The great thing about Real/Fake Princess, for me, has been how it has kept the complete courage of its convictions. The bare outlines of the story are fairly standard romance fodder: a man and a woman, each one fiery and independent in their own ways, grow closer together during a shared crisis and discover love. There’s a billion romance novels with this plot, but how the plot is played out makes all the difference, and R/FP somehow, amazingly, never manages to make a wrong step.
The final volume of the series takes everything that has been building through the course of this story and pushes it all the way to the conclusion it deserves. I could not ask for more. It gives us the “real/fake” princess of the title, Zhi Li, now in hiding from her enemies in power, and reunited at last with both Wu and Hui Tang — both of whom she has powerful and conflicting feelings for — in a rebel encampment. There is a fair amount of other plotting swirling around them during this last volume, but the really important stuff involves Zhi Li and the two men in her life, and that’s what I’ll focus on here.
The back flap of the volume describes this aspect of the story as “torn between two lovers,” which was probably not coincidentally, the title of a horribly narcissistic ‘70s hit tune. Somehow that doesn’t nail it for me, though: it’s more like one of them (Hui Tang) represents a comfortable past, and the other (Wu) represents a turbulent but thrilling future. They symbolize the different directions her life can take, and Zhi Li understands all too well that to choose one or the other may endanger them as well.
That’s what makes Zhi Li’s choices in the latter half of this final volume so impressive. Faced with the possibilities that she might endanger one or the other of them through her actions, she elects instead to return to the capitol and face certain death at the hands of the emperor for the crime of being an impostor. There’s no end of irony here, actually: the real princess is to be executed for being a fake, and even if Zhi Li wasn’t the real thing, she has the mind-set of the real thing. “I’ve decided not to get anyone else involved,” she tells herself, “or have anyone else protect me.” In a lot of stories, the moral posturing of the hero can be written off as convenience, but not here.
What I love about this series is how it is willing to do things that might come off as maudlin, but invests them with the right feelings, true feelings, to make them work. There’s a scene after Zhi Li has surrendered herself to the authorities and is waiting in a death cell to be executed. A guard comes around to serve her a meal, and they make small talk. Slowly she realizes that this man is not any old guard, but someone of incredible importance. She is being tested, and she needs to show him her true self — but for Zhi Li, this isn’t an issue anymore.
I will not ruin the conclusion here, but I will say that they find a way to make everything conclude exactly as it must. It’s also interesting to see, in that conclusion, how the story has balanced what I can only describe as modern conceits of romance (which are strongly individualistic) with its historical setting. Zhi Li is happy knowing that her death will serve the right ends, that she was able to know and communicate her real feelings for the people in her life, and that she did the right things. And there is more beyond that — again, which I won’t spoil, but closes off the story in a way that’s wholly satisfying and throws a few surprises without betraying anything.
There are few things I savor more than picking up something that I know nothing about — or that I would not have been inclined to touch at all — and having my expectations both surpassed and subverted. Real/Fake Princess was one of the big winners of 2007 in that respect. My only question: When do we get to see something else from I-Huan?
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