Afterword on "Cinderella"

Dear friends and family,

In my mind, once an author publishes his work (this would be more than just getting his friends and relatives and writers circle to read it) it stops being his. Don't get me wrong; if someone wants to pay for a copy my stuff or use it creatively, I should be one to get the check. But once it's out, the author no longer has authority on how it is to be interpreted or understood. And so it is with "Cinderella."

Here’s an afterword with my comments on what was in my mind as this story came to me and as I continue to think about these characters who came my way. But at this point, I’m just another commentator. I’m drafting my comments in the form of Q&A, which always seems easier to read.

Q. What a strange idea to place a romantic comedy in Qing Dynasty China. Why?

A. I am a big fan of screwball comedies and fairy tales. I especially like modern takes on fairy tales that you find in works of fantasy fiction writers. Film versions of this genre would be The Princess Bride and Ever After. Being an American guy of Chinese descent, I've always wanted to read or watch something of this sort that had people who look like me. With the rise of Internet media viewing, you can now easily find period TV and film from Asian countries that approach this, but they're not speaking in or to the American idiom.

I have written several satirical fairy tales (this was when my kids were growing up and I likewise took to writing stories with Chinese-esque heroes and villains with whom they could identify—and I could not find such things in the bookstores) and was trying to think of another writing project to capture some of the ideas I've been thinking about when I decided to work on a screwball comedy about a Chinese American petroleum engineer who finds himself doing research on a Pacific island that has a majority Chinese diaspora culture that he becomes entangled in. The people on that island had to have backstory of how they got there, and so "Cinderella and the Great Prince of Southern China" is part of that backstory.

Q.  The story seems to be placed in a specific point in history. Is the Princess Seven based on a historical figure?

A. The historical setting is broadly Qing Dynasty China. Remember that this is conceived as a story within a story and as such is a set of redacted remembrances by island elders so it's supposed to be a little fuzzy. The Kangxi Emperor had multiple wives and concubines by whom he sired many children, so he's sort of the kind of guy I imagine Princess Seven's dad to be. The story should NOT be expected to be historically or culturally accurate, but rather gesture toward the truth. That said, I tried to build in enough historical plausibility such that it is not totally mythical.

Q. Does this take place in Beijing?

A. I just call it the capital city where the Emperor lives to maintain the fairy tale quality. Pin it down to Beijing and you start wanting to get out the map and find places. That said, Beijing is not a coastal city (in case you're wondering about the docks and ships), but it was the terminus of the inland waterway the Grand Canal which ocean-going vessels could navigate. This is where the plausibility thing comes into play.

Q. Why don’t upper-class females like Seven and Silver Bird have bound feet?

A. You’re hitting on a reason why this is set in the Qing and not the Ming Dynasty (BTW, think of the Qing as roughly equivalent in time to the time of the Renaissance and the Ming as contemporaneous with the Medieval period). The Qing was a period where China was ruled by Manchurians, an ethnic group with a different culture than the majority Han culture.

The Qing were a pretty interesting group. They had a cosmopolitan, internationalist vision of what China could be. If the Han had just gone along with the program I suspect most of the world would be speaking Chinese today rather than English … but I digress, I don’t write alternate histories. 

Point being the Qing was a time of “foreign” rule and so there was this ethnic tension running through the time period that I kind of hint at in a couple of places. Imagine if the Quebequois managed to overthrow the United States and started imposing their way of life on the U.S.—they would get changed more than the rest of us, and that’s what happened to the Manchurians.

Placing the story in the Qing makes use of these historical tensions. Seven and the royal family, Silver Bird and her family, Minister Long, and Zuo and his lieutenants are from Manchurian families, part of the ruling elite. Three, his servants, all of the merchants, and practically everybody else are Han ethnicity. 

While high-born ladies, Seven and Silver Bird do not have bound feet because they are Manchurian (they didn't do that to their daughters). Manchurians have a horse-riding culture and I'm thinking you need a good long foot to ride a horse. 

There were no such thing as "lotus bud boots" but if I were a brothel owner in ancient China, I'd surely have invented them myself. Silver Bird handles a horse even better than she handles a camel (which her dad got as gift from a plaintiff whose case he settled, but that's another story . . .) and mention was made of Seven's affection for the northern horses. Red Beard is probably part Russian or has some Caucasian blood which attributes to his unusual size. 

Could we tell a Manchurian from a Han today? We can't, but Chinese probably can. I'm pretty sure if you're from a Manchurian family, it’s kept track of and your dad has let you know what your true family name is.

Q. Are people really named numbers like Seven and Three?

A. Birth-order identity is not my invention. Even in my own experience as a Diaspora Chinese I was frequently introduced by my parents to other Chinese families as "son three," never my Chinese name. I think Chinese people tend to regard people collectively and so it helps them to be told what spot you occupy in the collective. There are a crazy number of words to describe family relationships with precision and accuracy—rank meant a lot. I remember reading that Chinese referred to the daughters as numbers, but if you think about it, it’s not as impersonal as it seems. We think of “Abigail” as a girl’s name—and not in terms of it’s meaning which is “Father’s Joy.” Muslim families do the same thing naming their sons in a standard succession: Mohammad, Ali, Hussein, etc.

Q. Is it reasonable that Three would not have figured out that "Qi" is "Seven" just from her name?

A. I think so. He really wants to believe he has found himself his diamond in the rough and is willing to arrange all assumptions in his head to make it so. Anyway, Chinese has sooooo many homonyms I think it’s reasonable that that particular coincidence was so unlikely to him that it would not even occur.

BTW, Three’s taste in loud clothing comes from his administrating a port and because of that sees all kinds of textiles that the shippers and pirates run by him, and he’s cultivated a taste for the exotic. And yes, it was illegal for anyone to wear yellow in the Qing (it was reserved for royalty). He kind of gets away with pushing it because of his clueless and brash naivety and is frequently mistaken for being a foreigner or a cross-dressing weirdo.

Q. Has anyone told you the story seems very cinematic?

A. Yeah, at least two. Someone told me they were running the whole thing in their head as a TV costume-comedy miniseries. I always write stories in this very un-marketable length; not long enough to be a novel and way too long to be a short story. Someone suggested to me that I may be frustrated screenwriter or TV writer. There’s probably something to that. I write very dialogue heavy and I don’t tend to pen long scenes of description.

That said, it would be a very hard project to film. It would probably require hiring every Asian American actor in Hollywood to execute it. But let me segue from here into two things that I was reacting to when writing this story. There are two pop culture stereotypes about Asians that begged me to be addressed and turned on their head.

1) Male protagonist as martial arts expert: Three was educated as a gentleman and handling a weapon was part of that education, just as a well-rounded man today would be expected to handle firearms in some parts of the U.S.  Three knows enough to get through his compulsory exams. He makes his decisive win at the most boring of all martial arts contests to watch—the arm wrestle.

2) Chinese are barbarians who use torture: At this time in history, EVERYBODY used torture. In case you missed the passing reference, Judge Kuang got some of his best ideas for his treatise from Christian missionaries.  I almost had him waterboarding Three since we now know that technique was perfected in the Spanish Inquisition a generation earlier. Oh, but wait, WE modern Americans don't use torture, so I figured waterboarding was not really torture. So I just had Three being put into a small cage and then dunked in cold water (both good ol' American historical techniques so these details are ana-chronistic and ana-regionalistic too. BTW, Kuang Wen Sheng, the name of Three's torturer, is one of my Chinese names—and I have three beautiful daughters too by coincidence.) 

Q. Was there an Evergreen Inn?

A. I surely hope so. But we can be pretty sure something like a Red Lantern Inn existed. And while we’re on the topic, I'm pretty sure homosexual men could be found in China, both the kind who went in for long-term relationships (Golden Talent) and those who preferred to be players (Whispering Pine).

Q. Is there such an idea as a Four-Times Dog?

A. Never heard of it until I heard the street astrologer tell me there was such thing (and I'm SURE he wasn't just making it up to get more money out of me. . .). A word about the Hour of the Dog. Hours in old Chinese reckoning are two hours to us in the U.S. The "hours" are assigned to the 12 zodiac signs, Rat through Pig, and so they are necessarily 120 minutes each. Remember that this has a bearing on when the Carpenter and the Seamstress get to the Evergreen to play their part in Seven's subterfuge as her false parents.

Q. OK, spill. What are some of the Easter Eggs in this story?

A. General Zuo's name transliterated from its pronunciation in Cantonese would be General Tso. I just wanted to build in a kooky reference to the popular dish in American Chinese restaurants. There is a General Zuo in the Qing Dynasty but he lives a couple hundred years later than this story. Glint might be his ancestor eh? By the way, I don't know who came up with that dish, but it's awful--so over the top sweet and goopy. I wanted to have Seven inventing the dish in the story until I went out and ate it. Yuck. She'd never come up with such a thing. I liked the name though, and I needed a general in this story, so he stayed General Zuo.

The dialogue between Lucky and the Guard of the Dawn Patrol is my homage to Shakespeare. I am not a scholar of Shakespeare but I'm a huge fan. To my mind, he is the inventor of the modern romantic comedy. This is supposed to mimic the type of scene where a side character gets into punnery against a straight man. I'm probably going to go back and rewrite Lucky's lines into iambic pentameter. I made mention in one of my posts that this is supposed to be rather like one of Shakespeare’s comedies. If I ever did recast this into stage form, I’d definitely go for a Twelfth Night kind of vibe. If you’re familiar with British Christmas pantomimes, I’d think this would a terrific story for that genre.

There are hidden allusions, but you’ll have to find them for yourself. My favorite passage is the story of the recipe for preparing venison. It really is the kernel of the entire story.

We’re Done Here

Are you still reading? Get a life.  Anyway, that’s all the commentary I’ll offer here. If you have a question about the story, send it to me and I’ll post an answer in the blog. A couple of family members have asked for a PDF version of the whole Cinderella story (they don’t like this blog installment thing). If you want one, e-mail me; just don’t sell it and be sure give me credit. E-mail me through Facebook or to windyecragtavern@gmail.com.

Keep Reading

I’m going to start posting chapters of the “wraparound” novel in my blog as I rewrite it (it doesn't have a title yet). If you’re interested, please follow me and read the installments. You’re going to have to keep up because I am not going to leave them up indefinitely as I will Cinderella. I will narrate them and post them as MP3 files on my website as I go, so it will be continuously accessible in audio form, but after the novel is totally rewritten, it will be digitally self-published.

Thanks for reading.

Love,

Pops