(urth) Short Story 64: When I was Ming the Merciless

[Marc Aramini]

“When I Was Ming the Merciless” is copyright 1975 and appeared in *The Ides
of Tomorrow*.  It is collected in *Endangered Species.*

SUMMARY:

The narrator is interrogated after an experiment on distributing resources
with different groups of people goes awry.  He defends his actions in
creating an Empire from the yellow group of the experiment, subjugating the
green and blue groups, who, even if they were known before the experiment,
were treated as people without names or identities.  They create weapons
such as polearms and swords and forge a dragon banner, and at the end the
speaker orders his underlings to kill a woman, who is eviscerated.  Since
she was being monitored by the outside world, her death summons the
psychaids to break through the barriers and put the experiment to a stop,
though the Yellow group still fights against them with their inferior jury
rigged weapons.

COMMENTARY:

A relatively straightforward story, there are still a few things worth
mentioning.  This is obviously an outgrowth of the results of Zimbardo’s
Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 in which volunteers to be treated as
prisoners and guards were selected.  Originally scheduled for two weeks,
after six days it was disbanded because of the observations and interviews
of a psych student who questioned the morality of the experiment as a
whole, which was encouraging depression in those playing prisoners and
authoritarian abuse in those who were enacting the roles of guards.  This
story seems to involve world resources and how competing groups could come
to share them, and this particular group has chosen subjugation and
violence to achieve its ends.  It might also echo the Blue-eye, Brown-eye
classroom experiment carried out after Martin Luther King’s assassination
in the refusal of allowing mixing between the color groups (in this case,
Yellow, Green, and Blue) though this seems imposed to some degree by the
leader’s decree in the story.

THE WEAPONS:

Simple engineering of brooms and mops with cleavers, knives, and scarf
joints allow polearms to be formed, and the swords were made from metal
reinforcing bars under the floor and beaten into swords.  The speaker’s own
sword had a bone handle (What kind of bone?).  It is quite clear that the
leader has been changed to some degree by his experience in a way that
removing him from the environment is not going to eliminate: “Out here
there will be more scope for ingenuity; we might even be able to get hold
of some fissionables.  Just joking, of course.”

THEME:

Naturally this story is important because it introduces one of Wolfe’s most
enduring themes: Imitation begets reality.  If we pretend to be something,
we become it.  However, there is still room for this to be something of a
fantasy story in its atavistic totem treatment of the Lung-Rin and the
effigy of the speaker:

“There are things we don’t know about that live in the world with us –
things in another plane of reality.  And when you make something like that,
it comes – one of them comes.  It shapes itself to fit your image of it,
becoming the real Spirit of the Yellows. Anyway, when we had the torchlight
processions, sometimes you might think you could see it move. … We caught
rats and pigeons when we built it and put them inside, so it would make
strange sounds; some of them must have lived a long time. .. You can’t kill
the *thing*, the Spirit of the Yellows.  Not unless you kill all of us.  We’ll
be free some day.”

The threat of getting fissionables and the story of the “something” that
takes over: “when a man – a male, let’s call him – has been fighting a
woman, and he wins and knocks her down, and she drops whatever it is she
has, a club or whatever … and often her shirt and shorts are torn, there is
an impulse that takes command … and then, when a woman has had that happen
once or twice, it takes everything out of them. … Some of the men said that
they really liked it, underneath, but I don’t think so.”

This dominant, conquering, raping “impulse” is given flesh, and the
implication is that the leader, with all his self-justification, still
implies that no one really likes it, but it happens of itself.

The story also shows the circle of power fairly effectively: “Each of us
would tell the rotten things that had happened to him … but we were all
thinking that it wasn’t like that here.  We were all together – all Yellows
together. … We swore that we were going to stand together or fall
together.”

Yet this solidarity imposes its rules on others: “I don’t feel bad about
her, whoever she was.  We were all volunteers … she kept getting out of
line, over and over again, when she was just a stinking Green or Blue or
whatever she was.  I can’t even remember.  So I decided she should be
punished.  We made a ceremony out of it, with fire in the braziers, and the
big gong. … Jan put the sword through her belly … she liked the blood from
the blade.”  From the determination to make the world better when they are
in charge because terrible things happened to them outside before, they
fail to recognize the humanity of any other group, and create something
just as or even more horrific.

LUNG-RIN

While it is easy enough to associate the symbolism of the Lung-Rin
(according to our speaker, an image of two dragons fighting sewn from the
back of his shirt) with China and its Yellow Emperor, said to be descended
from the dragon, (Lung is, of course, a dragon), Rin is a bit more
problematic it is a Japanese name and can be used in speaking of something
cold, but I would prefer to stick with the Chinese connotations.  Is this a
combination of the mythical Kirin with the dragon?  The Kirin does serve to
herald the arrival or passing of a great leader.  In the early Chinese
representations, the dragon was said to assimilate the features of those it
conquered, thus becoming more like a Chimera than one unified creature.  While
the color Yellow obviously impels them to identify themselves as Mongolia,
shortening it to the Mongo hoard allows the leader to actually, perhaps in
jest, perhaps seriously, assume the persona of Ming the Merciless,
obviously the leader of the Mongos in Flash Gordon.

The overarching theme seen here, that we become what we pretend to be, will
be recapitulated over and over in Wolfe, for good and for bad.

STEREOTYPING:

While this story may at the surface be guilty of stereotyping (Ming the
Merciless is a fairly negative Chinese stereotype to begin with, and the
group identifying itself as Mongolia/Mongo based on their yellow bands and
clothing does tend to latch on to an obvious color association) … at its
heart the construction shows how easily it is to fall into arbitrary groups
and deny the humanity of others, even when we believe ourselves to be just.
Thus the hunger for control and respect makes the leader something of a
superstitious totalitarian stereotype.  I feel that the stereotypes are
intentional, self-conscious, and fit the theme of the story.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

Are there any real distinctions in the groups that justify differences in
behavior before the experiment? (ie – Greens being culled from hard
sciences rather than soft sciences?)  The theme would seem to be no – that
there is no difference in behavior based on any pre-existing class or
state, as the new world order is immersive and subjectively “real”.

What kind of bone handle does the leader’s sword have?

APPENDIX: Unstated questions.

They are ultimately extremely predictable though they are elided from the
text to present the pure voice of the leader trapped in his relative
delusions.  They would usually appear between every paragraph.  This allows
the leader’s voice to predominate the text to culminate in his absurd
claims:  “none of you could possibly know how it was then, when I was Ming
the Merciless.”

“Welcome.”

“Is there anything you would like to say?”

“Would you like a cigarette?”

“Why was there no coffee?”

?”What went wrong [during the experiment]?” (It is unclear what the
question is at this point, to which our narrator responds: “Odd that you
should put it as you did.  Because I’ve thought of it so often myself,
since the end, in just that way”)

“Aren’t you ashamed?” which is silenced.

“Relax/Calm down.”

“Tell us about your leadership tricks/weapons/how you did it?”

“Do you feel the need to justify yourself?”

“Time spent doing what?”

“Are you okay?”

There may be several paragraphs with no questions while he describes making
weapons.

“Would you like to see your sword?”

“What is [the Lung-Rin]?”

“Was that your god?”

“No, we haven’t talked to Don.”

“What happened to [the Spirit of the Yellows]?

“What did you talk about outside?”

“No. The recorder stays on.”

“Did the women want to fight?”

“Were you a government/sociology/psych student?” (hard to determine which
major they attempted to pigeonhole him in after he claimed he wasn’t
Emperor).

“Were there differences?”

“Did you let [the rapists/abusers from other colors] join you?”

“So you tried to take the colors off?”

“Were the brave women’s shirts in a similar torn state?”

“The colors could not band together?”

“The Greens had no fighters?”

“Can you tell us what all this was about?”

“What did you call your Empire?”

“How do you feel about killing [the girl]?”

“Did you kill her yourself?”

“And that was when the experiment stopped?” (Or something to that effect)

“Do you understand how we feel about this?”
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