium dens, countercurrents of colonial discourse and decadence, and sea passages between East and West, Linda Rogers’s epistolary novel owes much to the stunning French film, Indochine. The Empress Letters consists of a series of missives written aboard the first-class deck of The Empress of Asia by Poppy von Stronheim Mandeville to her daughter, Precious, during May 1927. The contrast between surname and given names points to the differences between aristocratic family histories and the under-classes that suffered from the bigotries of that era.
A Chinese proverb serves as one of the epigraphs to the novel: “Do not pray for gold and jade and precious things; pray that your children and grandchildren may all be good.” Three generations of women, Nora, Poppy, and Precious, form the matrilineal backbone of Rogers’s fourth novel, as Poppy attempts to explain her complex family history. Before addressing her daughter, Poppy writes the first letter to herself: “Once, when I was at a dinner party at a posh London Club, I went to the marble and gold ladies powder room and found a baby in the toilet.” This arresting opening image leads the reader back to the Chinese proverb. It also directs the reader forward to drowning and water imagery, and the recurrent theme of unknown parentage throughout the novel.
With a faint heart but strong hand and spirit, Poppy types steadily on her typewriter (a gift from her stepfather). She reinterprets her mother’s passion for gardening by painting flowers on canvas. Poppy addresses the first letter to her daughter with “My dear Little Shoe,” a pun on the French for cabbage, as well as a reference to her daughter’s father, Soong Chou. (For much of the novel, both mother and daughter are ignorant of their biological parents).
An established poet, Rogers utilises satisfying repetitions to echo sections of her narrative: “In the first sentence, I used the ship’s word ‘posh’-port out, starboard home.” Thus, “posh” turns out to be not merely a descriptive term pertaining to privilege, but more importantly a reference to directions, for the novel focuses on directions in time, space, psychology, and sexual orientation.
Poppy paints flowers and interprets them as vaginas, which her friend Tallulah Bankhead calls “the plum garden,” and there are plenty of plum gardens in this novel, explored by women who are, for the most part, androgynous (as are their male counterparts). Emily Carr, who plays a prominent role in teaching Poppy painting, is one of several tutors in the Casanora household in Victoria. The family moved to Victoria from San Francisco in 1907 to find a colonial city built on tunnels and graveyards-one for the High Anglicans, one for Catholics and lesser Protestants, one for the Chinese, another for Jews. Jewish Poppy shows her disregard for the privileged and prejudiced, and openly embraces the Chinese community in Victoria. In her tunnelled world she discovers smuggling areas for opium underneath her mother’s house. Under the veneer of polite society, the reality of drugs undermines any pretence of respectability. The child grows up believing that she could dig holes all the way to China.
Poppy’s father dies and her mother remains emotionally distant, but as Poppy matures, she is surrounded by several caring adults. Nanny MacDuff (or Duffie) teaches her to read and mind her manners. Miss Beach and her stepfather, Stanford, also assist in her upbringing. Their cook, Mah Lee, is dismissed during a typhoid epidemic, part of the anti-Chinese paranoia that swept through North America.
Nora tries to hide her Jewish roots in Victoria where anti-Semitism is a polite fact of life, so mother and daughter live as outsiders in the company of such families as Lady Cowes-Wentworth-Cowes. “We had Christmas trees and Christmas presents, but there was no carol singing. We had Easter-egg hunts but the Easter meal was more like a Passover Seder that I attended in London.” Poppy’s marginal status in an elitist society partly explains her empathy and identification with the Coolie gardeners who work at night in the opium trade. “Like light-deprived miners coming out of the ground with their tools, the gardeners emerged at daybreak from a tunnel under the house.” Ironically, this tunnel existence links the Jewish von Stronheim Mandevilles to Lady Cowes-Wentworth-Cowes, who also participates in the opium underworld beneath the veneer of Victorian respectability.
Under a series of tutors, Poppy enjoys home schooling in the company of Boulie, a ward of Lady Cowes-Wentworth-Cowes, and Alec MacDuff, the stuttering Scottish son of Duffie. Rogers paints the portraits of each of her minor characters as deftly as Poppy colours her floral canvases. Boulie tells Poppy stories about her own Chinese background: her mother played the pipa, or Chinese lute, for her older warlord husband, but fell in love with a young attaché at the French embassy. Boulie’s name is derived from the French “bouleversée.” When the Chinese warlord discovered the truth about the affair, he had her thrown into a well. Poppy’s education is filled with hybrids, orphans, fairy glens, mixed and missing parents, and bisexual encounters. She spies on the maid Miss Beach, who massages her mother in a sexual manner that in turn stimulates Poppy’s voyeurism. In an innocent ménage à trois, Boulie, Alec, and Poppy discover sex.
Although The Empress Letters focuses mainly on local events in Victoria, Rogers’s canvas is much broader, offering an international perspective on the Orient and Occident, particularly during World War I. Alec goes back to Europe where he dies, but not before Poppy gives birth to his supposed child. Unwed, she is forced to return to San Francisco for the secret delivery. Thus, Precious’s true identity remains a mystery for most of the novel, and in a final twist we learn that her actual father is Soong Chou and not Alec. Rogers devotes a couple of chapters to life in London where Poppy has an exhibition of her work.
East is East and West is West, but in The Empress Letters the twain manage to meet. Although the title of the novel seems obvious, another explanation emerges when Soong Chou offers Poppy a sprig of wisteria: “He called it the Empress flower.” He also brings her a gift of mah jong and explains the characters on the tiles. “This game of four winds was possibly invented by Confucius, who loved birds. It is called mah jong, which means ‘hemp bird.’ It is the game of one hundred intelligences and it will teach you patience.” Sensual and sensuous, The Empress Letters is brimming with the intelligence of a fine writer who captures the rhythm of the east wind.
Michael Greenstein (Books in Canada)

The Empress Letters manages to capture all the fantasy of early 20th century Victoria and also reveal the darkly class-ridden, racist, and narcotics-driven substructure on which the fantasy rests...Rogers gets top marks for the atmosphere she creates. (Quill & Quire )

The Empress Letters manages to capture all the fantasy of early 20th century Victoria and also reveal the darkly class-ridden, racist, and narcotics-driven substructure on which the fantasy rests...Rogers gets top marks for the atmosphere she creates.Quill & Quire