The Weekend Story Installments - A mid project recap for those who are curious

Dear Gentle Readers,

For those of you have come lately to this blog for whatever reason, you will have noticed that there is a story being put out in installments on weekends. This is a novel that I wrote in 2012, but am sharing it out with any of you "alpha" readers who care to follow along. This current process is the third and final rewrite and then it will be self-published probably on Amazon. It will be priced very modestly for download for less than the price of higher-end meal at Jack-in-the-Box/Carls Jr., so I hope you'll eventually buy it.

It is a very quirky and peculiar kind of story that doesn't easily fit into any marketable genre, so it's not even worth shopping to major publishers, but it's the kind of story that I want to read, so I had to write it. I consider it a calling card or a loss leader. It will never make any money and it's only job in this universe is to tickle and delight any who come upon it.

You may have dived in and tried reading a passage and it probably made absolutely no sense. Hence for those who are just curious, I am offering this recap just so you know what kind of story this thing is. If you pinned me down, I would call it a "magical-realist comedy of manners that delves into coming to terms with your ethnic identity and being too tied to your past by finding a whole bunch of people who have the same problems that you do, but they possess them to the extreme."

If you are a Chinese American, the closest that I will come to that most dour of all genres, ethnic identity prose, will be short, sarcastic journal comments made by the protagonist--identity prose, you know that stuff that you were forced to read in Asian Studies or Minority Literature--humorless laments on how awful it is be nonwhite in a white majority society.


Three Loves Seven (a working title)

One day in spring 2012, 50-something petroleum engineer and wildcat driller Clete Wong, who lives in Los Angeles, succumbs to his administrative assistant's nagging to list himself on an online professional network since several of his professional contacts use it. He is reluctant, fearing all kinds of inane contacts and posts, but he lists and soon is pinged by an old college friend, Johnson Lai, from back when they were studying geology in grad school, to whom he responds.

Johnson is now a fundraising officer for a nonprofit that is combating global warming (a organization that oil man Clete despises), and via emotional manipulation and nostalgia, convinces Clete to conduct an old-fashioned geological field survey, that Clete will fund himself, of a small, sparsely inhabited island in the South Pacific which is threatened to disappear underwater before long due to climate change. Clete's task will simply be to document what was there. The Islanders are very reclusive and allow NOBODY on. Lai's NGO has a time-limited research license that they cannot afford to act on, but he offers the opportunity to his ol' schoolchum Clete.

The project will last 90 days. Clete is fully capable of funding this effort and more. He's been an uncanny diviner of rich oil and gas deposits who has never drilled a dry hole. He takes all profits and uses them to fund the next production. And he is a quintessential Chinese American cheapskate who never draws out more benefit for himself than he can use to support his lonely bachelor lifestyle in a rented 2-bedroom apartment, driving an old Honda Civic. He is quite wealthy on paper, but I suppose in his own mind, he is only something of a conduit or a trustee of what mineral abundance he so easily finds.

He arrives at the research destination, an apparent volcanic island called "Dog Island," located beside a deep marine trench. He learns it is inhabited by 9 women, about his age, who each have a daughter, whose ages range from 16 to 21. They seem to be some remnant of a royal family that once ruled the island because they all call themselves princesses. He later learns there is a 10th mother-daughter pair who live in isolation on a central mountain whom the others call witches.

He is given a prefab cottage to live in and he is to interact only with his designated liaison Princess Lee, and her daughter Ling, who reside adjacent to him. Lee is a very dour, pushy, bossy, bitchy person who finds Clete's present to be an annoyance and an inconvenience. They immediately have a personality clash, but they settle into a mildly antagonistic equilibrium.

Clete learns that the princesses, like him, are all of Chinese ethnicity, but while he was part of the diaspora that went to California, their ancestors ended up in the middle of the Pacific. In his interactions with them he finds a lot that is similar to his family practices and a LOT that is different. He attempts to find out why these 20 women are there, but they offer no explanations of their history or current politics to him fearing that they will be exploited if any information is shared.

While he attempts to maintain his professional distance, the prohibition on his interacting with the locals quickly goes by the wayside as he keeps getting drawn into the personal lives of the Dog Islanders, mostly by the younger princesses who are quite curious to learn about the stranger. When the mothers learn he is an adjunct professor of math and engineering at a Southern California university, he is forced into providing instruction to the girls in the form of cram-school-style SAT prep courses, as a condition of his continued presence. For this reason, he is alternately called Dr. Wong or "the Professor" by everyone there.

Clete learns that the Island is divided into nine domains over which the nine elder princesses preside. The have organized their society assigning civic responsibilities under the Chinese 5-element model of Wood, Metal, Water, Earth, and Fire, with protective responsibilities assigned to a Security Council based on the four-directions system of East (dragon), North (tortoise), South (phoenix), and West (chi-lin).

His research movements are restricted to whatever domain he is assigned each week. As he moves from one domain to the next, he encounters and interacts with each successive princess and her daughter in turn, usually leading to great cultural misunderstanding and consternation.

Early on, he is befriended by the youngest inhabitant, 16-year-old Princess Qin Qin, whom he eventually hires as his research assistant. She is a dreamy, near-sighted teenager who is enamored of fairy tales and (probably due to a schoolteacher infatuation with Dr. Wong) gets it into her head that he just might be a prophesied, legendary savior to the Island that their foundational myth predicts will come. Much of her activity is trying to convince her mother and cousin princesses that this is so.

For his part, Dr. Wong feels sorry for Qin Qin who struggles to read with a glasses prescription that she outgrew years ago, and he violates the noninterventionist terms of his contract and manages to get  a set of glasses to her by extraordinary means. For this he is arrested, subjected to trial by the ancient rule of Ordeal (he is thrown overboard in shark-infested waters and told to swim to shore), manages to survive, is imprisoned, and eventually released. The older princesses have come to trust him and have enough affection that he was invited to participate in their twin festivals celebrating Seven-Seven and the Care of the Souls Lost at Sea.

What emerges to him through these activities is an incomplete picture of nine princesses (the older ones his age) who seem to be enacting a story of waiting for some "Prince Charming" to come rescue them and carry one of them off to who-knows-where, which he finds preposterous and unscientific. And apparently this Cinderella myth has been going on for as long as they have been there. But with these last two generations on the island, the societal resolve seems to be crumbling. The inhabitants are quite reasonable to him, and so for such strong and self-sufficient women to be so superstitious and blindly bound to a moribund tradition completely baffles him.

On the emotional front, as Clete goes from one domain to the next, each of the older women inhabitants, starved for any interaction with a man their own age, play out their varying levels of interest in trying to get to know him better. They are of course totally inept in dealing with a man, but he is even more inept and clueless as how to behave with women. The 50-somethings are ALL struggling with latent sexual attraction, but all of the older women AND Clete all have earlier claims on their loyalty that they feel they cannot relinquish. And so at this point in the story, everyone is frustrated (and somewhat horny, OK OK, the Princess Qi is trying to be celibate and live like a Buddhist nun, but she's finding herself horny as hell and she can't make up her mind if she wants to kill him or seduce him).

During all of the episodes, he learns of their almost Iron-Age technological existence, discovers bugs that almost seem sentient, spends time in a jail that enforces a zero-karma policy, explores the canopy of artificial forest of apparently cultivated tropical hardwood trees, encounters the sea witches (who seem more like certified nurse practitioners than voodoo shamans), and suffers being temporarily kidnapped and held in a pitch-black sea cave. Oh, he also had a run-in with a ghost on the high seas, but refuses to believe such a thing exists--he is a scientist after all.

We learn in a flashback sequence that Clete relates in a story he tells to his "students" and a couple of the mothers that was married for a short time (in common law terms) while he was in grad school, to a Hawaiian-Japanese girl named Mariko, who worked as a waitress in a diner near his university. She left him one day, and while he no longer actively searches for her, she occupies the seat demanding his undying loyalty. This unflagging adherence to the virtue of loyalty is something that Clete and the nine older princesses have in common. I think that they find his aspect of him, despite his rudeness and coarseness, quite admirable and endearing.

And so, we are at the end of the 9th week of Clete's12-week stay. As far as he is concerned, he believes he has found an untold wealth of intellect and potential in the younger nine, whom he thinks should ALL go to college and study engineering at his university instead of wasting their lives as subsistence farmers on a tropical island. He keeps wondering where the fathers of these girls are and is frankly appalled that they are absent from their daughters' lives. Clues keep getting accidentally dropped, but up until now, no one is willing to tell him the full story.

Little Qin Qin is aching to leave town and move onto bigger things. However, most everyone else is still convinced they need to stay true to the foundational myth and stay put on the Island until the foretold savior Prince appears, some out of belief, some out of habit. One of the girls, Princess Xiaomei, has been given the title "Questor" and she alone is approved to leave the Island in order to facilitate the coming of The Prince and she will do that while attending college away from home next year. Oh, and one of the older princesses, Na, the Guardian Princess of the Earth Element, the woman with the literally "shittiest" job on the Island, really has decided for herself that she is leaving with Clete when the time comes.

So, how did this wacky situation on the Island all come to be in the first place?

Well, we're getting to that. Those of you who started reading the blog from the very start already have part of the story in the portion that was styled "Cinderella and the Great Prince of Southern China."

The big issue in this book is that what people did hundreds of years ago matters to us today. Where our forebears come from and what they struggled with in life have repercussions on us that we can't even know.

If you want to go back and read this story, I'd be so happy if you did. Be warned though, my protagonist, even though he is extremely learned and holds two doctorates, has a bad case of potty mouth.

If you like one point of view in your prose, sorry. This is written as if it were a collection of reports gathered by one reporter [Qin Qin of the future] documenting what happened that summer in the Year of the Dragon, 2012 when the Professor dropped into their lives. Much of this is presented in remembered dialogue too, so if the action is somewhat choppy, it comes from my choice in presenting format.

I have told my daughters that if this novel were turned into TV miniseries, they'd have to hire every Asian American actress in Hollywood and tell them all to get tans, but only after they'd shot the Qing Dynasty rom-com portion of the story (which is coming up if you haven't read it or listened to it on my project website already). The characters of Ba, Yi, Na, and Da Mei will be trickier because they probably need to be "Blasians" (I see them in my mind that way, persons of mixed Asian and black ancestry).

Anyway, that's the generic explanation of all this stuff that keeps showing up on weekends. If I have time, I'll put together an index of chapters and links and stick it on this post.

Love,
Pops


If you really want to read this thing you have to start here. It will be cumbersome to work your way forward until I can post an index page, so I don't really recommend it. Pretty crazy huh?; an author encouraging you NOT to access his work ...

Oh, even though I said it's a final draft, forgive the typos and missing words still. I haven't given it a proofreading sweep yet.

VW