Rose Angel

By Alicia Ji, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in '27 June 14, 2023

Photography by Isha Malli, Del Norte High School

She is drowning in red and gold. Silken scarlet cascades over her straining shoulders and down her back, adorned with phoenixes of floral brocade. Her butterfly lips are dipped in petals of sealing vermilion, denser than her painted immortal moth eyebrows. A pure gold palace of pearls, jade, and bu yao is woven into her towering hair. She relishes the burden of the winding loops and ties of her hair because she knows that if she is to marry him, it can only be bound into a knot. The chiming beads of her auric hairpin sway back and forth and back and forth, counting down with every imprint of her straw soles in the flakes of cotton jade, almost as white as her niveous, powdered face. She grasps an intricate fan, embroidered with golden threads of wrapping vines, suffocating tighter than a ba she python.

But it cannot mask her blazing heartache.

Buried in the endless sleeves of her da xiu shan is her most treasured general’s note painted in metallic crimson on a desperate tear of fabric: a deathbed confession of his failure to stay devoted to her until the very end. She knows. She knows that he would never rebel against his beloved country, which he has saved innumerable times. She knows that even on this auspicious, wintry day, she cannot marry the future emperor, the treacherous man who maliciously sentenced her general to a convoluted, excruciating death for a fabricated rebellion. Just ahead of her lies a golden future plump with the five plum petals of prosperity: blessings, longevity, luck, fortune, and success. Yet she cannot stop dreaming of the rich, ruby pomegranates and the blooming, fuchsia lotus flowers from the adventures with her general.

Almost drifting away, her footprints sink less and less into the paling asphodel snow. She ascends the four sets of fourteen-step stairs to the empty military post that overlooks Chang An with unfamiliar serenity. While exhaling plumes of dove feathers, she pulls out the lustrous hairpieces, drops her golden fan onto the ivory blanket, and strides over the protective railing. At last, she is free from gold. All she can see is his flaming embrace as she plunges and drowns with him in a watercolor of red, becoming Chang An’s Rose Snowangel.