A slight digression.
Feb. 5th, 2002 10:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynI realise I promised that the next entry would talk about the Xiang sisters, but Liang and Hua aren't cooperating right now. Liang is almost pathologically shy, for some reason, and Hua is off on a gallery tour or something. All I can get out of her in the way of detail is 'four kids, Chinese equivalent of Jackson Pollock, cheerfully acknowledges that she's as insane as the rest of the family, married to a mild-mannered fellow who spends most of his life bemused by his wife's behavior and looking after the kids, Ho's favourite aunt'. She's got a picture in the Pens Gallery which is something of a nightmare - she was my first experiment with the Rapidograph pens, and her hair looks like she was either lit by about twenty different klieg lights or attacked by a mad stylist carrying swabs loaded with bleach. Mind you, knowing Hua, there's a good chance that it's not highlights, and that all the weird highlightey patches are either bleach or paint blobs. . . that's just an excuse for getting overenthusiastic and using her as a scratch monkey for the new pens, but still, it could be in-character for her, for all I know. Despite being the younger of the girls, Hua is the more dominant personality. Liang takes after her mother and would hide from the rest of the family if she could. God knows she's hiding from me. Might be a preschool teacher or something, I don't know. Hua was born a year or two before Yu... hm, for some reason I'm getting a weird 'twins' vibe off the girls. That might explain a bit. Anyway, that's all I can quite dig up on the girls. I'll let you know if there's any more.
Right now the big thing rolling through my head is Fang (big surprise). He's an active character right now, so more will develop on him as time goes on, but he started off at Ashes with only about a paragraph or two of background. Hashing out a bit more about him here should help me get him clearer in my mind.
Now let's see if I have this cut-tag thing right.
M'kay, here we go. After their fourth child was born, Xiang Zhenhua and his wife were reasonably sure they'd accomplished all they had set out to accomplish with their family, and stopped trying for more. When his wife (who I have yet to name - blaah) started noticing irregularities in what had previously been an almost clockwork-precise cycle- along with weird fluctuations in mood and body temperature - she inwardly rejoiced. The precautionary measures they'd been taking were on the distracting side. Believing it was safe already, she let her guard down for a few months. The hormonal fluctuations in temperament and physical condition continued, even as the cycle stopped dead. All was going as she and her husband believed it should. . .
And then, some four months later, something kicked.
The baby was born September 25, 1969, and slapped with the milkname Jingqi - 'surprise'. Being eight years younger than his nearest sibling, Yu, he wound up alternately spoiled and ignored. His parents adored him, but they really hadn't been expecting any more, and it was a little hard to get back into baby-rearing mode. By the time he was old enough to cause trouble (roughly the time he learned to crawl), he'd been more or less given into the care of his brothers. Yu didn't mind too much, because it meant he had someone littler than him to boss around, but Hong went nuts. The last thing he wanted was someone else to take up what little personal space he had. Hua and Liang loved playing with him, it'd been a while since Yu had been little enough to dress up and haul around, but the boys were expected to do most of the looking-after, on the grounds that he was their brother and would be sharing their room.
Jingqi learned early that the only way to get attention was to earn it. More often than not, that meant getting into scrapes that'd force his brothers to rescue him. Hong got tired of this eventually, but Yu played along for some time, until he too got bored of the game. Jingqi's brief foray into blame-it-on-someone-else prankery ended badly, with his apparently humorless eldest brother displaying a heretofore unknown talent for skullduggery and pranking him right back - and making the unbelievable mess around him look like it was Jingqi's fault. Punishment did not suit his tastes at all, so he settled for making himself stand out in ways that wouldn't get him smacked. It was something of a relief to his brothers, but he was still irritating.
At least he wasn't sent to the same school as them. His teachers were not particularly amused by his antics, and thought they reflected badly on his family. Even for a four-year-old he caused an unnecessary amount of trouble (yes, school started that early for him - I started attending school and learning to read at the age of three, and that's in America.) He had a talent for memorizing things quickly, which was a small mercy, but he was already something of a glory hound and few of the teachers were willing to put up with that. The one who got him when he was six was a sweet young lady who really didn't deserve him, or some of the other brats in her class. One day her temper frayed entirely too far. She assigned every child in the class a teaching-song to memorize. Most of them got simple little things befitting their age group. Qiaomiao (his parents had changed his name to 'ingenious' when he started school) got something twice as long and four times as difficult. The teacher had several other kids stand up and perform first, then pointed to him. Not only had he successfully committed the whole thing to memory, but he blew the room away...
That was pretty much the end of the boy's academic career. His parents got called in for a conference, and there was much discussion. His mother turned to her past employers for advice. The boy had no idea of all of this going on behind the scenes, of course. He just knew that he got taken out of his original school and sent to a different one, one that concentrated on much more entertaining things. Opera school was cool.
He loved it. He absolutely loved it. The other kids were in the same boat he was, and while there were boys who were as grouchy at him as his oldest brother - or worse - there were also boys his own age, and they liked him. There was all kinds of stuff to learn, and new ways to attract attention, and things to learn and get right, and, and, and. . . Zhenhua and his wife breathed a massive sigh of relief when the reports started coming back about what a model student he was, and how good he was at learning the discipline that would one day be required of him for adult roles in full-scale Chinese opera. It looked like all he'd really needed was the right sort of structure and the right stuff to catch his interests.
The boy got an unlooked-for present on his twelfth birthday. His voice cracked for the first time during vocal exercises. Changing that early was not entirely unheard of in his family, but he took some ribbing for it in school. The teachers started pushing him in the direction of wusheng (martial) parts just in case he came out of it with a lackluster voice. As it turned out, he didn't; he settled into a very acceptable baritone within a year and a half or so. More than acceptable, once he got used to the new sound. His parents, hearing him perform for the first time after the squeaking stopped, decided it was time to go for the big time and made inquiries to the Beijing School of Opera. The School was receptive to the prospect, so the kid got a trip to the mainland. What nobody had quite reckoned on was that when the voice changes, other things start changing as well. Zhenhua really should've kept a closer watch on his son. He slipped away several evenings, curious about the place - and the people - and the girls. Especially the girls. Especially that one fifteen-year-old who confided in him that she was sneaking out from under her father's eye, too, and thought he was cute, and offered to teach him a few things he wouldn't learn in school. . .
The next day there was an interview with a school admissions official named Xue Cai. Mr. Xue was a large, old, cranky man with a fondness for politics and something of a dislike for southerners like the Xiang family. He was also a man with a fifteen year old daughter who always seemed much too tired and distracted in the mornings to be up to anything good. Somewhere along the way he mentioned this with an air of weary disgust. Qiaomiao, for lack of anything better to say, apologized for keeping her out so late.
It went downhill from there. Suffice it to say that he did not get in.
Qiaomiao changed his name after that to the relatively innocuous-sounding 'Fang' (visit). The incident won him the label of family disgrace. Well aware that he'd ruined his own chances, Fang hastily started planning out a new future, no small feat at his age. There was always local theater, and the movies didn't always care if you had high-class training or not. . .although they did seem to like it if you knew English. His had never been the best. There was something about the pronunciations he just couldn't seem to get right. That'd be fine if he got himself a career doing things backstage, but if he wanted to be in front of the cameras, or even just in front of the footlights, he'd have to do better. Dialogue coaches were expensive, though, well out of his range, and he didn't dare ask his family for help on that front. It was a hell of a thing to ponder. A trip to the movies seemed just the thing to help him work it out, so he headed over to one of his favourite theatres. They always seemed to have cool stuff, even if it was generally a couple of years out of date. It happened that they'd gotten hold of a cargo of old James Bond reels. Fang plunked down his money and sat himself down in the back row in time for the opening credits of "Thunderball".
It was love at first sight. Fang started salting away whatever money he could, and during what little spare time he had (he was still in opera training, after all - just not at anything so grandiose as the Beijing School), he could usually be found in the theater, attention riveted to the screen. If he happened to be reciting the lines under his breath along with Connery or Moore or whoever the flavour of the week was, so what? Nobody really noticed. He eventually managed to cadge a few favours and get himself a VCR and a small television, and his English skills took off like a rocket. Got slapped a few times in the process, though - he tried practicing his newfound facility with the language on women he heard speaking English before he had anything close to Bond's smoothness with the ladies. It took him some time to figure out that no, nobody actually named their daughters that way. Nevertheless, he persevered.
Worked out awfully well, too. He made a number of pretty good friends that way, mostly among the backstage crowd. When he wasn't getting parts suited to his somewhat hammy acting style or his still-brilliant voice, he cheerfully took whatever work he could find. Usually that meant stage hand stuff. He needed to support his Bond habit, after all. A few of the other stage hands were about his age and were big fans of Western cinema, too. The best friend to come out of the bunch was a guy by the name of Wu Wei, who had come to Hong Kong for the sort of work experience you just couldn't find in his native Beijing. They roomed together for a time to save on expenses. When Wei headed home in May of 1989, he promised Fang he'd be keeping in touch, and he was as good as his word, even suggesting that Fang keep an eye on the international news sometime in early June, as he was visiting some people who had Big Plans for that week. So Fang watched, and cheered the first time he saw his friend among the students. . .
He did not cheer after that. He just kept watching. Once, he got up and looked at the wall calendar, and did some mental math. Then he went back to watching. Eventually he managed to tear himself away long enough to cross town and ring his parents' doorbell. They'd been watching, too. There was no talk of disgrace or wasted potential that night. They knew. They all knew.
Fang started the process of trying to emigrate in July. There was no way, absolutely no way,, he was going to stay around when the PRC took over. Not after what he'd seen. No way. He wouldn't last a week when they came to town, he just knew it. He wanted as much distance - physically and ideologically - as possible between him and them. The United States was his first choice, as Yu (he refused to call him James) had already moved there and had even had a son, but he busied himself sounding out all the alternatives, even going so far at one point as to consider Argentina. The process was painfully long, and on more than one occasion he seriously considered abandoning legal means. Never got quite that frustrated, though, if only because that particular train of thought inevitably ended with his new country finding out and deporting him back just in time for the handover. When Zhenhua was felled by a heart attack in 1993, Yu and Hua came back from the States for the funeral, bringing their families and their stories of various parts of California. It only strengthened Fang's resolve to get the hell out of town.
Somewhere during the course of the funeral arrangements Little Yu, James' son, tugged on Fang's sleeve and asked what was going on. Daddy had explained that it had been Grandpa Zhenhua's time to go and that he was in heaven now, but Little Yu wasn't sure he liked that answer. It didn't explain anything. Fang's few experiences with Christianity had not impressed him, and he felt his brother was doing the boy a disservice by raising him to believe in such nonsense, so he took Little Yu aside and quietly explained that Grandpa Zhenhua was dead. He'd lived a good long time, and he'd worked very hard all his life, but he'd worked so hard that he became very sick and wore out his heart. When his heart had stopped working he'd died, and in forty-nine days he'd be judged and probably sent somewhere else to be born as somebody else and make up for the mistakes he'd made during his lifetime. This seemed to console the boy a great deal, and Yu went away happy. It caused some bad blood between Fang and James, though; with a sigh Fang started looking into other parts of the United States, as he somehow doubted he'd be welcome in San Francisco, the way his brother was behaving.
Sometime in the course of the next year things started looking up for Fang's quest for a way out. He made a number of contacts in Vancouver's Chinese community, as well as in Washington State. One of them was a fellow performer, a dancer by the name of Beric (I would give his full name here but RL I can never remember the rest of it - sorry!), who was more than happy to give him some pointers on the immigration process. One of them was to give a different profession to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as actors were a dime a dozen but skilled workers in other areas of entertainment were in high demand. A bit more nosing around got him the name of a university administrator in Bay City, a Washington State town with a thriving Chinese community, and it wasn't long before he had himself a sponsor and an employment slot waiting. Granted, it was as a stagehand in the University's drama department, but so what? It was America. They were willing to let him in. And the local government had finally agreed that it would be okay for him to leave. None too soon, either, it was 1996 and Fang could hear the tanks rumbling their way towards Hong Kong. . .
That's pretty much the point at which Fang started at Ashes. He's had some interesting adventures since then, but I've rambled on enough for today, I think. In his honor, today's pulp survival tip is #66: Democracy and republican forms of government work great in America, but being loud about how wonderful they are in comparison to the local form of government is a great way to wind up in an Evil Villain's prison.
Right now the big thing rolling through my head is Fang (big surprise). He's an active character right now, so more will develop on him as time goes on, but he started off at Ashes with only about a paragraph or two of background. Hashing out a bit more about him here should help me get him clearer in my mind.
Now let's see if I have this cut-tag thing right.
M'kay, here we go. After their fourth child was born, Xiang Zhenhua and his wife were reasonably sure they'd accomplished all they had set out to accomplish with their family, and stopped trying for more. When his wife (who I have yet to name - blaah) started noticing irregularities in what had previously been an almost clockwork-precise cycle- along with weird fluctuations in mood and body temperature - she inwardly rejoiced. The precautionary measures they'd been taking were on the distracting side. Believing it was safe already, she let her guard down for a few months. The hormonal fluctuations in temperament and physical condition continued, even as the cycle stopped dead. All was going as she and her husband believed it should. . .
And then, some four months later, something kicked.
The baby was born September 25, 1969, and slapped with the milkname Jingqi - 'surprise'. Being eight years younger than his nearest sibling, Yu, he wound up alternately spoiled and ignored. His parents adored him, but they really hadn't been expecting any more, and it was a little hard to get back into baby-rearing mode. By the time he was old enough to cause trouble (roughly the time he learned to crawl), he'd been more or less given into the care of his brothers. Yu didn't mind too much, because it meant he had someone littler than him to boss around, but Hong went nuts. The last thing he wanted was someone else to take up what little personal space he had. Hua and Liang loved playing with him, it'd been a while since Yu had been little enough to dress up and haul around, but the boys were expected to do most of the looking-after, on the grounds that he was their brother and would be sharing their room.
Jingqi learned early that the only way to get attention was to earn it. More often than not, that meant getting into scrapes that'd force his brothers to rescue him. Hong got tired of this eventually, but Yu played along for some time, until he too got bored of the game. Jingqi's brief foray into blame-it-on-someone-else prankery ended badly, with his apparently humorless eldest brother displaying a heretofore unknown talent for skullduggery and pranking him right back - and making the unbelievable mess around him look like it was Jingqi's fault. Punishment did not suit his tastes at all, so he settled for making himself stand out in ways that wouldn't get him smacked. It was something of a relief to his brothers, but he was still irritating.
At least he wasn't sent to the same school as them. His teachers were not particularly amused by his antics, and thought they reflected badly on his family. Even for a four-year-old he caused an unnecessary amount of trouble (yes, school started that early for him - I started attending school and learning to read at the age of three, and that's in America.) He had a talent for memorizing things quickly, which was a small mercy, but he was already something of a glory hound and few of the teachers were willing to put up with that. The one who got him when he was six was a sweet young lady who really didn't deserve him, or some of the other brats in her class. One day her temper frayed entirely too far. She assigned every child in the class a teaching-song to memorize. Most of them got simple little things befitting their age group. Qiaomiao (his parents had changed his name to 'ingenious' when he started school) got something twice as long and four times as difficult. The teacher had several other kids stand up and perform first, then pointed to him. Not only had he successfully committed the whole thing to memory, but he blew the room away...
That was pretty much the end of the boy's academic career. His parents got called in for a conference, and there was much discussion. His mother turned to her past employers for advice. The boy had no idea of all of this going on behind the scenes, of course. He just knew that he got taken out of his original school and sent to a different one, one that concentrated on much more entertaining things. Opera school was cool.
He loved it. He absolutely loved it. The other kids were in the same boat he was, and while there were boys who were as grouchy at him as his oldest brother - or worse - there were also boys his own age, and they liked him. There was all kinds of stuff to learn, and new ways to attract attention, and things to learn and get right, and, and, and. . . Zhenhua and his wife breathed a massive sigh of relief when the reports started coming back about what a model student he was, and how good he was at learning the discipline that would one day be required of him for adult roles in full-scale Chinese opera. It looked like all he'd really needed was the right sort of structure and the right stuff to catch his interests.
The boy got an unlooked-for present on his twelfth birthday. His voice cracked for the first time during vocal exercises. Changing that early was not entirely unheard of in his family, but he took some ribbing for it in school. The teachers started pushing him in the direction of wusheng (martial) parts just in case he came out of it with a lackluster voice. As it turned out, he didn't; he settled into a very acceptable baritone within a year and a half or so. More than acceptable, once he got used to the new sound. His parents, hearing him perform for the first time after the squeaking stopped, decided it was time to go for the big time and made inquiries to the Beijing School of Opera. The School was receptive to the prospect, so the kid got a trip to the mainland. What nobody had quite reckoned on was that when the voice changes, other things start changing as well. Zhenhua really should've kept a closer watch on his son. He slipped away several evenings, curious about the place - and the people - and the girls. Especially the girls. Especially that one fifteen-year-old who confided in him that she was sneaking out from under her father's eye, too, and thought he was cute, and offered to teach him a few things he wouldn't learn in school. . .
The next day there was an interview with a school admissions official named Xue Cai. Mr. Xue was a large, old, cranky man with a fondness for politics and something of a dislike for southerners like the Xiang family. He was also a man with a fifteen year old daughter who always seemed much too tired and distracted in the mornings to be up to anything good. Somewhere along the way he mentioned this with an air of weary disgust. Qiaomiao, for lack of anything better to say, apologized for keeping her out so late.
It went downhill from there. Suffice it to say that he did not get in.
Qiaomiao changed his name after that to the relatively innocuous-sounding 'Fang' (visit). The incident won him the label of family disgrace. Well aware that he'd ruined his own chances, Fang hastily started planning out a new future, no small feat at his age. There was always local theater, and the movies didn't always care if you had high-class training or not. . .although they did seem to like it if you knew English. His had never been the best. There was something about the pronunciations he just couldn't seem to get right. That'd be fine if he got himself a career doing things backstage, but if he wanted to be in front of the cameras, or even just in front of the footlights, he'd have to do better. Dialogue coaches were expensive, though, well out of his range, and he didn't dare ask his family for help on that front. It was a hell of a thing to ponder. A trip to the movies seemed just the thing to help him work it out, so he headed over to one of his favourite theatres. They always seemed to have cool stuff, even if it was generally a couple of years out of date. It happened that they'd gotten hold of a cargo of old James Bond reels. Fang plunked down his money and sat himself down in the back row in time for the opening credits of "Thunderball".
It was love at first sight. Fang started salting away whatever money he could, and during what little spare time he had (he was still in opera training, after all - just not at anything so grandiose as the Beijing School), he could usually be found in the theater, attention riveted to the screen. If he happened to be reciting the lines under his breath along with Connery or Moore or whoever the flavour of the week was, so what? Nobody really noticed. He eventually managed to cadge a few favours and get himself a VCR and a small television, and his English skills took off like a rocket. Got slapped a few times in the process, though - he tried practicing his newfound facility with the language on women he heard speaking English before he had anything close to Bond's smoothness with the ladies. It took him some time to figure out that no, nobody actually named their daughters that way. Nevertheless, he persevered.
Worked out awfully well, too. He made a number of pretty good friends that way, mostly among the backstage crowd. When he wasn't getting parts suited to his somewhat hammy acting style or his still-brilliant voice, he cheerfully took whatever work he could find. Usually that meant stage hand stuff. He needed to support his Bond habit, after all. A few of the other stage hands were about his age and were big fans of Western cinema, too. The best friend to come out of the bunch was a guy by the name of Wu Wei, who had come to Hong Kong for the sort of work experience you just couldn't find in his native Beijing. They roomed together for a time to save on expenses. When Wei headed home in May of 1989, he promised Fang he'd be keeping in touch, and he was as good as his word, even suggesting that Fang keep an eye on the international news sometime in early June, as he was visiting some people who had Big Plans for that week. So Fang watched, and cheered the first time he saw his friend among the students. . .
He did not cheer after that. He just kept watching. Once, he got up and looked at the wall calendar, and did some mental math. Then he went back to watching. Eventually he managed to tear himself away long enough to cross town and ring his parents' doorbell. They'd been watching, too. There was no talk of disgrace or wasted potential that night. They knew. They all knew.
Fang started the process of trying to emigrate in July. There was no way, absolutely no way,, he was going to stay around when the PRC took over. Not after what he'd seen. No way. He wouldn't last a week when they came to town, he just knew it. He wanted as much distance - physically and ideologically - as possible between him and them. The United States was his first choice, as Yu (he refused to call him James) had already moved there and had even had a son, but he busied himself sounding out all the alternatives, even going so far at one point as to consider Argentina. The process was painfully long, and on more than one occasion he seriously considered abandoning legal means. Never got quite that frustrated, though, if only because that particular train of thought inevitably ended with his new country finding out and deporting him back just in time for the handover. When Zhenhua was felled by a heart attack in 1993, Yu and Hua came back from the States for the funeral, bringing their families and their stories of various parts of California. It only strengthened Fang's resolve to get the hell out of town.
Somewhere during the course of the funeral arrangements Little Yu, James' son, tugged on Fang's sleeve and asked what was going on. Daddy had explained that it had been Grandpa Zhenhua's time to go and that he was in heaven now, but Little Yu wasn't sure he liked that answer. It didn't explain anything. Fang's few experiences with Christianity had not impressed him, and he felt his brother was doing the boy a disservice by raising him to believe in such nonsense, so he took Little Yu aside and quietly explained that Grandpa Zhenhua was dead. He'd lived a good long time, and he'd worked very hard all his life, but he'd worked so hard that he became very sick and wore out his heart. When his heart had stopped working he'd died, and in forty-nine days he'd be judged and probably sent somewhere else to be born as somebody else and make up for the mistakes he'd made during his lifetime. This seemed to console the boy a great deal, and Yu went away happy. It caused some bad blood between Fang and James, though; with a sigh Fang started looking into other parts of the United States, as he somehow doubted he'd be welcome in San Francisco, the way his brother was behaving.
Sometime in the course of the next year things started looking up for Fang's quest for a way out. He made a number of contacts in Vancouver's Chinese community, as well as in Washington State. One of them was a fellow performer, a dancer by the name of Beric (I would give his full name here but RL I can never remember the rest of it - sorry!), who was more than happy to give him some pointers on the immigration process. One of them was to give a different profession to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as actors were a dime a dozen but skilled workers in other areas of entertainment were in high demand. A bit more nosing around got him the name of a university administrator in Bay City, a Washington State town with a thriving Chinese community, and it wasn't long before he had himself a sponsor and an employment slot waiting. Granted, it was as a stagehand in the University's drama department, but so what? It was America. They were willing to let him in. And the local government had finally agreed that it would be okay for him to leave. None too soon, either, it was 1996 and Fang could hear the tanks rumbling their way towards Hong Kong. . .
That's pretty much the point at which Fang started at Ashes. He's had some interesting adventures since then, but I've rambled on enough for today, I think. In his honor, today's pulp survival tip is #66: Democracy and republican forms of government work great in America, but being loud about how wonderful they are in comparison to the local form of government is a great way to wind up in an Evil Villain's prison.
