The Dowager Wei lived in a separate residence within the outer courtyard of the family compound — a building that had been designed for comfort rather than state, with southern exposure and a garden that she tended herself, or had tended before her joints had made that impractical. It was still her garden in every meaningful sense: the selection of plants, the arrangement of paths, the particular quality of controlled wildness that skilled gardeners produce when they have been in conversation with a space for many years.
She received me in her receiving room, which was full of evidence of a well-ordered mind: books arranged by subject, correspondence in labeled cases, a writing table set up with the kind of ergonomic attention that came from having spent decades at a writing table and having learned, by necessity, what worked.
