Sima Qian
I prefer to be called Ssu-ma. The Chin Emperor lost his deer and everyone went looking for it. The result was the Han dynasty, during which, as a friend remarked, China finally quit fucking around and became a serious empire. I am the Grand Historian. In my long history, written 100 years into the Han (202 BCE – 220 modern era), and going all the way back, I tried to figure out a way to let everything in. I have been accused of being a mere archivist, a Grand Plagiarist, a bad editor in the moral lesson sense (I refused to pretend everything follows the pattern; good guys lose, bad guys win, the only thing we can do is square the record later, which of course is something), the charges are all true as far as they go. I didn’t care because I was trying to make a book that would last, that was open, that didn’t overrate the ten thousand theories. I just put the stories (sometimes contradictory) out there, along with chronological tables, treatises, the hereditary houses, and the memorials of stand-out types. You can move back and forth, check versions of same events, write your own history. At the end of many of the one hundred and thirty chapters I included modest emotional reactions, I tried not to get in the way of the material. It almost looks simple, but no one has even been able to repeat it, the story of several thousand years of particular human history, in a way that makes a certain sense of it, that keeps it still somewhat there and alive. My father started the history and on his deathbed pushed me to be the new Confucius, which is a bit too tall of an order as I show in the Record, where the sagely one is nonetheless a man. As the Burning of the Books created an eternal cult of books, as Chin the uniting emperor lasted a few years but gave us a name, I with my book made China, I filled in the rap sheet, I blended the babble into a working script. I showed everything including how to deal with the royals in a not too full of shit way. Wherever you are I will always be ahead of you. Who knew that Record of the Grand Historian would be anything? It was written officially on the side, my position at Emperor Wu’s court was Grand Astrologer with minor duties. In court on the fatal day I spoke up to defend a certain general, guy I didn’t particularly like but respected, who was having a bad time with the barbarians, and Wu blew his cork and put me in the slam where, lacking the standard buyout fee, I was expected to off myself. My mistakes had been #1 speaking up, and #2 banging heads with minister Li, who was brother of Exalted Concubine Li, who later, after she got sick, famously refused to let Wu see her in a reduced condition and died. In their way the Li’s were comers, I’ll give them that. Meanwhile I had a fucking book to finish, for the sake of which I plea-bargained away the family jewels, the place where the deed is done is called the silkworm chamber. I took one for the team, and finished the Record. As a eunuch I found that I felt much more in touch with regular folk, the kind I didn’t write about...
Pan Ku
I grew up not liking Ssu-ma. My father--Pan Piao--was in the last generation that lived partly in Early Han partly in Later, and was expert in the flaws that brought the first Han down. Ssu-ma, that giant with poor discipline, was the big symbol of everything. He read everything and sampled brilliantly and left Confucius out of the equation. Even as he wrote up the sage’s life and included his Spring and Autumn Annals of Lu, which is pure morality. For Ssu-ma, as for the whole out-of-control period, Tao was a moral equivalent. Yet we respect his learning, and his willingness to call a spade a spade, and in some ultimate sense we do not even argue with the simple idea that things flourish, then decline; at an extreme position, they turn. But in the Pan family we feel that history and life are better when you have some moral sense of here you are. The Confucian method is what does this. Early Han was all chi, which means to follow the energy stream wherever it might go. Later Han mixes in li, which means ritual, rectification and bureaucratic propriety. A little restraint and life becomes more interesting; serious restraint and life gets serious. So you can see why the Pans have issues with Ssu-ma, it is a Chinese irony that I am his biographer. I simply attached to the official edition of Record of the GH his original preface which has a few details, the letter he wrote to a friend regarding being a eunuch and how not great it feels, and then I added a brief assessment of the Record of GH itself, hitting on some of the points I just mentioned. He could have done worse, and so might have the whole early dynasty without my Record of the Early Han, started by my father and continued by myself. I spent the best twenty years of my life, say age twenty-five to forty-five, on it. One brief interregnum early on when word reached the emperor that someone was working on a private history; my twin brother Ch’ao had to get me out by showing a bit of the work and representing his ass off, after that I had access to the archives. I followed somewhat the structure of the Old One, I had annals and tables and treatises; I dumped the hereditary houses section, that’s one thing the first Han got right, I re-tweaked the philosophies a bit, in place of memorials I added an anachronistic table of nineteen hundred-plus mostly ancient persons ranked in nine moral (as opposed to intellectual or materialistic) categories with Sage at the top and Ignoramus at the bottom. I moved things back in a Confucian direction and made models for life and set the standard for all future dynasty histories. I downgraded all the Early Han commentaries upon the classics that drifted off in every direction, and got back to the original classics in straight-up versions from the original script extracting the ten thousand lessons, taking life to a good level.
-- Chris Daly resides West Coast, USA, and has been in the writing life for some decades and has published in various magazines and journals. Stories recently have been in Stone Coast Review, Main Street Rag, Fleas on the Dog, Wrath Bearing Tree, Chiron Review, Cowboy Jamboree, Arrowheart, Magazine 1, Superpresent, Pure Slush and Dumbo.