#and my hair style could still be considered traditionally 'female' it's not like I decided to shave my head or anything

[newt-and-salamander]

Thinking about that boy I knew from university who started flirting with me at some point. He kept telling me my hair looked great. (I had rather shortish hair at that point, about chin-lenght.)

After a few weeks he asked me out and I declined. It wasn't that awkward and we stayed casual friends (he was part of my friend group as well). But some time later he started to tell me that I should let my hair grow because it would look better.

I honestly can't remember my reaction (I don't think it was very quick-witted). But every once in a while I think of him and honestly don't know whether I want to laugh or shout because The Audacity.

I cut my hair even shorter two weeks ago and ever since then I notice men who really aren't entitled to any opinion (like my boss or a friend's father) comment on my hair style in "neutral" ways like "Oh, your hair is short" or "it certainly looks practical" or "now that's a change" and it just baffles me because ... its ... MY????? hair. And it isn't that much of a change, it was rather short before (and it's not that short now!). I'm just a person who fills in Excel sheets for you or goes for a walk with your daughter, why do you think you need to "politely" express your discontent with my looks??

[alarawriting]

52 Project #42: Lineage

The air outside Jiangpao International Airport was hot and humid. Karula had always found her home too cold except in midsummer, so it felt good to her, the hot air against her skin making her finally feel almost warm enough. Taxi drivers called out to her urgently, aggressively marketing their services.

“Lady! I can take you to Jiangpao, very cheaply! I have the best rates of anyone here!”

“Younger sister, I’ve got a luxury car! I can take you to Jiangpao in the greatest comfort! You want to hire me!”

“My car’s the fastest, lady!”

One of the taxi drivers – a young man, maybe her own age, maybe even younger – with a mop of unruly black hair, slightly overlong for Senchai men’s fashion, came over to her and gestured at her large, heavy suitcase. “Elder sister, can I take your bag? All these drivers yelling at you probably don’t realize you want some peace and quiet after your long flight.”

Karula smiled. “I’m not going to Jiangpao, though. I’m headed to Nandijao.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I can take you there, sure,” he said. “My rates are very good.”

“Well, you’re the only one who decided not to yell at me from your car, so sure. Take my bag.”

“Your Senchai’sho is very good,” he said as he loaded the suitcase in the trunk of his taxi. “I can barely tell you have an accent. Where are you from?”

“Foirais,” Karula said, “but both my mother and father came from here.”

“Ah. I think everyone seeing a woman who looks Senchai’in, dressed in Southern clothing and too young to be a business executive, probably assumed you were from the South; that’s why they were yelling. But most of them probably thought you were one of the Given-Away Girls, not your mother.”

“Is that what you’re calling them over here?” She dug the disused seat belt out of the crevice of the taxi’s seat. “Given-Away Girls?”

“Well, they were given away,” the taxi driver said apologetically. “It’s not a slur or anything like that.”

He pulled out of the taxi roundabout and gently followed the flow of traffic toward the highway. “So what brings you to Senchai?”

“I’m researching my past, and I’m an anthropology student doing graduate work on Senchai’a folklore,” she said. “So I’ll be going to the Great Library.”

“Oh!” The taxi driver glanced back at her, sounding genuinely impressed. “You got your approval papers? They don’t usually let foreigners into the Great Library.”

“Of course.” She’d hardly have flown all the way from Foirais if she didn’t have all her permits in order to do what she’d come to do. “My cousin is a physics professor at Nandijao University, so she pulled some strings.”

“But you said you were researching your past?”

“My mother’s heritage,” Karula said. “My father—” was a philosophy student at the University who became a dissident, and had to flee to Foirais to stay out of prison—“grew up in Nandijao. But my mother was, as you say, a Given-Away Girl, so we don’t have any idea who her relatives are. All we know is what town she was born in.”

“Well, if it’s a small town and you know her birthdate, the records at the Great Library might help you narrow it down, but I don’t envy you. It’s got to be like looking for a single worm in an entire barrel of rice.”

It would be. The Given-Away Girls – she’d never heard the term before, but it seemed so perfect, she wondered why not – had birth certificates that showed their actual town of birth and birth date, but their parents’ names had been replaced by their adoptive parents. Girls had traditionally been seen as a burden in Senchai – parents had to raise a dowry for them, and then the girls ended up caring for their in-laws once they were elderly, not their own parents. When demographics in the wealthy nations of the South, like Foirais, had shifted so that there were far fewer children available for adoption, parents in Senchai had learned that if they gave away their daughters at birth, they would receive large sums of money.

Fueled by the promise of riches and the desire to send their daughters to a place where girls were valuable enough that adoptive parents would pay large sums to have a daughter, a place where their girls might grow up to be wealthy and secure, many, many parents gave up their daughters for adoption… to the point where the female population dropped low enough that the government of Senchai outlawed dowry, and made such adoptions require permits that were rarely given. But by the time the government took action, over a hundred thousand daughters of Senchai had been adopted out to other nations, the history of the families they came from lost to them forever.

With a father who had family back in Senchai, Karula Lefaire – her mother’s name, which was traditional in Foirais for women – had more resources to research the issue than most of the Given-Away Girls or their children did. And she also had more reason to.

“It’ll be difficult, but I’ll enjoy the challenge,” Karula said. “And it gives me a good excuse to do research for my thesis.”

***

From Jiangpao International Airport, it was an hour and a half to her cousin Ren Seiri’s house. Small talk with the taxi driver passed some of the time, but Karula was very relieved when she arrived. She was by nature too solitary to truly enjoy being locked in a small metal box with another person for an hour unless they were a good friend.

Ren Seiri greeted her at the door. “Younger cousin!  Come in, come in! I’ll have my son take your bag—”

“Don’t trouble him, I can carry it. I’m stronger than I look.”

“Nonsense, you’re a guest and you’re family from a long way away. Jai! Come help our cousin with her bag!”

Jai, who more or less bounced into the room, turned out to be around 14, taller than Karula but skinnier, and she was herself a thin woman. “Elder cousin, no, don’t burden your son! I can carry it!”

“No, no, elder cousin!” Jai said. “I’ve been lifting weights! Look!” He grunted as he lifted the suitcase over his head. It had wheels, but plainly he didn’t want to use them on the lacquered bamboo floor.

“Oh, well, that is impressive,” Karula said.

“Let me show you to your room, and then you must come have some tea. Perhaps some sweet bean buns. Or some real food. I have barbeque pork rolls and cold eel dumplings.” Seiri’s doctorate and professorship apparently didn’t stop her from behaving exactly like any stereotypical Senchai’in mother.

Ren Seiri was the daughter of Karula’s father’s significantly older brother. She was not quite twice Karula’s age, but she was plainly getting there. She was wearing a dress of Southern styling, but beautiful silk dyed in a very Senchai’a pattern, and elegant soft house slippers. Karula replaced her own shoes with house slippers before following Seiri and her son.

She finally got some time to herself by insisting she needed a shower and a change of clothes. It was an excuse, but a good one. Most people would, in fact, need a shower and change of clothes after so much time in the Senchai’a heat. Karula, unlike most people, hadn’t sweated into her clothes at all, and she found the air conditioning oppressive enough that she turned it off in her bedroom and then opened all the windows, letting the heat in. She ran her shower as hot as she could stand it, and pinned her long hair up while it was still fairly wet because the wet hair was chilly on her neck. The traditional Senchai’a gown and robe she dressed in were silk, but heavy enough to keep the heat in… not generally something a Senchai’in, or in fact anybody, would wear in high summer, but it would keep the bugs off, and it looked lighter and cooler than it was.

After her shower, her cousin insisted on feeding her tea, hot pork buns, cold eel dumplings, and pastries full of warm bean custard, plainly purchased fresh at a bakery less than an hour ago. Seiri had probably ordered them while Karula was in the shower. Karula didn’t eat the dumplings. Seiri said that it made sense that a woman raised in Foirais wouldn’t have a taste for eel, and Karula didn’t correct her.

Then Seiri bustled around the kitchen, making dinner, continuing to bring Karula cups of tea and prattle on about family members Karula had obviously never met, telling stories about Karula’s father’s childhood that she’d heard from her own grandparents. Karula appreciated the hospitality but this was driving her insane. This was much too much social interaction, but she couldn’t politely extricate herself from it.  She eventually managed to turn the conversation to teaching Jai some Foiraisse and telling him about the city she grew up in.

Dinner was Seiri, Jai, Seiri’s husband Shaon, Seiri’s sister Leirin, and Leirin’s boyfriend, who was apparently only allowed to see Leirin when Leirin was at Seiri’s house because their parents disapproved of him and it would be absolutely scandalous for her to be alone with her boyfriend without being chaperoned by family.  Seiri assured Karula that she would be meeting her grandparents tomorrow, but they had to travel from Jiangpao. She said this in a slightly derisive tone, not the mockery of a person looking down on a lower status person, but the mockery of a person who believes someone of the same status is putting on airs. So apparently living in Jiangpao was considered higher status, at least for well-to-do people, than living in a college town, and Seiri disapproved of this. Then they all spent the entire meal continuing to tell Karula all about the lives of people she’d never met.

Afterward Seiri showed Karula the photo album. She was very interested in the pictures her father had sent back to his family of himself, his wife and daughter; Karula had almost no pictures of her mother as an adult, as everything her parents had owned when her mother had been alive had burned in the fire.  It was astonishing how much her mother had looked like her.  They could be twins, if they hadn’t been a generation apart.  But then Seiri insisted on showing her all the other pictures, of the cousins, and the cousins’ cousins, and the great-grandparents, and everyone’s in-laws, and by the time she was done with just one photo album Karula’s eyes were glazed over and she had to plead exhaustion in order to escape to her room.

Karula’s long-lost family were so friendly, so welcoming. Such nice people.

She was so looking forward to spending tomorrow in the Great Library’s archive, not talking to anyone at all.

***

Senchai was famous – or perhaps infamous – for its bureaucracy and record-keeping. The country had started keeping detailed records of its citizens on papyrus, nearly three thousand years ago, when the country had only been the city of Jiangpao and the immediate province around it. Twenty-four hundred years ago, the empire had expanded to the point where local provinces were storing all of their own records. Emperor Nan had decreed that every record should have two copies made, and the second copy should be stored in an archive in the newly founded city of Nandijao, “Nan’s Treasure”.

Since then, through dynasties, foreign occupations, and revolutions, through the expansion and contraction of Senchai as wars moved the borders this way and that, every citizen of Senchai had had all of their important records – birth, marriage, any certificates they’d earned for the right to practice certain professions like medicine or accounting, and death – stored as copies in the Archives. The Great Library of Nandijao had grown up around the Archives, and the University of Nandijao, Senchai’s greatest and most nationally renowned university, had been founded there for proximity to the Great Library.

A famous story was told of conquerors who’d come in and tried to burn the Archives, who had been driven back by librarians, professors, and students from the University, wielding nothing but sticks and their own belts with rocks or heavy bars of soap tied to the end.  This story was held in some skepticism by many scholars, since the only records of the incident were held in the Archives, and the librarians were no more immune than anyone else to self-aggrandizing stories. On the other hand, it was also true that, had it happened, it wasn’t likely that records about it would have gone anywhere but the Archives. It was, after all, where copies of all records in the nation ended up; it sent records nowhere itself.  

There was currently a major project underway to digitize the Archives. The digitization had gotten back only two hundred fifty years so far, but that was probably far enough for Karula’s needs. Probably. So she didn’t spend any time sifting through papers centuries old; she spent the day scrolling through digitized documents.  It was still as quiet and undisturbed as she’d hoped. If only she could do this outside where it was warm, rather than in the air conditioning, it would be ideal.

It was lengthy work. There was a difference between a record of birth and a birth certificate. The record of birth stated that a certain mother had given live birth within a certain week, and the gender of the baby, but the father’s name and the child’s name were not recorded.  It was done for the census, not to track the lives of citizens. The birth certificates were amended on adoption, and if the original certificate still existed in the Archives anywhere, it was probably in a file cabinet for inactive documents, older documents that had revised versions.  So there was no record of Karula’s mother, specifically, but there were records of all the women who had given birth in the city of Chofu, in that week. Unfortunately, Chofu, while nowhere near the size of Jiangpao or even Nandijao, was still large enough to support thirty-one births of girls in the week of Karula’s mother’s birthday. And Chofu, being a port town, had been a major destination for pregnant women who planned to sell any daughter they might have to pale-skinned Southerners. Ten of the women who were recorded as giving birth that week did not appear on any birth certificates, and ten of the birth certificates were girls with Southerner names for parents.

This meant Karula had to trace back the family histories and origin provinces of ten women, any of whom might have been her grandmother. And then track back their families, though thankfully that went back to before the era of Given-Away Girls. And then compare to records of birth to make sure no daughters were adopted out to other families, because the fact that they’d have names in Senchai’sho would make it non-obvious that an adoption had happened. And then cross correlate that to whatever news had made it on paper to the Archives… because news was not a governmental record and there was no guarantee a newspaper would have been sent to the Archives in the first place.

She’d spend the first half of her days doing her genealogical research in the Archives, and the other half in the Library proper, reading folklore accounts, particularly the stories told in various regions. During the Revolution at the beginning of the century, the new leadership of Senchai had decided that folklore was ancient superstition that needed to be discarded as Senchai entered the New Century, but fortunately that had only lasted until the original dictator had died. The new government had decided instead that folklore was part of the rich cultural history of Senchai and should definitely be preserved, and they’d even sent people around to record the stories the locals would tell, and then take them back to the Library. It had been a spasm of nationalism that had resulted in Senchai joining in on the wrong side of a terrible war, but the effect, the attempt to preserve Senchai’s ancient culture, had continued onward even after the war.

After her work, she’d go walking in Nandijao. Senchai was the first place she’d ever been where everyone looked like her. In Foirais, where most of the citizens were pale people with round eyes and a wild variety of hair colors, Karula had had very few people she could look to who were similar to her.  Here in Senchai, her accent made her an outsider, but she at least looked like the folks here.  Mostly. There was the fact that they all had black or brown eyes, and hers were only brown at a distance; when she looked closely in a mirror, they appeared a tawny amber.  But since she hadn’t run around looking deep into most people’s eyes here in Senchai, she assumed it was a normal variation.

It was a little bit sad that no matter where she went, she was an outsider. In Foirais, her eyes and skin marked her as “not Foiraise” to many of her fellow citizens even though she’d grown up there. In Senchai, she looked like the people, but the moment she opened her mouth, she revealed herself as foreign. So she tried to get by in talking as little as possible. It felt better, somehow, to be thought of a mute or selectively non-verbal Senchai’in than a foreigner. She explored the city, bought food, newspapers, occasionally tiny memorabilia – nothing large enough that it wouldn’t fit in her suitcase.

And then she’d go to her aunt’s house and spend the evening having to listen to her cousin and her husband talk, endlessly.  At one point she’d gotten her cousin onto the topic of physics, in desperation. Cousin Seiri had been happy to talk about her own research, but then had drifted into the topic of her own doctorate, and then her college days, and then she’d monopolized the conversation talking about her youth for an hour. Finally, Karula had taken to cultivating a relationship with Jai, in self defense. He let her get a word in edgewise sometimes, and Cousin Seiri wouldn’t interrupt Karula and tell her about people she had never met and never would.

He was a good kid. Karula had always had a soft spot for kids. He liked playing football – the challenge of never using your hands, the excitement of making your body into the thing to hit the ball with rather than a stick or the parts of your body designed to hit things with – and he enjoyed making and flying kites. His father, also a physics professor, had taught him about aerodynamics when he was young, and they used to make kites together.  He was also willing to talk for long periods of time about his favorite comic books, and science fiction, and he thought her researches into folklore were cool. Especially the part about creatures who appeared in many, many different countries’ legends. Dragons, phoenixes, the qilin and its resemblance to Southern unicorns, the different types of undead around the world.

She tried to pull her own weight by helping around the house – sweeping, washing dishes, cleaning the kitchen counter. At first Seiri insisted that she shouldn’t do any such thing, because she was a guest, but Karula had responded by pointing out that she was family, and she wanted to feel like family. After that, Seiri let her do chores… as long as they didn’t involve going near the burner on the stove.

The first time she’d done that, and the only, had been when she’d tried to put on hot water for tea. At home in Foirais, she’d had an electric stove, and in her dorm at university, there had been no stove at all – you used the cafeteria, or you heated food in a microwave.  Cousin Seiri’s stove had a gas range. Karula had turned on the burner… and then stared, mesmerized, at the flames, the tea kettle still in her hand. Slowly she’d reached toward the flame with her free hand.

Seiri had seen her do it and pulled her away as she was about to touch the beautiful flame. “Oh, no, no! You can’t be doing things with fire!” She’d put the kettle on the burner herself and then pulled Karula away from the stove entirely by both hands, walking backwards, pulling Karula toward the family dining table.  “I’m so sorry. After what happened to your mother…! I didn’t even think! Of course you shouldn’t have to do anything with fire!”

That night Karula dreamed. In real life, Father had held her, both of them screaming, begging for Mother to stop, as Mother had run back into their burning house, and Karula had struggled in Father’s arms to follow her, to pull her back. In the dream, Father wasn’t even there, and Karula ran through the burning hallways, opening doors into rooms her house had not actually had, looking for Mother. And then she’d found her, wreathed in fire, her eyes golden and glowing… and Karula had walked toward the fire, intent on immolating herself as well.

She didn’t normally remember her dreams, but she woke the moment she touched the flame, shaken, tears on her face.

***

After twenty-three days of running into the dead end of “there are no records of this at the Archives”, Karula decided to go to Chofu for herself.

“You make sure to get a good hotel,” Cousin Seiri insisted. “If I were you I’d get a Southern-style hotel. I know there’s a Hillain and a Morenta in Chofu, and they get good reviews.”

“I can stay in a Southern-style hotel anywhere near home,” Karula said. “I’m looking for something Senchai’a, but nice. Do you know any?”

“Oh, of course! But the truth is, Chofu’s just a small town in comparison to Nandijao, so I don’t know how many options you’ll have.”

The truth was, Cousin Seiri had never been to Chofu and needed time to contact her network of friends and family to find out what was good there. Karula trusted Cousin Seiri’s network better than she trusted official reviews, so she waited, and eventually booked a room in a Chofu inn called the Soaring Fish.  It was a traditional inn, so a dinner buffet was served nightly, large platters of fried rice and stir-fried meats in various sauces, and the guests were expected to take whatever portions they wanted.  Karula, arriving on a late train, was grateful. It was the first time she had stayed at a traditional Senchai’a inn; she’d stayed in many Southern-style hotels with restaurants attached, and in many of them the hotel served breakfast, but she’d never before been somewhere that the hotel itself served dinner.  She was always happy to warm up with a hot meal.

The next day she went to Chofu’s Children’s Peace and Health Center… a euphemism for the place where parents could abandon children, no questions asked.  Since the revolution Senchai had been torn between the modern ways they wanted to adopt and the traditional mores most of the country held. In past times, the traditions demanded total obedience from children to their parents, but nowadays children had rights, and parents had obligations to them.  It was also a tradition for parents in dire poverty to sell their daughters as servants, but nowadays that meant the sex trade, so it was extremely illegal. The society’s safety valve was the Children’s Peace and Health Center, where runaways would be sheltered, and children even as old as adolescents could be dropped off by parents.

Orphans were sent there as well. Some of those were adopted out quickly; the Children’s Peace and Health Centers mediated almost all the adoptions in Senchai. Those who weren’t ended up in orphanages, but the Peace and Health Center that had brought them in would continue to look for adoptive or foster parents for them.

Karula had visited the center in Nandijao; it was elaborately hidden. A shrubbery maze, a basement level of tunnels, and a network of walkways above formed a labyrinth with many, many exits – at a park for children, at an office building for doctors, at a shopping center… and the Children’s Peace and Health Center. This ensured that it was almost impossible to tell whether a given person with a child was taking the child to the Center, or to a doctor’s appointment, or a play date.

Chofu wasn’t nearly so wealthy a city, nor nearly as invested in appearances. The Children’s Peace and Health Center was simply there, on a street near one of the bus stops. It was a Southern-style rectangular blocky building, built back when Senchai perceived the South as more medically advanced and progressive. Thus it was out of place, and very ugly. On her way to the front door, Karula passed a strange version of a revolving door. It was only half a person’s height, and instead of being a glass door, it was a crib and an opaque partition. Experimentally, Karula pushed the empty crib slightly, noting where it would enter the building.

It was at this Center that her mother had been presented to her future parents, had been adopted and taken away from her homeland. Had her biological grandmother laid her mother down in that crib and spun it to push her baby into the Center, to be taken by employees, never to be seen by Karula’s grandmother anymore?

Inside, it looked just like a Southern-style medical office, with a receptionist behind a clear partition. “Hello!” the receptionist said. “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to research my mother’s history.”

“Oh, well, you must understand that we keep very little information on birth parents.”

“That’s all right,” Karula said. “I’ll take what I can get. How would I look her up?”

“Do you have the names of your open-hearted grandparents?”

Karula blinked. “Open-hearted?”

“Oh, we don’t like to use the term ‘adoptive parent’ here. It sounds like they’re lesser than birth parents somehow. Anyone who’d take a child into their heart and adopt them is open-hearted and generous, so we call them ‘open-hearted parents’.”

Ah. A euphemism. “I do. My mother’s mother was Charlée Lefaire, and her husband was Gantoise Lefaire.”

“And your name is?”

“Karula Lefaire.”

The receptionist’s eyebrow went up. “Your mother didn’t marry?”

“In Foirais, children take the mother’s family name, not the father’s.”

“Oh! Of course! Pardon me for prying, I’ve never met anyone from Foirais before.  Most of the Given-Away Girls or their families come from Anacrisia or Southland.”

“Well, I’ve never been to Senchai before, so now we’re matched.” Karula smiled at her. “Do you have any record of either of my open-hearted grandparents?”

The receptionist typed, her long lacquered nails clacking against her keyboard. “Yes. Charlée Lefaire, and there’s Gantoise Lefaire.  Oh, interesting.”

“What’s interesting?”

“Your mother would have been Jirène Lefaire?”

“Yes.  Do you have any record of her birth name?”

“No, we don’t keep that. But she was adopted at 16 months, not infancy.  And this says she entered the center only two weeks before her adoption. So she wasn’t an infant surrender.” More clacking. “I might be able to get some more detail.  Prospective parents like to know if there was any family history of violence or drug abuse or anything like that which they might need to know about their new child.”

Karula suspected that children with problems like that in their past were probably the last to be adopted. Or second last, after disabled children. “So what kind of information would be kept?”

“It’ll tell me if she was a legal surrender – meaning, she was taken away from incompetent birth parents for legal reasons – or… oh. Oh, that’s different. I don’t see that often.”

“What are you seeing?”

“She was surrendered by the fire department.  That only happens if the child is rescued from a fire and the parents are dead or can’t be found, usually. Fire department personnel do general rescues, so it could have been a flood or an earthquake…”

“No,” Karula said. “Fire does sound likely.”

“Did she have burn scars?”

“Nothing like that, but she had a… strange relationship with fire.”  She didn’t want to talk about that. “The birth date on her birth certificate is 13 Sanwa. Is that the birth date you have also?”

“Yes. That’s correct.”

“But you don’t have her birth name?”

“No. As I said, we don’t keep that.”

What she’d said was that information wasn’t kept on the birth parents, but Karula said nothing. “Do you have her adoption date?”

“22 Ren.”

“That gives me a lot to go on. Thanks.”

***

The Archives back in Nandijao didn’t have perfect records of newspapers… but the Library itself kept copies of newspapers going back sixty years, all the way back to the Revolution. Karula’s mother would have been 45 now, and Chofu was a large enough city that newspapers would probably be kept from it.

On 4 Ren that year, a house fire claimed the lives of Bai Ji-Wen, 25 years old, and her husband, Bai Sanli, 30.  They were survived by their infant child, who wasn’t named, but Karula could guess. Named after her mother, perhaps, Ji-Wen, or maybe Ji-Len. “Songbird”, and if it had changed to Ji-Len, “Little Bird.” Ji-Wen or Ji-Len becoming the Foiraise name Jirène made perfect sense.

Bai Sanli, born 30 years earlier, had married Tenra Ji-Wen when he was 26, whereupon she’d taken his family name. Tenra Ji-Wen, who’d have been 21 at the time, had been born in a fishing town thirty kilometers up the coast from Chofu, called Bangji. That was Karula’s next destination.

“Where are you going to stay?”  Cousin Seiri was, in Karula’s opinion, overly worried about this. “That’s so far away! You’ll be out in the middle of nowhere!”

“It’s all right,” Karula reassured her. “I’m good at finding my own way.”

“But you’ll be a young woman all alone! Don’t you know what can happen to young women in the forest when nobody’s around?”

“I’ll be fine, Elder Cousin,” Karula said. “I’ll call and let you know how I’m doing.”

“But will they even have service out there?”

Karula raised an eyebrow. “Elder Cousin… the entire country was wired for land lines a generation ago. If I have no cell signal, I’ll just call from one of those.”

In addition to landlines and electricity, the government a generation ago had made certain there were train lines all over Senchai, so Karula didn’t have too much difficulty getting to Bangji.  Once she got there, there was exactly one taxi at the train station, and the very bored taxi driver seemed very surprised to see her. “Oh! You’re a visitor!”

“I guess you don’t get many in Bangji?”

“I come out here every day and wait at the train station,” the old man said. “I’m supposed to be retired, but who can live off the government stipend? So I drive my taxi. But only two or three times a week am I needed, and usually it’s university students coming home to visit. Who are you here to see?”

“I’m a researcher from Foirais,” Karula said. “I’m here to collect stories from people. Is there anywhere I can stay?”

“Well, the Wangs run a bed and breakfast, but I don’t know if their room is available. I haven’t picked anyone up at the train station, though, so… probably.”

***

Mrs. Wang was also elderly, a small woman whose white hair was collected in a traditional Senchai’a bun. Karula had wondered how Bangji could support even one bed and breakfast, if they had so few visitors. Presumably the Wangs were also on retirement stipend. Strictly speaking, retirees on the stipend weren’t supposed to work; in theory, the government could reduce their stipend by the amount they made from side jobs. In practice, the government might possibly care about people in a retirement community, or in some areas of big cities where a lot of government ministers lived, but no one was ever going to come to Bangji and find out that old people had side businesses.

“Mr. Jo tells me you’re looking for a place to stay?” Mrs. Wang had come out to speak to the taxi driver, and then went around to the passenger side to talk to Karula. “I do have a room if you’d like!”

“That would be wonderful,” Karula said.

The room turned out to be small but very clean, decorated with rustic wooden sculptures of sea dragons, turtles whose shells glittered with stars, and giant fish-birds. This was perfect. It was legends of creatures like that that had brought Karula to Senchai, and out here to Bangji.  A mandala made of sea shells decorated the wall above the bed, which was a mattress on the floor, covered in sheets in the traditional dark blues and purples of the squid ink the locals harvested and sold for textile pigment.  A feather-filled silk comforter in a paler blue color was folded at the foot of the bed. The walls were thin bamboo, but solid enough for her purposes. There was one long, low piece of furniture with drawers running alongside one wall.

“This is beautiful. I would be pleased to rent from you.”

Mrs. Wang nodded. “We make our own breakfast at 6 am, but if you come down to the kitchen before 9 am, I’ll make you something. Typically our breakfast is rice porridge with smoked fish and fried dough twists, but if there’s something specific you want, I could make you anything. I used to be a cook at a local restaurant, before I retired.”

“Whatever you’re making for yourself is fine, as long as it’s hot. I can come down early.” Karula usually woke at sunrise, or just before it, the imminent appearance of the sun filling her with restless energy.

“Early is best,” Mrs. Wang agreed. “Our daughter sleeps late, and it’s best not to be at breakfast at the same time she is. So much energy!” She smiled.

“I don’t mind children, or their energy, but if you prefer that I avoid your daughter—”

“No, no! If she approaches you, feel free to be Elder Sister or Auntie, as you please.  There aren’t a lot of children in Bangji… not anymore, anyway.”

“Because most of the town has become venerable, I imagine?”

“That, yes, but… well, there have been some tragedies. Several children have disappeared.  The police weren’t able to find any common factor, and every home here’s been searched thoroughly, and there are no strangers in Bangji most of the time.  So we think perhaps they were taken by wild animals, but no one’s found animal spoor, either.”

“That’s terrible!”

“We try to watch over Lai-Mei all the time, but she’s so young and energetic, and she behaves as if there’s no danger at all. We try to tell her, but she doesn’t always listen.”

“Well, if I run into her, I will surely try to caution her. Perhaps I can use my youth and energy to counter hers, and keep her safe.”

***

Mr. Wang was equally friendly and equally garrulous, talking to Karula about his garden, which was indeed beautiful.

“In my younger days I traveled all over Senchai,” he said. “I gathered up plants from all sorts of places. Back then we didn’t really think about things like invasive species.” He smiled wryly.  “Nowadays I try to grow local plants only, but some of these are just too beautiful to do without even if they came from halfway across the country.  Like these.” He showed her flowers with purple and pink bells. Another had clusters of tiny orange and red flowers making patterns that looked like larger flowers.

“You’ve lived here a long time,” Karula said. “I’m trying to track down my mother’s family.  Do you remember anything about a family named Tenra?”

“Tenra? Can’t say I do. Mrs. Wang might know, though. As I said, I traveled, but she’s lived here her whole life.”

***

Karula spent the day gathering stories from people about legends in the area.  People in Bangji were full of such stories, and they all claimed that this had really happened, to a friend of a friend. Stories of dragons who almost managed to barbeque the friend of a friend. Stories of the great bird-fish surfacing less than an hour’s sail away from the shore. Qilin in the forest at the base of the mountain to the west of Bangji. Malevolent demons. Witches who had certainly cast baleful spells and hexes on innocent people, oh, around 30 years ago.

She asked several people about the Tenra family. No one remembered them. This seemed strange to Karula; Tenra Ji-Wen had married at the age of 21, 50 years ago. Had she had no family by then? Had her family been transplants from somewhere else? Had they moved on? Surely one of the elderly residents of Bangji would remember. But none did.

When she returned to the Wangs’ bed and breakfast, she almost tripped over a little girl, perhaps 9 or so.  “Well, hello.”

The girl looked her up and down, an almost insolent expression on her face.  “Where did you come from?”

“Foirais, but my mother was born in Chofu, and her mother was born in Bangji, according to the records.  Are you Wang Lai-Mei?”

“That isn’t a real person,” the girl said. “I’m Lun Lai-Mei.”

A child old enough to keep her original family name when she was adopted was probably one of the Thrown-Away Girls, a darker and sadder term for the abandoned girls who were surrendered to the Children’s Center as toddlers or older.  “Ah. Well, Lun Lai-Mei, I’m Karula Lefaire.”

“Doesn’t matter to me,” Lai-Mei said. “I’ll just call you Elder Sister anyway.”

“Yes, but it’s polite to share my name with you, since you shared yours. I’m staying with your parents while I research my family.”

“I figured that. You definitely aren’t from Senchai, so why would you be here unless you’re a guest?”

“My accent makes it that obvious?”

“I could just look at your face, Elder Sister. You don’t look Senchai’in.”

Karula blinked.  Both her parents were Senchai’in born in Senchai; how could she look anything else? “Why not?”

Lai-Mei smiled. “You’re too tall.”

Karula was a little on the tall side for a Senchai’in woman, but not to the point where she stood out. “I’ve met many Senchai’in women who are taller than me.”

“Well, it’s something,” Lai-Mei said. “I don’t know what.”

Lai-Mei herself didn’t quite look fully Senchai’in. She was beautiful, tiny for her apparent age, long straight hair pinned up with hairpins in the back that had seashells on them. In all respects but one she was the perfect picture of a Senchai’in girl… but her eyes were bright, vivid green. Perhaps her mother had had an affair with a foreigner, and that was why she’d been given away. Or perhaps it was a natural variation. Karula hadn’t met any Senchai’in with eye colors other than black or brown, aside from herself… and her own eye color was subtle enough that neither Cousin Seiri, nor Jai, nor anyone else who’d seen her up close in good lighting had remarked on it. But there were a billion people in Senchai, and many distinct ethnic groups, so perhaps green eyes was a rare but known phenomenon. Like red-haired people in Foirais.

“Lai-Mei!” Mrs. Wang called from the door. “Don’t bother the honored guest!”

“She’s not bothering me!” Karula called back. To Lai-Mei she said, “I might see you tomorrow if I’m not too tired when I come home.”

“This isn’t home for you, though, Elder Sister,” Lai-Mei said.

“This is my current base of operations, and that’s good enough.”

By Senchai’a standards, the child was extremely rude, but Karula found it a refreshing change, actually. All the children she’d met so far had had mostly perfect manners – Seiri might think Jai’s desire to monopolize a conversation talking about his interests was a flaw, but Karula, here to learn from Senchai’in people, didn’t see it that way. Lai-Mei was blunt. By Foiraise standards, she was actually fairly normal. Children were children all around the world, after all.

***

Elderly Mrs. Jin, 98 years old, was mentioned in a discussion in town of who might remember the Tenra family.  So Karula went to her house.  It was in better repair than she expected for a 98-year-old woman, and Karula could see why; two shirtless young men were working on the property, one clipping the hedges and one repairing a shutter.

“Is Mrs. Jin home?” she asked one of them.

The young man laughed. “Grandmother never goes anywhere anymore. What you want to ask is, is Mrs. Jin awake, and the answer is, probably not but she loves visitors, so go in and wake her up if you like.”

Inside, a middle-aged woman was pureeing rice and some sort of vegetable in a blender. “Hello! Are you here to see Grandmother?”

The term was a generic one of respect for the elderly, but Karula thought perhaps this woman was really Mrs. Jin’s granddaughter. “I’m doing some research to track down my mother’s family,” she said, “and Mrs. Jin was referred to me as someone who might remember my grandmother here as a child.”

“Oh, she loves it when people want to ask her about the past! Let me go see if she wants to wake up to see you.”

She ducked behind a sliding bamboo partition, and was gone for a couple of minutes. When she returned she said, “Come this way. Grandmother would be happy to talk with you!”

The old woman was reclining on a couch that was absolutely drowning in pillows. “This is the guest, Grandmother!” the woman yelled.  “She’s staying at the Wangs’ bed and breakfast!”

“Glad to see they’ve got some custom,” Mrs. Jin said in a surprisingly strong voice for such an old woman. She was very small, with gray hair cropped in a modern short haircut, and Karula would have guessed her to be in her 70’s or 80’s. Then again, Karula had hardly met enough nonagenarians to have any idea how to tell a 90-something from a younger but still elderly person. “Come close, girl, and sit down on these floor pillows. Neither my eyesight nor my hearing’s the best anymore.”

“We keep trying to get her to go to the doctor to be fitted for hearing aids,” the middle-aged woman said.

“And I keep saying no! Because at my age, why should I travel? If the doctor wants my money, he should come here.”

“The national health ministry would pay the doctor, not you,” the woman sighed.

Karula took the offered seat, right in front of the old woman. “My mother was a Given-Away girl, but I managed to track down the identity of her mother. A woman named Tenra Ji-Wen was born here… maybe around 70 years ago?”

“Oh.  Oh, I remember that. The Tenra family. Such a shame what happened to them.”

“What happened to them?”

“The father was in logging, if I remember right. Cut down trees, bring them to the city to sell to the middlemen who make logs into wood for carpenters.  There’s a lot of forest around here, but in those days there was almost nothing else; you could barely get to Bangji except by water.  There was a road, but it was packed dirt and full of ruts from the carts.  Well, you know how it is.  Every time it rained the whole thing turned into mud and we were trapped here.” Mrs. Jin nodded slightly to herself, her eyes – focused and bright a moment ago, unfocusing. Karula wondered if she was falling asleep, but it seemed she was just collecting her thoughts.

“I think it was… 40 years ago they paved the road? They were having a revolution, outside of Bangji, but it never came here. They came from the government to tell us how to run our lives, and we smiled and nodded and did just what we pleased as soon as they were gone. Found out later, they’d never returned! Bandits or wild animals or something. They disappeared without a trace.  We didn’t learn until two or three groups from the government came through and then left.  They were all vanishing. So the soldiers came, you know, because they thought we were killing these people, but we told them our protector spirit must be getting overly aggressive, and we hadn’t known it was killing. We laid down a lovely large tuna at the shrine and prayed for the protector not to kill the government workers anymore, and that did the trick. Soldiers were still suspicious, though. They quartered here for a few years, but eventually they realized, Bangji may hold to a lot of the old ways, but a lot of the newfangled stuff they wanted to bring in? We were already doing it.”

This was fascinating but had nothing to do with the Tenra family that Karula could see. For a moment impatience warred with her scholar’s curiosity. The scholar won. “Your protector spirit? Can you tell me about that?”

“No one who has ill intent toward Bangji can come here, and anyone who develops ill intent while they’re here, they never leave. The government people wanted to take away everyone’s land and make it the property of the state and then give it back to us to work on it. Well, that’s just stupid. We already live as a community; everyone takes care of everyone else. You know, everyone in the town calls me Grandmother and they all come by to take care of me, feed me, help me to the bathroom… I can’t walk on my own anymore. It bothered me at first, that everyone came, because I always used to do for myself. I took care of my kids and all their friends, and all my grandkids, and all their friends, and I was the one who did for people, and it was hard to get my head around being the one they were doing for, but you know what? I thought about it, and I earned it. I worked hard to take care of all those kids and now they all take care of me, and that’s the way life’s supposed to be, right?”

“What is the protector spirit?” Karula asked again.

Mrs. Jin cackled. “A dragon, of course! A sea dragon, what else would a fishing town have? We’re not large enough for the fish-bird to honor us with its presence, nor holy enough for qilins, but there’s so many dragons. The sea is full of them. The land too.” Her eyes went unfocused again.  “It’s the land dragons you have to watch out for. So many of them died in the purges out there. So many. The children don’t even know who they are.”

“What’s the difference between a land dragon and a sea dragon?”

“Well, what do you think? One lives on the earth and one lives in the water!  Land dragons have earth and fire and air in their souls.  A lot of them breathe fire like the Southern ones. Sea dragons have water and air, no fire or earth, but they’re more magical.”

“And what is the protector spirit?”

Mrs. Jin went unfocused again.  “I wish I knew anymore, young lady.  Back in those days the protector was definitely a sea dragon, but the soldiers… I worry about the soldiers.  For a while it was gone. Then it came back, but I’ve never seen it, so I don’t know if it’s the same one. I don’t know if the price is worth paying anymore.”

“Why wouldn’t the price be worth paying?”

Mrs. Jin shrugged. “You didn’t come here to listen to me ramble about everything and anything, though. You said Tenra Ji-Wen?”

“Yes.”

“I could tell,” Mrs. Jin nodded. “You look exactly like her. Exactly. We weren’t close; I didn’t have kids yet when she was born. She must have left, what, maybe she was seventeen? eighteen? How old are you, granddaughter?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Close enough. I knew her but we were out of sync; she was too young to be my playmate and too old to be my kids’ friend. But we all knew her. So hard she worked, since she was so small. She couldn’t even go to school. Someone had to take care of her father. She cooked and cleaned for him.”

“Wait, what happened to her mother?”

“Oh, I didn’t say? Such a tragedy, she burned.  Whole house went up in flames when Ji-Wen was little. 2, 3? Something like that. The father was out, he was a logger. I mentioned that, right?”

Karula held herself very still, showing nothing of her reaction on her face. “You certainly did, Grandmother.”

“It was a miracle. Something preserved that little girl. They found her in the ashes, crying.  Her mother must have gotten her into a cellar or something so the fire wouldn’t get her.”

“She didn’t have any siblings?”

“No, she was her mother’s first, and her poor mother never lived long enough to have another.  The father didn’t even remarry until she was, I don’t know, 14 or 15?  And the stepmother was respectful to the daughter, of course, we wouldn’t have stood for it otherwise, but Ji-Wen wanted to get away anyway. I think she probably wanted to get away the whole time, but she needed to take care of her father. So she left, a few years later. We never saw her again. Whatever did happen to her?”

“I’m not sure,” Karula lied. “I need to do some more research.  I believe she’s dead, but the details…?” She shrugged.  “It’ll come together from my research, eventually. Do you know where her mother came from? The one who died?”

“No. Sad to say I wasn’t the gossip back then that I became! Oh, I cared so much about what the kids my own age were doing, but nothing about the old people. That’s the problem with humans, you know. The young ones don’t think the old ones are people.”

“I certainly think older people are people,” Karula said, startled.

“I don’t exactly mean that. Like… we’re just here. We have our own lives, but the kids don’t care. Whereas we care about the kids, because we remember being them, but they don’t remember us unless they can remember past lives!” She chuckled. “You’re different, though. Most people who come to me with a question, they don’t have any patience for how my mind wanders. It’s been doing that since my 50’s, you know. Amazing when you think about it, I’ve been old for almost as long as I was young. If you count 50 as old. Most of the 50 year olds don’t, but the young ones like you do.”

“Your stories are fascinating. But I’m a student of folklore, and to a lesser extent history, and it amazes me to talk to someone as venerable as you, Grandmother. To be alive from before the revolution! The things you must have seen… Is there anyone coming to you to write down these stories?”

“Write them down?”

“Someone should, if no one is. Would you mind if scholars from Nandijao came here to write down the story of your life? You could tell them anything you’d like. Grandmother, you are living history and we should all learn from you.” Karula stood up. “I must go now, if there’s nothing you’d like me to do for you, but I would love to come back soon.”

“Yes, you do that! I’ll have Izhen make you tea.  We still do it the old way, you know. I’ve got one of those new-fangled gas stoves for heating water, but we do it in the fireplace, just like when I was a girl.” She gestured at the fireplace, which, thankfully, was dark at the moment.

Karula bowed hastily, dragging her eyes away. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be back!”

Her hands didn’t shake until she was back in her room, safe from anyone’s eyes.  The Wangs’ house also had a fireplace. But they hadn’t lit it since she’d arrived. It was summertime; they didn’t need to.

Karula had planned to take this trip on summer break because it made the most sense with her schedule. She was beginning to realize there was another reason why it had been a very good idea to do it now, as well.

***

No one but Mrs. Jin even remembered the Tenra family… which made sense, if they’d kept to themselves after tragedy struck. Mrs. Jin would have been a young woman when it had happened, but most of the town elderly were in their 70’s or 80’s; they’d have been children. It didn’t seem that there was anyone as old as Mrs. Jin, or even close.

If she wanted more detail on Ji-Wen’s mother and father—particularly mother – she’d have to go back to the Archives.  But she wasn’t lying to flatter the old woman; Mrs. Jin’s stories were a national treasure and should be preserved at all cost.  She wanted to stay here and listen to more of them. And she wanted to know more about this protector spirit. Would she be able to find independent corroboration in the death records of the government agents disappearing? That too was a question for the Archives, but to ask it, Karula needed more of the details.

***

Mrs. Wang wasn’t originally from Bangji, and Mr. Wang waxed garrulous about all the things he’d seen in his travels, but wasn’t nearly as talkative about anything local.  It took conversing with six retired people before she found someone who could give her more information about the protector spirit.

Mr. Sho was in his 70’s, but still quite vigorous. “It’s all the fish!” he boasted.  “Here in Bangji, we eat nothing but fish, and it keeps us healthy and strong!”

“I can see that,” Karula said. “I’m surprised no one but Mrs. Wang seems to be in their 90’s. All of you retired people seem so healthy!”

“Good health is a treasure,” Mr. Sho agreed. “But we do our duty. Jin Tai-Lee is the town grandmother, you know. We all love her.”

“Yes, she seems so.”

“So we don’t let her go to the temple. Better we go, before our health starts to fail us.”

Karula blinked. When had they gotten onto the subject of attending the temple? “Which temple?”

“There’s only one,” Mr. Sho said. “The shrine of the protector spirit. Where we sacrifice part of what we catch. Large fish, when we bring them in. Many fish, when we can’t get a big one. One time we gave a bucket of crabs!” He laughed.  

“And the elder people in the village do this?”

Mr. Sho nodded. “Sometimes the protector doesn’t like the offering. Well, gods and spirits and demons, they all must get bored with the same food every day.”

“What happens if the protector doesn’t like the offering?”

Mr. Sho leaned forward, his expression very serious. “It’s absolutely vital to do, you know. No one comes to Bangji anymore. There used to be bandits and pirates, and the protector spirit would save us. Then there were people from the government, who wanted us to live the way they were trying to force the rest of the country. But nowadays there’s nobody. We drive trucks full of fish down the road, now it’s paved, and we drive on back. No one for the spirit to protect us from.”

“So without anyone for the spirit to protect you from, I guess you’re afraid it’ll be angry and bored if you don’t give it good offerings?”

“If it doesn’t like the offering… it would be very bad for it to come back to the village to find one it prefers,” Mr. Sho said somberly. “So we old people bring it, and that way, if it doesn’t like the offering we provided, well…”

“Wait. Are you telling me the protector spirit – the protector spirit takes elderly people as a sacrifice?”

Mr. Sho nodded. Karula couldn’t see any sign on his face or in his voice that he was joking.  

“Is there a specific time it’s done? Would it be safe for me to go up to the shrine, or would the spirit assume I’m a sacrifice?”

“Nobody knows anymore,” Mr. Sho said, sadly. “We do what we can, but the spirit… well, we don’t speak ill of it. It might be listening.”

“It’s not protecting you?”

“We don’t know if it is or not,” Mr. Sho said. “All we know is what we have lost.”

***

“I’m probably going to return to the Archives for a while,” Karula said, as Mrs. Wang served dinner. It was a bed-and-breakfast, not a bed-and-breakfast-and-dinner, but Mrs. Wang was treating Karula more like an actual houseguest than a paying guest. “But I’ll be back.”

“I wanted you to play with me!” Lai-Mei said angrily.  “You’ve only been here a few days!”

Karula smiled indulgently. “Maybe I could find time to play with you tomorrow. My train won’t leave until afternoon.”

“Lai-Mei, this is a guest. Behave yourself!” Mrs. Wang scolded.

“It’s all right,” Karula said.

“There aren’t any children around here for her to play with,” Mr. Wang said apologetically.

Karula remembered Mrs. Wang telling her that there weren’t many children here because some of them had disappeared, possibly taken by wild animals.  She’d wondered, then, why the police hadn’t been called, why there hadn’t been extensive searches. Yes, this was far out into the countryside, but how could anyone do nothing when children were disappearing?

But Mr. Sho had implied, very strongly, that the protector spirit needed to be appeased with the lives of the elderly citizens who brought the sacrifices, from time to time. And that if they didn’t, the spirit would come to the village to find something to take.

Modern Senchai’a scholarship followed the same line as the South. There was no such thing as spirits. Nothing supernatural in the world. No dragons, no fish-birds, no qilin. Everything could be explained as fossils that ancient people had found and speculated on, or mistakes humans had made long in the past that had been carried forward in legend. Karula hadn’t truly expected to find any evidence that any of the stories she collected had any reality to them.

And yet… it didn’t surprise her. Somehow.  She considered it a genuinely reasonable theory that a protector spirit turned malevolent might have taken children – to eat? What did the protector spirit do with the sacrifices? – because it wasn’t pleased with the quality of what had been provided to it.

Was she being too credulous? Probably. Was this most likely the nonsense of peasants without any modern education? That could well be. But what if it was real?

She needed to see the death certificates. She needed to see how many children had been born here, and how many had died. She needed to return to the Archives.

But first, she wanted to see the shrine.

***

The sun had just come up the next morning when, fortified with one of Mrs. Wang’s hot breakfasts, Karula headed for the cliff where the shrine to the protector was.

Bangji was a tiny bump of a peninsula, bounded on one side by the start of the Mingshen Mountains and on the other side by thick forest, which climbed up the mountains to the extent that it could. The shrine looked out over the cliffside that faced the ocean, looking toward the east and the sunrise.  There was a winding path up the side of the cliff, with steps.

It took her an hour to make it all the way up. She was young and healthy, her legs strong; she wondered how long it took elderly people to get up here, carrying a big fish. How did they get a tuna up these steps? A large tuna would need two people to carry it at the best of times. She tried to imagine two old men, trying to tandem-carry a gigantic slippery fish, up a mountainside staircase that took a young healthy person an hour. Then she imagined that those two old men knew that if their protector spirit didn’t like the tuna, they themselves might be eaten.

After all that, the shrine itself was an anticlimax. Throughout most of Senchai, temples were large, elaborate things, or at least as large and elaborate as poverty-stricken locals had been able to build. During the revolution many of them had been destroyed, but when the new leadership came in after the revolutionary leader had died, their push to restore Senchai’s lost traditions in the name of nationalism had gotten most of those rebuilt with modern materials and architecture.  They were also, generally, shrines to ancestors. The spirit worship thing was more like you’d find in Niyong, to the east. Which was not that shocking; much of Senchai’s eastern coast had a lot of Niyong’s culture, customs and food intermixed with their own. And with Bangji being relatively isolated from the mainland, it was even more likely.

But Karula had never seen any evidence that Niyong’s spirits were real, let alone that they’d travel to Senchai for worship.

An actual Niyong shrine would generally be made of wood. Bangji’s was made of stone instead; there was plenty of easily accessible stone nearby, as the cliff face was a plateau, with another cliff a short distance inland, on top of it. It was a simple rectangular building with terra cotta tiles for a roof and white and gray stones mortared together for its walls. Inside, a candle burned in front of a tapestry showing Bangji, from the perspective of the shrine on the cliff, so the individual buildings were embroidered too small to make out much detail about them. There was no representation of the protector spirit itself anywhere, but there were some smashed pieces of terra cotta that might have once been statues.

Outside, facing the ocean, there was a very large stone circle with a very small stone wall ringed around it, and a pedestal about twice as high as the tiny wall in its center. Stains on the pedestal and a slightly fishy smell suggested that here was the place they sacrificed to their protector.

There was no evidence of a real protector spirit here. There was no evidence of human blood, but there was probably a lot more fish sacrificed than people, so that proved little. None of it told Karula anything except that Bangji had borrowed some customs from Niyong, which was hardly a surprise.

Two-thirds of the way down the steps, she was met by Lai-Mei. “Elder Sister! I thought you’d gone back to Nandijao and forgotten your promise!” the little girl said indignantly.

There was either a protector spirit, a wild animal, or an evil human being taking children from the town and killing or kidnapping them. Karula felt cold. Had the Wangs never told Lai-Mei the danger, or was she just that headstrong and self-confident?  “Why aren’t you home? Don’t you know it’s dangerous out here?”

“I wanted to find you. I was afraid you left.”

“I told you I wasn’t leaving until afternoon, and it’s dangerous out here. Lai-Mei, the reason you don’t have playmates your own age is that children have died. Or vanished. It’s not safe for you.”

“But it’s safe for you?”

“I haven’t heard of young adults disappearing.”

“It happens sometimes,” Lai-Mei said vaguely. “But we can be careful. I want to play a game of hide and seek with you!”

“I was going to go back to the house and change clothes. I’ve been up the mountain and I’m all sweaty.”

“What’s the point to that? If you play with me you’ll just get sweaty again, right?”

The child had a fair point. “…all right.  But why don’t we go down to the base of the cliff?  I don’t feel like this is a safe place for hide-and-seek.”

“Okay!” Lai-Mei began skipping down the stairs. Even with longer legs, Karula had to rush to keep up. She smiled indulgently.  She could see where the Wangs’ complaint about Lai-Mei’s energy levels came from.

The base of the staircase was an area Karula had explored fairly extensively since coming to Bangji, though obviously she couldn’t know it as well as a child who’d lived here for years.  Lai-Mei turned and looked up at her as Karula stepped off the stairs. "Now let’s play Hide-and-Seek,"  she said, a bright smile on her face.  "And if I find you and catch you, I'll turn into a dragon and eat you up."

Karula grinned. Children's sense of the fantastic always delighted her.  "And after you eat me up, then I'll chase you?"

She laughed. "You won't be doing anything. You'll be eaten."

"Oh, of course," Karula said, still smiling. "All right, I'll go and hide, and you count to a hundred."

"To ten."

"Oh, no, it has to be a hundred.  I'm a stranger to this area-- you need to give me time to find a good hiding spot." Karula took games very seriously, and had no intention of losing to Lai-Mei.  She thought it was wrong, in general, to throw competitions to make kids feel better; adults who deliberately lost to children gave them an inflated sense of their own ability.  And in some senses, her mother’s death by fire when she was a young child had aged her, made her too burdened to easily make friends with the carefree innocents most children were.  She had missed out on a lot of this kind of simple play when she’d been a child herself. Maybe she was enough of a child to want to win the game for its own sake.  

"That's fair.  To a hundred, then."  Her smile showed tiny white teeth.

Lai-Mei covered her face with her hands to count. Karula ran through the woods.  She could think of several places she’d found in her explorations that would make good hiding places.  

It was a forest. At the base of a cliff. There were plenty of large rocks jutting out of the ground, and plenty of tree coverage and brush. Karula found a spot behind one of the large rocks, where a scrubby bush had grown because a tree couldn’t take root near such a large rock. She was able to climb over the rock and carefully lower herself into the spot where the bush met the rock, shoving parts of it out of the way. Lai-Mei would be too short to see that the top had been disturbed, and from the front of the bush, there’d be no disturbance visible.

She was alone with her breathing for all of two minutes.  Then a shriek split the air. “Found you!”

Karula looked up, expecting to congratulate the girl on her expert finding skills.

Lai-Mei was standing on the rock… looming. There was no other way to describe it. Like a tiny nine-year-old girl suddenly had enormous invisible mass, ready to reach down and crush. And her pupils had turned to slits, like a cat’s.

"I see you," Lai-Mei caroled.  "And now I'm going to eat you up."

It made no sense why Karula suddenly felt fear. This was still a nine year old girl. Lai-Mei’s smile was full of sharp teeth now, tearing carnivore teeth, and her pupils were slits, but she was a child. Still, Karula rolled herself sideways along the rock to get out of the brush, and started running as soon as she was out.

Lai-Mei leapt down from the rock, over the bush, which should not have been possible for a child her age, and landed. Karula knew this, not because she was watching – her eyes were focused in front because she was running – but because she heard the thump of the child’s landing, a short distance behind her, and no sound of rustling branches or leaves.  She glanced behind herself, once, very quickly. Lai-Mei was there, grinning hugely now, her mouth all teeth, and her skin had started to take on the mottled pattern of scales.

Karula kept running.

Around trees, rocks, bushes. Through all kinds of cover. Dodging this way and that.  And behind her, Lai-Mei never faltered, never stumbled. She laughed, the high-pitched laugh of a little girl playing a fun game, as she chased after Karula, and the sound of the laughter was never cut off by heavy breathing. This was easy for her. Fun. She was playing cat and mouse, dragging out the game.

“Do the Wangs know?” Karula screamed back over her shoulder when Lai-Mei was entirely too close.

That sobered the girl slightly. She stopped shrieking and giggling.  “No, they don’t, and I don’t want them to. They’re my parents! I’m here to keep them safe.”  Then she giggled again. “I get really hungry, though…”

Karula was rapidly running out of breath herself. She used her adult height to grab a tree branch that was too tall for Lai-Mei – too tall for herself, really, but amazing how high a person can jump when their life depends on it – and pulled herself, with arm strength and then support from her legs walking up the tree, onto the branch. Lai-Mei looked up at her.  “Do you think that’s going to stop me?” she giggled.

“I want to know why,” Karula said.  “Why me?”

“You’re an outsider. I can’t eat any more children. People with children are moving out of the town.  They’ve been here, their families, for hundreds of years and they’re running away because of me. I have to protect Bangji, and that means I can’t have people just running away and moving out. If they keep doing that there won’t be a town.”

“Have you considered maybe eating the fish they bring you?”

Lai-Mei made a face. “I ate fish. I ate a lot of fish. Fish is boring all the time!  And the old people who bring it are crunchy, like I burned them. They don’t taste burnt, but they haven’t got any more juice in them than if I did. I want prey who’ll run away from me and get their blood pumping, and I don’t want it to be anyone who lives in Bangji. That means you.”

“You’re not the original protector spirit, are you. What happened to it?” The longer she could keep the girl talking, the more of her breath and strength she could get back. Also, the scholar in her wanted to know, even if she was about to die.

Lai-Mei shrugged. “Dunno. Probably got killed in the revolution or the purges or something. A lot of dragons died that way. My parents probably did too. I didn’t even know I was a dragon until I came here and went to school and then I saw pictures.”

“You’re a fire-breather? So, a land dragon?”

“I don’t know. I just told you, all I know about dragons is what I’ve read! It’s not like anyone ever came along to take me to dragon school or something.”

Dragons taking human form. The massive upheavals of the revolution, and the rebellions, the counter-revolutions, the purges. A quarter century or more of violence. Things in Senchai were peaceful now, but hadn’t been as little as ten years ago. Nandijao and Jiangpao had been peaceful enough, civilized, calm, but her father had had to flee or else he’d have been taken in the night like his friends were, and out in the countryside, government officials had still been bringing down soldiers on the heads of small towns like Bangji, because they weren’t “modernizing” fast enough. Maybe they still were.

Karula thought of a dragon in human form killed by gunfire, or a bomb, a level of violence that even a fantastic, magical creature had never evolved to deal with.  She thought of an egg left behind, of a baby born able to shapeshift, and humans taking in a wandering child.  Senchai’a dragons were supposed to be ancient and wise, but how would you ever get to be ancient and wise if you were young, and untaught by any of your own kind? “Why do you have a last name, then?”

Lai-Mei giggled. “Haven’t you figured it out?” She traced a character in the air with her finger. “Lun!” And the character she traced, the word she spoke, was the word they’d both just been using. Dragon.

“The Children’s Center taught me how to read and write when I was very little, and I learned to hide myself. I could only eat the other children if it was safe to. I wanted to go someplace where there would be more to eat, so I ran away and I found the Wangs, and Bangji. I found that they feed dragons here, as long as the dragon protects them. So I told them my name was Lun Lai-Mei. But I never told them the characters.” She sketched her true name in the air. Dragon Pursue Fierce.

“You have the order wrong,” Karula said. “You should have been Lun Mei-Lai. ‘The fierce dragon is coming?’ The way you have it, it sounds like ‘the dragon pursues ferocity’.”

“I’m going to kill and eat you, and you’re correcting my grammar? I was three! Or four, I don’t remember exactly.”

She changed, unfolding from a girl-child to a small dragon.  A land dragon, with the serpentine body of a Senchai’a dragon, and wings, and nostrils that snorted puffs of sulfur. She was no bigger than a minivan and no longer than a hearse, and her head was just slightly larger than an adult’s proportions would be, but she was definitely a dragon.

"You see, Elder Sister?"  she laughed. "I've caught you now, and become a dragon.  And now I'll eat you up."

I’m going to die here, Karula thought. She could jump out of the tree and keep running, but she had no advantages against Lai-Mei anymore; the dragon was bigger than her, and could fly, and her serpentine body could probably twist through the trees. There was no way she was going to get out of this one.

Not like this. Not without… not without the fire.

It had started when she was a teenager. A candle, a gas burner, a fireplace… any fire mesmerized her, and she’d had intrusive thoughts about self-immolation. Like her mother, who’d run back into their burning home. As she’d gotten older it had only gotten worse. Her food had to be hot, but she couldn’t cook it herself if there was a flame involved, or she’d put her hand in it, try to immolate herself.  She’d come here hoping to find out why, if there was a connection of some kind between the things she felt and the way her mother had died… and she’d found evidence that her grandmother and her great-grandmother had died the same way.

She’d wanted to find something to save herself.  But if she was going to die anyway… she wanted to taste the fire.

“Are you sure you’re a dragon there?” Karula taunted her. “You look to me more like a big dog.”

“…What did you just say to me?”

“You heard me.” Karula grinned, as insolently as she could manage.  “You call yourself a dragon? Maybe a lion.”

Lai-Mei lunged at her with a shriek, but Karula dropped to the ground, dodging the large mouth. “Oh, yes, use your teeth!” she yelled mockingly. “Dragons are supposed to be ancient and wise, not brute beasts! But sure, you’re totally a dragon!”

“Nothing you say will matter when I tear you apart!” Lai-Mei growled.

“Oh, but you’ll remember it. You want to think of yourself as a big strong dragon because you managed to terrorize some children and some superstitious old people, but I know the truth! If you were a dragon, you’d be able to flame me to death, but you haven’t even tried! You don’t even have any flame!”

“I’ll show you flame!” Lai-Mei snarled, and breathed a blast at Karula.

Karula screamed.

It burned, it was agony, but it was a cleansing agony, like the feeling of ripping off a scab or drenching a cut in rubbing alcohol, times a thousand. It was agony, but it felt right, it felt like she had been waiting for this all her life. She fell backward into light so blinding and red it was the same as darkness, as her flesh charred away. But her scream never stopped, growing higher in pitch and harsher, more tinny, and wings unfolded from somewhere as their prison of human flesh burned away, and her scream was the shriek of a giant bird. And her eyes opened.

Lai-Mei slithered backward a few steps and reared her head back, startled. “What—”

And Karula knew, now.

The memories of her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother, ancestor after ancestor going back thousands of years. Give birth to an egg and set yourself aflame so the baby bird will carry all your memories, all that you are. Learn to take human form. Branch out, have more children. Boys who will carry the trait into the human population, so there will be more of your kind, eventually, more lineages. Girls who will become you as soon as they die in fire.  

Karula was the Phoenix, and had always been, as her mother before her, and her mother’s mother, and backward to the dawn of time. And the Phoenix didn’t die in the flames. The flames burned and purified, took away the human shell if the Phoenix was born in one.  The ancients had had it wrong. There was more than one Phoenix and there had been for thousands of years, but within a single lineage, the daughters all carried the memories of the mothers and all the ancestors backward through time.

She spread her wings and shrieked again.

Lai-Mei screamed. "What-- what are you? You-- you were human--!!"

"No more human than you, little dragon,"  Karula called to her, with a voice that was the song of a bird.  "I am the Phoenix.  I was your guest, and you tried to kill me."

She rose into the air, wings flapping, and then dove at the dragon with a predatory screech. Lai-Mei breathed another blast of fire at Karula, but the flames that seared her strengthened her, so soon after her rebirth. She raked at the dragon’s eyes with her talons.  

Screaming, Lai-Mei took wing herself, flying like an awkward chick.  She wasn’t used to flight, not combat flight, not against an equal opponent. Karula was smaller than the dragon, but not by much; the part of her that was still Karula the human scholar wondered how she could possibly be flying at the size she was, and how Lai-Mei could possibly be flying, when both of them were far too large for their wingspans.  The part of her that was the immortal Phoenix knew that the physics of the human world didn’t apply here. Karula flew ahead of her, almost effortlessly, still mocking her.  She had never flown before, but she was the Phoenix and had flown a thousand thousand times, and in that she had far more experience than the nine-year-old dragon.

Though Lai-Mei ripped at Karula and blasted flame, the bird’s greater knowledge of flight made her more maneuverable. She dodged each time, easily, taunting the dragon-child with challenges that were fierce bird cries. Karula’s beak and talons were less deadly-- she scored the dragon many times, drawing blood, but there was no hope of defeating her that way.  Instead, she maddened the child, so that when Karula winged away from her, Lai-Mei followed, coming after her as the name she’d chosen suggested.

Karula flew and flew, and Lai-Mei followed and followed, always to the east. They closed with each other more than once, Lai-Mei’s teeth closing on fiery feathers, Karula’s talons slicing a leathery wing – but Karula would always break free, climb and head east, and Lai-Mei followed in her rage. And thenthey were over the deep ocean.  

Karula climbed steeply, straight toward the sun.  As the sunbird, the Phoenix, the bird of fire, she could look straight into the sun without penalty.  It was not the same for the dragon.  Land dragons were creatures of caves and mountains, with no more resistance to the light of the sun than a human would have.  Lai-Mei tried to pursue upward, but was blinded.  She leveled off, looking around herself for the phoenix, glancing upward sometimes… but never far enough upward. It wasn’t noon yet, but it was close enough that aiming straight at the sun brought Karula almost directly to the top of the sky.  

She dove then, landing hard at the scruff of the dragon’s neck, and dug in with her talons, pinching off the nerves to the wings and paralyzing them, as her weight drove them both downward.  Lai-Mei screamed and struggled, her wings beating feebly and erratically.  The pressure points to fully paralyze her wings weren’t accessible to a phoenix’s talons, but near-paralysis and weakness would do the job as well.  She twisted her serpentine body and tried to bite Karula, but the bird was in exactly the position that the dragon couldn’t reach her from, and Karula’s enormous wings drove both of them down toward the ocean.

When Lai-Mei hit the ocean, she sizzled and steamed.  The sea dragon who’d been Bangji’s protector spirit, long before Lai-Mei’s birth, would have thrived in the ocean… but that dragon wouldn’t have breathed fire.  And wouldn’t have eaten the children in the town she was supposedly protecting.

Karula took care not to touch the water herself as she submerged the thrashing baby dragon, and with the power of her wings she held her there, Lai-Mei’s head thrust down by the bite of Karula’s talons in just the right places, until her struggles weakened.

She turned into a human girl again, causing Karula to reflexively let go of her as the feeling of thick scale under her talons changed to soft human flesh. Lai-Mei bobbed to the surface, gasping, and looked up at Karula pleadingly through the waves. "I'll be good!"  she wheezed, struggling to stay afloat and to get enough air.  "Please, let me go, Karula! I'll never hurt anyone ever again!"

Karula hesitated.  Could the little dragon truly be blamed for knowing nothing of what it meant to be a dragon, of having the morality of a beast, when she had lost her dragon parents and mentors before she even hatched?  And it would break the Wangs’ heart when Lai-Mei never returned.

As it had broken the hearts of the parents of Bangji when their own children had never come home.

There was no blame here. No moral culpability. Lai-Mei had become a monster. It didn’t matter whose fault it was that she had done so.  It was tragic how the dragons had failed her, how the people of Senchai and their violence had failed the dragons.  But she had eaten human flesh.  The human Karula Lefaire might have wanted to take pity on a little girl… but the Phoenix knew that, to protect the dragons and the phoenixes, all the wild magical creatures of the world, and to protect the humans as well, a magical beast who’d eaten human flesh couldn’t be allowed to live.

She landed on the child, letting her weight push the girl underwater. Lai-Mei thrashed and struggled, and tried to pull Karula down into the water with her, where her own magic would fizzle and be extinguished.  But Karula had wings, and they were stronger than anything a human child’s strength could bring to bear.

In the water, a human could live longer than a land dragon, whose fire was part of their life force. But humans couldn’t breathe water either. Karula held Lai-Mei under until she stopped moving and air stopped bubbling out of her mouth.

The “protector” of Bangji was dead.  She had never been an adequate protector – the price she’d taken from the village for her protection had been far, far too high. But the village expected a protector, and in a nation where bureaucratic zeal was fond of stomping out dissidence, variance, and any deviance from the One True Approved Way, a tiny village that held to the old ways in so many things was in danger, without a protector.

Karula climbed toward the sun again, and then banked, turning toward the village. Someday perhaps she would be human again; someday she might bear a daughter to be the Phoenix after her.  And having already undergone her transformation and mastered her relationship with fire, she wouldn’t be compelled to immolate herself before the daughter was old enough to understand. She’d be able to teach her child before once again becoming the bird of fire. Someday. Perhaps.

But right now, there was a village whose only protection from a harsh central government that demanded obedience and order… was floating dead in the waves, with the marks of Karula’s talons in her flesh.  And that meant Karula had an obligation.

She swept over the town, once, her fiery wings making a contrail in the air as she passed.  The villagers looked up at her in amazement. And then she turned, and climbed again, and landed at the shrine.

On the land she could hunt for herself, but she could not dive into the sea to catch fish.  There were no large wild animals around here, and people needed their goats and pigs to survive. She would not take from humans what they needed to live any more than she would take their lives.  

But she hoped they would bring the next offering soon.  She was hungry.  And she hoped it would be hot.

***

Sorry, apparently 11 am on Monday is the new best time for posting my 52 Project fics? Still gonna try to get the next one out by Friday, though.

[queerbreadcrumbs]

I wrote this letter to for when I eventually come out (:

To my loved ones,

I wrote this letter to explain something important to you, because I value our relationship and your support. I wanted to share with you that I don’t fully identify as the current gender I am recognized as. I’m non-binary. As such, from now on it’d be great if you could address me as “Rowan” rather than “*******” and use they/them pronouns for me. Obviously, I know that this will take some time to adjust to and I’m not expecting miracles, but genuine effort will mean the world!

I understand that this may be somewhat confusing, especially as you’ve all known me for quite some time. Over the course of this letter, I have included answers to the most common questions people have, as well as definitions and resources for further information. I’m also happy to answer any questions you may have regarding this insofar as they are respectful.

What does non binary mean?

-       Non- Binary or genderqueer individuals have a gender identity and/or expression that is neither man or woman. Some people are both, or are fluid in their gender identities or expressions and others are neither. In my case, it’s that I don’t identify particularly strongly with either gender. Most of the time I don’t feel like either a man or a woman, I just am.

Are you trans?

-       Well yes and no. Yes in the sense that I don’t agree with the gender assigned to me at birth, no in the sense that I have no desire to transition to male.

Do I have to do anything?

-       Not really! As I mentioned earlier, my name is now Rowan, and my pronouns are now they/them. So instead of saying something like “I like ******, she bakes really good cakes” or “****** left her coat here!” you’d instead say “I like Rowan, they bake really good cakes.” Or “Rowan left their coat here!” The only thing you really have to do is make a conscious effort not to use my old name and pronouns.

What are pronouns and why do you want new ones?

-       Pronouns are a group of words we use as short versions for nouns. The most common ones in the English language are she/her/ (feminine) and he/him (masculine). The singular form of these that isn’t gendered is usually thought to be “it/it’s” and personally I find this much more jarring in a sentence than they/them. Firstly, because it’s dehumanising. We tend to use the pronoun “it” when describing an inanimate object. “Look at that potato, it’s got eyes growing on it!” Whereas when describing a group of people, or someone whose gender you don’t know, the grammatically correct pronouns to give would be they/them. I don’t really know my gender, so I don’t expect you to figure it out through a complex use of English syntax. They/them, like you would use with any other unknown is fine.

-       This is something I want to change because people using she/her in reference to me makes me quite uncomfortable. When I am referred to as female it kind of feels like I’m an imposter or deceiving people in some way, like you’re seeing something that’s not there and that you’ll be cross when you find out I’ve been lying to you. I’d like to change my pronouns as I want to be honest with you all about who I am.

Why “Rowan”?

-       Rowan is a Gaelic name which comes from the Rowan tree. (Like the name Willow is after the Willow tree) In Scottish Gaelic it means “little redhead” and has always been a unisex name, although usually these days we see it more for boys than girls. I imagine most of you would immediately think of Rowan Atkinson. (Mr Bean, Blackadder)

-       I chose Rowan for a few reasons. Firstly because of its Gaelic origin and my desire to keep some connection to my Celtic roots. Secondly it sounds similar to ******* and has the same number of syllables which should help you when remembering to use it! Thirdly as those of you related to me directly will know, when those of us assigned female at birth (AFAB) reach a certain age our hair reddens before turning grey. As my hair has already started to pick this up, I thought a name meaning “redhead” was appropriate.

-       I wanted to change this because my given name is quite feminine and much like being referred to as she/her, being called ‘*******’ makes me feel very uncomfortable. You’d think being called it for 24 years would be enough to get used to it, but apparently not!

Why change this now?

-       I’ll admit that this all may be quite shocking or confusing to some of you. Please know that I have given this no small amount of thought. Accepting myself as I am has been a long and arduous process for me, so I understand if it feels like a lot for my loved ones too.

-       Looking back, it feels like I’ve had a difficult relationship with gender. As some of you will remember I was always a bit of a tomboy growing up. It took a long time for me to be comfortable wearing dresses.

-       As a teenager though, I began to face increasing pressure to be feminine, and was often called a lesbian for the way I chose to present myself. I had short hair and wore many a check shirt with doc martens. I loved it! Although, I did notice on the occasion I didn’t do this and presented in a more feminine way I was praised for this. People told me I looked nicer; people treated me better. The teasing stopped and I lived with less harassment which felt nice. Unfortunately, though I interpreted this feeling nice as enjoying being perceived as female.

-       I was still quite uncomfortable and some of my friends and loved ones picked up on this. However, I didn’t think it too important to question.

-       BUT NOT FOR LONG! Lockdown had a profound effect on me coming to terms with my gender. Because I wasn’t going anywhere, I no longer had to perform femininity. I just wore what felt good. I cut my hair really short and liked it! I was very comfortable with being at home, both physically and mentally.

-       However, when lockdown ended, I got a new job. I had to start performing again and the long hiatus made me realise just how uncomfortable I actually am being seen as a woman. The kids at school call me “miss.” I get called ****** constantly as people are trying to get my attention in the conventional way rather than just throwing things at me or just touching me like Tom does. Honestly, I hate it and it’s profoundly exhausting, which is why I’ve decided I want to live as Rowan.

-       Another thing that put all of this into sharp perspective for me was getting engaged. Don’t misunderstand, I love Tom more than anything in the world, and I still want very much to get married to him and for us to spend the rest of our lives together. I’m still very excited about our wedding! However, the language used to talk about weddings and engagements and the expectations surrounding them are very gendered! Words like ‘bride’ or ‘wife’ feel very strange and foreign when applied to me. As mentioned earlier though I don’t want to be a husband or groom either. I’m not sure there are alternatives for these words. I quite like how romantic “betrothed” sounds but I also don’t want to sound like I’ve just walked out of 1655.

-       Trying on wedding dresses was another huge hurdle for me. Part of it was my self-esteem issues and lack of confidence but everything I tried on made me feel like a fake, a failure. It being during times of COVID, I wasn’t permitted to take anyone with me to my fitting appointments. As such, I had these strange, unfamiliar saleswomen telling me I’d make a stunning bride and all such other nonsense while I felt just…wrong. At the time, I remember discussing it with my friends after sending them some pictures of me wearing wedding dresses. The words I used were “I felt like an imposter.” This is not just because I’m not used to wearing anything fancy. It’s because I’m not a woman. The clothes you wear on your wedding day are meant to make you feel fantastic, and I didn’t feel even comfortable in any of them, let alone fantastic. I have since purchased a dress to wear on my wedding day. It is simple, and I will style it to make myself as happy as I can be. I will still look like a “bride”. I’m just going to try to be as comfy as I can, reminding myself that clothes have no gender.  

What about clothes?

-       Typically, clothes are gendered. You walk into a shop and they usually have a men’s range and a women’s range. Because I am neither, I shop in both ranges!

-       I do also own a fair few dresses and skirts. This won’t change. Clothes have no gender. Traditionally yes, women wear dresses and skirts. But plenty of people who identify as men wear them and find them comfortable. Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, Harry Styles, Jayden Smith. These are all men, and yet they have all rocked skirts at one point or another. My wearing a dress or a skirt doesn’t make me any less non-binary as much as it didn’t make these guys any less of a man.

-       Furthermore, it wasn’t that long ago that trousers were deemed too masculine for women. However most modern women wear trousers, a lot of the time. Some of you are probably wearing trousers right now. Trousers have only recently begun to be considered neutral in our culture. Of course, it depends massively these days on the cut and the fit of them, but trousers can absolutely be masculine or feminine, just like me. I truly believe that one day skirts and dresses will become this neutral. They have been for a long time in Scotland.

-       In my mind this also explains why my personal preference for clothing has always been baggy and loose fitting.

Gendered terminology

-       As I mentioned previously when I talked about weddings, a lot of family language is heavily gendered. Son/Daughter, Husband/Wife, Niece/Nephew, Mum/Dad, Auntie/Uncle, Brother/Sister ect. Some of these words have gender neutral equivalents, and others don’t really. Where there is a gender-neutral equivalent, I would prefer it. Where there isn’t, I’m okay to be referred to as the female variant. For example, I’m fine being “Auntie Rowan”, “Dawn’s daughter[1]” or “Tom’s wife.[2]” But, I’d rather be Winnie’s parent than her mum, my Auntie’s nibling than her niece and Leanne’s sibling than her sister. If this sounds a little odd in conversation, and I’m sure it will do at first, you can say things like “My daughter uses they/them pronouns.”

So, are you “out, out”?

-       This letter is the start of my “social” transition. This is the part where the trans or non-binary person begins to live as themselves. As my close friends and family, I have chosen to share this with you first. As I live authentically, I want you to hear it from me, and have it explained by me rather than just stumbling across the fact I’ve changed my name on social media.

-       However, I’m not fully out yet. I’ve not yet informed anyone I work with or anyone in an official capacity, such as my doctor and I’m not using my new name legally just yet.

-       Please be mindful when discussing this with others that they may not be accepting. What matters is that you accept me. If you think telling a specific person might put me at risk, then don’t tell them.

-       If you want to discuss this with extended family that’s fine! 

More information

-       If you have questions that I haven’t answered here let me know and I’ll do my best to answer.

-       If you don’t feel comfortable asking me or just want more information on non-binary identities: - https://lgbt.foundation/who-we-help/trans-people/non-binary - https://gender.wikia.org/wiki/Non-binary - “A Field Guide to gender-neutral language” Shelley Roth (50p on apple books, or I could smuggle you a copy!)

In conclusion, I hope that you’re able to understand and support me in my coming out and coming to terms with my nonbinary identity, and that this doesn’t ruin, but strengthen our relationship. This has been very hard for me to share, but I’m ready to be my authentic self.  If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

Yours,

*********

[1] Technically yes, Son/Daughter do have the gender-neutral variant of child, but It’d be kind of weird to call a 24 year old a child, so please don’t.

[2] I hate the word “spouse” it just sounds like “spout” and I’d rather be someone’s wife than someone’s spout any day.

[silasmadams]

💔💝❤️A Mild Defense of Love Triangles 🚶‍♂️👫

INTRO

As the title indicates I want to offer my defense of the love triangle. In my opinion, shitting on the love triangle is the equivalent of beating a dead horse and if you want to continue beating said dead horse, go right ahead. Who am I to stop you? But that being said, I think love triangles get a bad rap. I will say that a lot of the criticism of love triangles, especially in more recent works, is fair. A lot of the criticisms bring up important points and shine lights on the overuse of this trope, to the point that when it’s used well people still decide to shit on it or call it out. Now, the YA genre especially can do this poorly. I love YA, for the uninitiated that just means Young Adult. I think YA is a fantastic genre and there are hundreds of gems within it but again there’s a lot of overuse of the love triangle and when it’s used well, even within the YA genre, it’s still seen as bad because people have decided that using the love triangle is automatically only for cheap romance or unneeded drama or what have you. And this is true in certain cases but not all. 

As such it’s unfair to dismiss this trope so easily. I mean I get it, we’ve all got tropes we hate, I absolutely despise the constant setting of fantasy within a medieval England type sphere or the trope of when there’s one female character in a group whose sole purpose is to be the love interest OR the dark brooding bad boy who’s an absolute asshole but we’re expected to like him and be into his bastardry because of his tragic backstory, and so on. Suffice to say I’ve got my fair share of issues about tropes in the literature world but as a whole, love triangles aren’t my top priority among them, hence the title. 

I’m going to discuss three books/series that I feel do the love triangle justice. Regardless of the book’s own merit, I feel this aspect of them was done well. I believe there are two main ways that the love triangle can be done right. The first is pure emotions where the characters bounce off each other perfectly and make you invested in all the involved parties. That is to say, not a love vector, not a love segment with an additional point on the periphery, but an actual triangle where all three characters have some relationship with one another be it romantic, platonic, or hate-filled. The second is by having the love interests double as different ideologies/beliefs that the main person must choose. These two types can and often do overlap which only further adds to the strength of the love triangle that’s depicted. 

Fair warning, there will be spoilers (mild or otherwise) for the following: The Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Clare, The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, and My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (the first book only).

EXAMPLE 1: THE INFERNAL DEVICES BY CASSANDRA CLARE

The Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Clare. I have long since fallen out of love with her books, but I feel as though this series is a good example of the love triangle based on pure emotions done right. Whatever opinions you may have of this author it’s important to give credit where credit is due. 

Within the Infernal Devices, there is the main love triangle between Will, Tessa, and Jem.  Will is your typical bad boy with a heart of gold except in Victorian England, Jem is a kind-hearted musician with a drug addiction. Tessa is the newcomer to the magical world that the boys know and she is an avid reader who constantly talks about the books she's read or would like to read. Now the reason this love triangle works as well as it does is because each party, in their own way, is in love with the other person. Will loves Tessa and the reader sees that through their escapades, their secret romances, their longing gazes and what not. Jem also loves Tessa and the reader similarly sees that through their shared conversations and affectionate moments. Tessa loves both of these boys which is evident through her internal dialogue that we as the reader are able to peer into, and if Clare had stopped there then this would be a poor love triangle, however, she doesn’t. She instead chooses to establish a strong and clear relationship between Will and Jem that showcases their own love for each other. They have a connection that is incredibly strong and goes beyond the terms of simple ‘bromance’ if you will. Jem, as someone who was forced to take a life altering drug and then became addicted to it, is an individual that is constantly in poor health and Will constantly cares for and protects him. He’s worried for him and tries to keep him safe and happy as best he can. They are the link in the love triangle that allows it to be as engaging as it is. They are not merely two boys fighting over a prize, they are two people that love each other and also happen to love the same girl. When Jem and Tessa become engaged, Will is heartbroken but it comes off as a heartbreak from both sides, he’s hurt by both Jem and Tessa choosing each other and leaving him. Tessa herself is unsure of the match because she continues to harbor feelings for Will while also being in love with Jem.

Within the series, it’s not just one side you care about. Sure, there were people who were rooting for Will over Jem or Jem over Will but the vast majority didn’t want anyone hurt, they were invested and they wanted a solution that would end with neither one of them upset. I, as a reader, cared for these characters and not just in the sense of who Tessa would choose but in the sense of the boy’s relationship with each other. Was this something they could move past, were they strong enough to get through these emotions and come out stronger on the other side? When reading it myself I clearly remember that tension and that desire for these characters to be happy.

In this sense, the emotions drive the series and even as I was starting to lose interest in Clare’s writing style and her books, I stuck around to see the conclusion of this romance. I’ll admit I was upset and am still somewhat bitter about the ending. You had all the chances to make it an excellent Polyamory ship, Clare but you didn’t! Regardless of the lackluster ending of this love triangle, I’d still put this as a great example of the emotional aspect in a love triangle done right, due in part to the lasting impact it has. Because, even years after finishing the series I still think about it and I still hope to write a relationship like that in my own stories, one that sticks with the reader long after they’ve finished the series or even have fallen out of love with the authors books.

EXAMPLE 2: THE HUNGER GAMES BY SUZANNE COLLINS

When I talk about this series I am specifically talking about the books, not the movies. The movies are well done, don’t get me wrong and they stick close to the series but the marketing of the movies and the desire to push the whole “Team Peeta” or “Team Gale” is something that muddies the movies for me. I know this is something that was present in the books as well but I wasn’t too active online when I first read them so I never had that aspect of the books in my head. I also want to note that the romance isn’t the main focus of this series but the love triangle in it serves a good example of a well done love triangle based on equating the individual to an identity/belief system. 

What I mean by the boys representing a belief system/different life/identity is this; I mean that someone like Gale is the old world belief, the more stringent, masculine, and typical. He is attractive and he is familiar, he is something that Katniss has known her whole life and as such he’s the obvious choice. It’s something expected, they’re not only from the same class but they share a similar backstory. Gale is the type of person Katniss would be expected to go with. They are the perfect pair because they are not a change from the status quo they are acceptable. Peeta, on the other hand, is from a different class than Katniss, a higher class. He is not the traditionally masculine option, he’s not a miner or a hunter but a baker. He doesn’t have the same views as Gale and is seen as the gentler of the two boys. Where Gale is strength, Peeta is kindness, where Gale is anger, Peeta is forgiveness, and so on. These two are diametric opposites even in terms of their physical appearances. Gale looks like Katniss, that is brown skin, dark hair, dark eyes because that is what the lower classes look like, that is how the reader is meant to initially discern from poor and rich with the exception of Prim and Katniss’s mother. Her mother having married lower than her class and her sister having the resemblance of their mother, subtly insinuating that Prim is the sister meant for greater things. Typically the higher classes, like the one Peeta is a part of, are light-skinned with light hair, light eyes, they are the merchants and local politicians, etc. Therefore they, the boys, not only represent different beliefs but different life-styles all together. When the third book in the trilogy comes around and Katniss is given a choice of mercy or revenge, Gale stands on the side of revenge, on the side that says they should take the children of the capitol and have them fight each other, Hunger Games style. Peeta on the other hand stands on the side of mercy where he argues that it is inhumane and cruel and by going forward with the plan for revenge they are no better than the people they took down, they are not saviors but rather they are the people here to replace Snow. When Katniss shoots Coin instead of Snow, she chooses mercy and thus she chooses Peeta, she chooses a quiet and gentle life rather than an extravagant one under cameras. By having the boys be polar opposites in ideological beliefs it makes Katniss’s choice of the two boys not about romance, which seems fitting for her considering she isn’t exactly a romantic and more interested in doing what she believes to be right, but about choosing and sticking with a certain belief/ideology/etc. It explains her waffling between the two boys as well, she is trying to understand her own viewpoints and the flip flopping from one boy to the other allow her to explore said points.

EXAMPLE 3: MY BRILLIANT FRIEND BY ELENA FERRANTE

In all honesty, this book alone deserves its own review and I have been meaning to talk about in detail but I don’t want to start talking about it until I’ve finished the entire series. For now, I’ll be talking about the first book and its use of love triangles, squares, so on. Love shapes if you will. This series follows the friendship of two girls in post-war Italy from childhood to early adulthood. Unlike the other examples, this isn’t a YA book but a Historical Fiction, adult book.

I’ve already discussed the use of emotions and angst as well as belief systems. This book is an example of both being used. The boys in this book are a way to depict how the women are meant to navigate the world they live in while the women themselves, Lila and Elena are a depiction of pure emotion. Each character that shows interest in Lila and to an extent Elena serves as a way to depict different forms of ideologies/government/etc. There is not one love triangle, but multiple love triangles happening at once. As such I can’t touch on every aspect here so I’m going to only give a quick run-down.

The men or boys in question that are after Lila are Stefano (Capitalism), Marcello (Fascism), Pasquale (Communism), while the boys after Elena are Nino (Academia/Education) and Antonio (The Plebs/Common Folk/Poverty). Within this group there are love triangles galore and since I can’t focus on all of them, I’m going to briefly talk about the love triangle of Lila, Pasquale, and Elena. This love triangle is one that’s more towards the beginning of the novel and its set when the girls are beginning to grow out of childhood and into adulthood. Pasquale is the first boy to show interest not in Elena but in Lila. This brings out jealousy in Elena because even though Lila has always been smarter than her, she has always been the more beautiful of the two friends. Once Pasquale starts to show interest in Lila, it becomes a gateway for the other boys to look on and also begin to fawn over Lila. Hence why it goes Pasquale, Marcello, and Stefano, much like the history of Italy itself (though I’ll admit I’m no expert on that). However, whenever the boys do fawn over Lila, Elena is always present. Lila and Elena themselves have deep rivalry and love that goes back years. They are constantly at each other's throats but they are also best friends. Their bond is something that goes unbroken, even when they fight, they obsess over each other and refuse to let the other out of their mind. In all of the love triangles that show up there is always a version that involves the girls in some way. For Example, the love triangle is Lila, Pasquale, and Marcello. There is ofcourse a version of it where Elena is involved, being Lila, Elena, and Marcello. Unlike the other two series examples, this one is more intricate and complex, that by no means takes away from the other two but it shows how the love triangle can be more than what most people give it credit for. It can be a series of interlocking relationships each as convoluted and twisted as our relationships in real life tend to be. When reading all these relationships and love triangles I was never struck with a feeling of boredom and I never felt the urge to roll my eyes. I was invested in the stories and the links, I wanted to know what would happen, I wanted to know where the relationship of Lila and Elena went, I wanted to know who or if they would choose a suitor. I was entrenched in their lives, I cared what happened along with seeing the parallels of ideologies that were offered their way. This is probably one of the best examples of modern love triangles I can think off.

CONCLUSION

I don’t really have a deep thing to say here at the end. I don’t even know if you’re convinced by ramblings or not. I just think people should allow themselves to be more creative with the love triangle trope. A trope is after all, only bad when it's blatantly predictable and doesn’t make the reader feel anything. I think it’s high time we gave the love triangle another go instead of constantly shoving it back in a corner or looking down on it because ‘romance bad’ especially since its purpose isn’t just romance but relationships of various natures. The love triangle deserves far more credit than being relegated to what a lot of people deem a ‘lesser’ genre. So, have I changed your mind? Do you remain steadfast in hating the love triangle? Tell me if you want or go about your day as usual if you’d rather not.

A VIDEO THAT TALKS ABOUT LOVE TRIANGLES THAT YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT:

https://youtu.be/QojOfp8V7rA 

I came across this video after having written this but I thought it was also an interesting take on the defense of/falling back in love with the love triangle. 

BOOKS MENTIONED:

The Infernal Devices by Cassandra Clare 

The Infernal Devices Book Series

Or 

The Infernal Devices, the Complete Collection: Clockwork Angel; Clockwork Prince; Clockwork Princess

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 

The Hunger Games Book Series

Or

The Hunger Games Trilogy Boxed Set (1) (8601400319468): Suzanne Collins: Books

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

https://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9781609450786?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=NMPi_Smart_Shopping&utm_term=NMPi_Smart_Shopping&ds_rl=1264488&ds_rl=1264488&gclid=Cj0KCQiAnL7yBRD3ARIsAJp_oLanfQZ7YxglG4iP0K1_LaJhsVUDMCH6HJVo_BSrS9IBFCvGe2-r4KkaAtTrEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Or

My Brilliant Friend: Neapolitan Novels, Book One: Elena Ferrante, Ann Goldstein: 8601400235683

OR get them all at your library, it’s free after all. If your library is closed due to the pandemic, a lot of libraries have ebooks you can borrow. They typically have a large collection online so go ahead and try your luck there, and of course, stay safe and stay inside if you can. 

CHECK OUT MY BLOG:

https://silasmadams.home.blog/2020/04/09/%f0%9f%92%94%f0%9f%92%9d%e2%9d%a4%ef%b8%8fa-mild-defense-of-love-triangles-%f0%9f%9a%b6%e2%80%8d%e2%99%82%ef%b8%8f%f0%9f%91%ab/

[spamzineglasgow]

SPAM Digest #3 (Nov 2018)

A quick list of the editors’ current favourite critical essays, post-internet think pieces, and literature reviews that have influenced the way we think about contemporary poetics, technology and storytelling.

Deborah Smith of Tilted Axis Press on translation, at the International Literature Showcase 2017.

Literature from outside of Europe tends to get read more anthropologically than as art, and so we're publishing you things that are surreal or experimental , or that are at least innovative in some way.

Deborah Smith talks here both of translation and the ethos behind the non-profit press she founded, Tilted Axis. One of the points that resonated most with me was her recognition that literature outside of Europe, more often than not, is read anthropologically rather than as art. Is it a fair assumption to say that we, as western readers, would see a work of Thai or Indonesian literature as a doorway to furthering our understanding of that culture, but would be slower to consider the work critically and artistically, even when the style, form and ideas are innovative and experimental? Speaking on behalf of myself, I would say I've been prone to this. 

Of course, translated literature, the 'lifeblood of English', as Smith puts it, does offer us an opening into cultures, traditions and ideas different from our own. Yet I found it truly refreshing when purchasing Prabda Yoon's Moving Parts from Tilted Axis to not find myself pondering what this book will teach me about Bangkok Culture. When reviews from authors such as Eley Williams read 'Sleek, supple and soaring – in this extraordinary translation, Prabda Yoon’s stories command your attention', any anthropological curiosities are overtaken by artistic interest.

As Smith points out in this talk, translators act as the literary 'gatekeepers', deciding which works make it across our borders. Traditionally, more unknown and underrepresented writers from countries in Asia haven't had such a platform to share their works in English, with larger publishing companies picking the writers they deem to be worthy of translating. Founded only three years ago, in 2015, Smith's press is the first to publish contemporary fiction in Uzbek and Thai in the United Kingdom. Just with that achievement alone, I think it would be fair to say that Tilted Axis is unique in the platform it is offering to the British public. 

M.P.

‘Emoji Dick and the Eponymous Whale, An Essay in Four Parts’ by Lisa Gitelman on Post45

[This strong recommendation comes with a flashing *very long read* alert]

This is without a doubt the most thorough and exhaustive commentary on the seminal post-iphone experiment that is Emoji Dick - an pictorial novel written by Herman Melville, edited and compiled by Fred Benenson, and translated into emoji by the hundreds of labourers that quietly operate behind Amazon Mechanical Turk . Gitelman’s essay approaches the Melville x Benson enterprise as 'a ludic contact zone between human intelligence and algorithmic processing', and as a beautifully layered example of what falls 'between literature and whatever the fate of the literary may be in an ever more digitally mediated and data-described world'.

What stands out about this essay is that Gitelman chooses to focus on the easily overlooked conditions of textual production involved in such a complex experiment - one that could, perhaps superficially, be considered simply for its conceptual significance. Gitelman draws parallels between the material manufacture of Moby Dick, the 19th-century physical novel, and the genesis of Emoji Dick the kick-started, self-published, on-demand book (do we still get to call it a novel?), as well as the politics behind the different types of labour involved in such different processes (from physical typesetting and letterpress printing, to crowdsourcing, algorithmic mediation and coding).

Questions of pictorial and collaborative translation are also raised, with reference to the west’s early approaches to Chinese and Japanese pictograms, the struggles that go along with the digitisation of the physically printed, the potential shortcomings of pictorial cataloging through linguistic methodologies, and illegibility as an artistic or conceptual statement in today’s literary landscape.

‘My students have observed that half the fun of Emoji Dick is saying it. They like the word dick, yes, but there is pleasure in the whole title. The word emoji, like the word perestroika is an untranslatable. It functions as a "checkpoint," marking a historically specific zone of contact and frisson between languages, the paradoxical crux of incommensurability and pleasurable accommodation. And just as perestroika is a Romanized untranslatable that we can date to the Gorbachev era of the 1980s, emojiis a transliterated untranslatable evolved in and of our networked present. Like other untranslatables, it can be reckoned "as a linguistic form of creative failure with homeopathic uses."’

D.B.

Image Source

‘Of Donuts I Have Loved’, by Miranda Dennis, Granta

I’ve been thinking about the value of the empty calorie lately. What it means to say, ‘treat yourself’ and how capitalism confects a version of spiritual nourishment that often comes in greasy wrappers. The damage and beauty in that, a little transient snack for the stressed commuter. To bestow upon your workmates a box full of donuts. Lore of rings and holes, orbital dough and icing halos. The donut’s performative, Sunday innocence. In a series of shorts that detail encounters with donuts, Miranda Dennis sketches a lovely reflection on hunger and care and the need to feel ‘whole’. The way our favourite snack brands offer a pharmakon source of regret and relief, how we find ourselves glitched on sugar’s addictive logic. She depicts a soft phenomenology of the donut. To see yourself sweet, to indulge those rituals that make us feel safe. This is the culinary memoir I want to read: not an oyster in sight, no grumpy men in whites with knives; instead the playful economy of snacks and comfort and female bodies. The acknowledgement of food as more than an expression of style or embodied nutrition. Food as narrative fact, as catalyst for complex affects: the precise oscillations between sadness and joy, the transitional digest of mood within us. 

M.S.

What is the internet? by Ian Sample, The Guardian

Most people, myself included, would think to know the answer to a question as obvious as this. Having been present at the Dark Mycology reading group, run by the Glasgow based Art & Ecology collective, I noted that one guest speaker pointed out how many people never envisage the  internet in its physical form, and speak of it as if it really were wholly immaterial.

If someone were to ask me 'what is the internet?', I'd tend to explain it as a network of connections, focusing mostly on its functions/what it makes possible. My answer would probably focus on the immaterial, the web of shared information existing in a hyperspace, seemingly without any grounding in the physical world. Flashes of hyperlinks and search engines would surface before any images of deep sea ethernet cables came to mind. The question of what the internet actually is in its physical form didn't come as wholly new knowledge to me. Nor would I imagine it does for many others. Yet although I was at least partially aware of these elements, there's something quite novel about picturing the internet for what it is in its material form: hundreds of thousands of miles of underwater cables spanning all corners of the globe, connecting hundreds of nations. 

To try to visualise the seemingly endless bank of information that flows through cables the width of hosepipes is quite magical when you consider the specifications of such a network: information passing at the speed of light through fibre optic threads the width of a single hair. There's something so painfully delicate about that image when you begin to think how more and more to the elements that allow our lives to function rely on the intactness of those small, underwater tubes. With an ever-growing number of lives now inseparable from online space, matched with a  growing dependence on connectivity, it is too interesting to see how even in its physical form, all users are connected. The damage to two marine cables near the Egyptian port of Alexandria, which left many users in India and Pakistan without internet, illustrates how delicate such seemingly secure connections can be.

[pressography-blog1]

This French-English Blogger Has Mastered

New Post has been published on https://pressography.org/this-french-english-blogger-has-mastered/

This French-English Blogger Has Mastered

Style that doesn’t come evidently to a French girl? Looks like a cultural anathema, specifically while thinking about 1/2-English and half-French style blogger Camille Charrière. Having endeared herself to her nearly half of a million Instagram fans with that enviable “performed, however, undone” insouciant style that Seems like a birthright to our Gallic sisters, it appears her destiny as a Fashion phenomenon changed into greater than sealed.

but, as the 29-12 months-antique former lawyer explains, developing up in a house full of intellectuals, a profession in the creative enterprise wasn’t necessarily recommended. Still, after a brief stint in the finance international, Charrière subsequently took the plunge into Fashion with the launch of her weblog, Camille Over the Rainbow, and the relaxation, as she says, is history World Scoop.

From documenting her cool-lady fashion on her buzzy blog to currently launching a podcast, Fashion: No Clearout, the Pau, France-native continually brings a clean, unstudied elegance to her style for paintings—a sentiment that still interprets into her beauty ordinary. With the help of Wella’s nourishing Oil Reflections products–such little renovation! Such huge results!–Charrière continues that blonde bedhead of hers brilliantly.

Here, the blogger tells us how she came to work in Style, why she invests in exceptional hair care products, and how her multilingual and multicultural heritage conjures up her style.

Style Is a Received Flavor My mom is half English and half French, and simplest agreed to marry my French dad and pass lower back to France with him at the situation that our family would be English simplest. So I grew up talking English at home and had to examine French on the go or at college. I now consider my bilingual and bicultural upbringing my mystery weapon—no one expects me to have a British accessory! My parents are noticeably highbrow and kooky, with books pouring out of every corner of my residence, and opera usually gambling at pinnacle extent. but I wouldn’t credit score them for my interest in Fashion. They were very a good deal in opposition to me crossing over into the creative industry. I suppose I always favored garments, but it turned into simplest at a university that I started to like the memories behind the clothes, and began to develop my personal sense of style. I would say, in my case, that my fascination with Fashion turned into Obtained and no longer something I was born with. I graduated as an attorney and labored in finance for a bit before taking the jump of religion into Style. I truly by no means imagined I’d paintings on this industry. From the Finance world to the Style world I was going out with an English guy and determined to move to London notwithstanding having simply graduated from regulation college. Being not able to practice regulation inside the U.Okay. without doing a conversion route, I decided to enter finance, wondering it would upload a few side to my linear CV. It becomes the excellent/worst choice I have ever made. I hated it a lot, I decided right away operating for a massive profits was in no way going to paintings for me. I decided to parent out what I certainly wanted. I started out my blog, Camille Over the Rainbow, as a creative outlet and found out that I wanted to be part of the Style enterprise, so I applied for a process at Net-a-Porter, cease my city task, and the rest is records!

Uniform Dressing, the French Way I don’t have traditional days and that is the exceptional component about what I do. Every day is completely specific. If I’m walking around London, I’m able to make certain I am in at ease clothes, as the metropolis is big and also you become having to nearly jog everywhere so as no longer to be past due. I only get dressed up when I can be. My each day uniform is conventional denim teamed with a big chunky knit or a unfastened-match tee, and both sneakers or Chelsea boots. Easy does it—I’m French in spite of everything!

finished however Undone at work My go-to look for paintings is the “completed, undone” messy bedhead. I focus on very wealthy products to appearance after my bleached locks, but I really like to have a brief habitual. I feel the want to clean my hair Each day due to the fact I don’t like the color it activates day two of being unwashed—the drawback of daily washing being that it could get pretty dry. I like the usage of Wella’s Luminous Smoothing Oil directly out of the shower, after towel drying. Even in winter, I don’t use a blow-dryer as I just like the herbal-wave appearance. The oil makes this easier. With the aid of using quality merchandise Every day, I don’t need to worry about brushing my hair. I also love the Wella Luminous Reboot Masks because it absolutely nourishes my locks without making them heavy or greasy. I’ll use it in place of a conditioner as part of my each day recurring. It does wonders for my damaged, dry highlights. It’s air-dried and looks after itself! Continuously Accessorizing

My earrings in no way come off. I have worn the same jewelry for three years. I have a diamond horn necklace which I love to mention is a croissant in honor of my genes. I additionally wear a signet ring, and horny hoops in order to make even the most boyish outfit extra female.

Hardworking Staples for an afternoon of labor I really like to suppose that I have embraced the idea of wearing a uniform and constructing a wardrobe of tough-running staples, à Los Angeles franchise, jumbled together with the English mentality of “do what you need.” In my case, that in all likelihood means being the least dressy character inside the room at a cocktail celebration. same ease goes for my hair (simply five minutes with Wella’s Luminous Reboot Mask. Come as you are!

Away to Write blog Posts For NonEnglish Speakers

What are the problems that non-English talking bloggers are experiencing in the procedure of blogging? They’re many, however, the two maximum often ordinary demanding situations are the following:

1) no longer sure which language they must use to weblog – should they use their native language and have a smaller potential readership or to the weblog in English in which their readership could be lots larger, but wherein they face demanding situations in writing as nicely?

2) Some other downturn is whilst They may be feeling remote from different bloggers – a lot of them pondered that at instances they felt that they have been not taken as significantly By bloggers in different parts of the arena and found running a blog hard.

If you are a non-English speaker, you can Nevertheless write your blog in English, because you discover it lots less complicated to put in writing about technology-associated news and opinions on this language — especially when most people of your readers are from America, United kingdom, and so forth. There’s clearly lot more opposition in your blog In case you selected to jot down in English and also you should suppose cautiously about what content material you will put up for your weblog after which choose your area of interest.

no longer a bad idea is to blog in each language – your local and English, and have every article posted in both languages. probably you must place plenty more work into this, but it’s a great concept anyway.

Without a doubt, non-English speak bloggers need to ask themselves two questions: what is my goal and what’s my audience? If you blog for human beings you want to make commercial enterprise with at a neighborhood or national degree, then weblog in your local language. At the stop of the day, the entire point is to be understood. In any other case, you can’t anticipate building a weblog network. And of path In case your blog for a worldwide audience, then you must choose English.

Consistent with many bloggers’ stories, you can weblog either in English or to your very own language as quickly as your goals are clean, human beings understand what you have to mention, you’ve got suitable content material — rich, exciting, colorful, you realize your readers and their wishes and you answer to it. In any language, blogging is the same and you need to maintain up with the identical policies.

Of direction, whilst someone writes in a few dialect from a far-flung region, he/she will never get a target audience of million readers. Nevertheless, likely this answers the desires of a handful of nearby readers and each person will be happy approximately that.

The exceptional recommendation to bloggers could be to write within the language you feel most at ease with because this gives you the widest range of expression and the least errors. This Manner you will in all likelihood get a faithful target audience much faster, even if it seems it isn’t always that huge.

However, when you have exact reasons for running a blog in English, inclusive of trying a bigger percentage of worldwide site visitors, however your English is not that suitable, you have to probably try to collaborate yourself with somebody whose English proficiency is much better and feature him/her to proofread your posts for corrections before posting.

On the identical time, bloggers who post blogs in English, but their niche is greater or much less domestically oriented, will lose their local target audience huge time, especially in which English is not one of the languages traditionally studied at school or Otherwise.

So that you can monetize their blogs, many non-English Audio system are starting their blogs in English with the chance we already have noted above. Bloggers who’ve non-English Audio system writing in English are probably tens of millions, and no person can underestimate their function and contribution to the worldwide blogosphere.