So I grew up day by day like this, wrapped in brocade in the Prime Minister's residence.
To a baby, time is both slow and fast. Slow in that every day is carefully arranged, with almost no freedom; fast in that this body stretches and grows so quickly that I often stare blankly into the bronze mirror—the child whose features are gradually taking shape there is both unfamiliar and familiar.
The "child-rearing code" my grandmother set for me was meticulous to an infuriating degree.
In the morning, my face was first washed with warm water mixed with pearl powder and floral dew, the wet nurse's touch as light as a feather. Then came the "hair-combing rite."
My father, Liu Qingci, often personally held the comb, gently arranging my soft black hair while softly reciting lines from The Admonitions for Men: "A man should take chastity and tranquility as his virtue, and gentleness and compliance as his beauty…"
I sat on a specially made high chair, swinging my two short legs that still couldn't reach the ground, silently rolling my eyes inside.
Breakfast was even more particular. A bowl of warming bird's-nest porridge, several pastries so delicate they hardly looked like food—every bite had to be tested for temperature by the wet nurse before being fed to me. Grandmother said my spleen and stomach were weak and needed careful nurturing.
"Yuzhi looks so well today," Father always liked to say, his fingers gently stroking my cheek. "This skin truly takes after me—lustrous like jade."
I smiled obediently on the surface, but inside I was thinking: the bronze tan I got from working on construction sites in my previous life—that was what you called healthy.
After breakfast came the time for "learning the arts." From the age of three, I began to study what men of this era were supposed to learn.
The teacher was a taciturn middle-aged man with long fingers and superb skill. He taught me to play, starting with the simplest fingerings. But I could never quite help myself—when the clear, resonant notes flowed out, my fingers would act on their own, plucking fragments of pop tunes I remembered.
The teacher froze and looked up at me, his eyes full of shock and uncertainty.
"Young master… where did you hear this melody?"
My heart jumped. I immediately lowered my eyes and pretended to be innocent in a thin, soft voice.
"Yuzhi was just plucking at random. Please don't be angry, sir."
Go lessons were a little better. The person who taught me was a meticulous scholar from my mother's staff, surnamed Zhou. At first she treated it as amusing a child, until when I was three and a half, holding the black stones, I used a "small knight's move" she hadn't noticed to subtly trap her white dragon.
Madam Zhou stared at the board for a long time before slowly raising her head. The look in her eyes was complicated. "Young master… such cleverness of mind does not belong to a child."
I immediately let go of the stones and showed an innocent smile. "It was teacher who was letting me win."
Calligraphy and painting classes were the most torturous. Writing had to be upright and graceful; painting had to be meticulous flowers and birds—mostly plum, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum, butterflies playing among peonies.
The teacher praised me for having weak brush strength but an unusual sense of composition, especially when sketching buildings and houses, where there was faintly a sense of perspective.
"How does the young master know to draw like this?" asked the gentle old lady who taught painting, curiously.
I blinked. "Yuzhi saw it in a dream."
She took it as childish talk and smiled, patting my head.
Besides these "arts," there was something that gave me an even bigger headache—"etiquette training."
An old nanny specially invited from the palace, surnamed Yan, and as strict as her name, taught me how to walk (small steps, steady posture), how to bow (movements soft, head lowered and eyes downcast), how to smile (corners of the lips slightly raised, no showing of teeth), and even how to cough (covering the mouth with the sleeve, sound not too harsh).
"The young master's status is noble. In the future you will attend great gatherings," Yan Nanny said with a stiff face. "Every movement you make represents the Su family's reputation."
Learning this was agony. Once, after practicing the curtsy for too long, my legs went weak and I almost fell. Yan Nanny frowned, and Father immediately scooped me up in distress.
"Nanny, Yuzhi is still small. Take it slowly," Father pleaded softly.
Yan Nanny sighed. "Master Liu has a compassionate father's heart, but the young master is delicate and needs strict teaching all the more. So many sons of noble families, because they were laxly taught when young, grow up with improper conduct and ruin their prospects."
Prospects. That word again.
My "prospects," in everyone's eyes, meant that someday in the future, wearing a phoenix crown and bridal robes (here, that is what men wear when they marry), I would be carried in a splendid sedan chair into the inner residence of some powerful household.
This understanding was like an invisible net, suffocating me.
Fortunately, I still had room to breathe—my three elder sisters.
My eldest sister, Su Pei, was much older than me. When I was born she was already sixteen and had long since entered the Imperial Guard.
When she came home she was always in armor, her posture straight, an air of the battlefield in her brows. She didn't talk much, but every time she saw me, she would gently pinch my cheek with her calloused fingers and stuff some novel little toys bought outside the palace into my hands: a clay frog that could jump, shadow puppets painted with exotic patterns, sickeningly sweet Western Region candy.
"Yuzhi, do you like it?" she would ask, with a kind of awkward tenderness in her eyes.
I would nod vigorously, and she would show a very faint smile.
My second sister, Su Fei, was even quieter. She studied at the Imperial Academy and was very learned. She taught me characters far faster than the teachers and was never bound by The Admonitions for Men or Male Precepts.
She would tell me about mountains and rivers, about the desolation in frontier poems, about little anecdotes from the court. Her room was full of books, and she would occasionally slip me one or two travelogues or miscellanies in secret.
"Yuzhi learns characters quickly; it doesn't hurt to read these too," she would say with a wink. "Just don't let Mother and Father know."
My third sister, Su Xiao, was the brightest, liveliest color of my childhood.
She was only eight years older than me, right at the age when even cats and dogs found her annoying—climbing trees to steal birds' nests, wading into the river to catch fish, running back covered in dust and sweat, only to have Father tug her ear and scold her for "not acting like a girl."
But she was extremely good to me. She would secretly take me to sneak into the back-yard stables, point at the gentle little mare, and say, "When Yuzhi gets a bit bigger, Sister will teach you to ride! Don't be afraid, Sister will hold you!"
Although every time we were quickly "arrested and brought back" by the wet nurses or nannies, that fleeting feeling—like touching a wider world—made me yearn for it.
Su Xiao was also the first person who, in front of me, spoke without restraint about "the outside world."