Secret Diaries of A Spa Girl: January 2014

Saturday, January 25, 2014

My day with my mom

Today is a very special day for me! My mom decided to bring me to my health and dental checkup. My mom says that I'm going to spend a lot of her money and she needs to work harder in the future.

The vet says I still have a strong heart for my age (9 years old) and a very nice coat but he found out a rotten tooth. So I got scheduled for a dental cleaning and extraction. They even draw my blood today! I keep whining...

Then my mom needs to go back to work so I follow her. Ta taaaaa.... this is the place she works.

My mom is busy working on people's faces, eyebrows and lashes. I feel like I need to support her business, so I put on some makeup to look better. See I got eyebrows!

She works till 7:30pm today. We pick up our dinner on our way home. My mom doesn't cook at all but she will buy my favorite food - we got beef short ribs!

Saturday, January 18, 2014

The last empress of China

I can't get the story of this woman out of my mind - the last empress of China - Empress WanRong, after reading her biography. She was born in 1906 and died in 1946 when she was about 40 years old.

She married the last emperor at 16 years old.

Wan Rong was young, beautiful, well-educated, fluent in English and well-mannered. Pretty soon she captured the heart of the Emperor after the marriage.

Her life was easy and comfortable as the empress in the forbidden city.

After a few years with the fall of Qing Dynasty, she was expelled from the forbidden city along with the Emperor Pu Yi and Concubine Wen Xiu. Three of them living in a mansion. Wan Rong was active in the upper class social life.

Concubine Wen Xiu soon divorced Emperor Pu Yi, leaving just 2 of them Pu Yi and Wan Rong in the royal marriage. For 2000 years of Chinese history, Wen Xiu was the first concubine to divorce an Emperor. It was a great humiliation to Emperor Pu Yi. Pu Yi started to blame Wan Rong for forcing Wen Xiu away and causing him to be humiliated publicly.

Her emperor husband ran away to the north east of China to get help from the Japanese to regain the throne as the emperor. Wan Rong soon went to the north east to pursue the same path as her husband.

Both of them were controlled by the Japanese and the marriage fall apart. Realized that they are not going to regain the empire back, Emperor Pu Yi physically and mentally abused Wan Rong. She was to be blamed for everything. Empress Wan Rong was addicted to opium because of her loneliness and neglect of her husband.

After the WWII ended, Wan Rong tried to run to Korea with the help of her sister-in-law but she did not succeed. She was captured by the communist army and thrown into the prison.

Before she turned 40, she died of opium withdrawal and starvation. Her body was found in a pool of bodily fluid and buried with the rest of the prisoners.

The ending was so sad. After the failure of the royal marriage to the last emperor, Wan Rong was mentally ill, living in despair and starting to have hallucination about the glory and luxury of her empress life in the past, when the emperor was very in love with her.