Storytelling

I used to tell stories, but I haven't come up with ideas in years. I’m not sure why. 

I used to lie in bed and throw myself into daydreams about pirates or ninjas or the Mafia, depending on what in particular I was obsessed with at the time. I would map plots and repeat scenes in my head until every line of dialogue ran smoothly, no hiccups, looking through different camera angles. Sometimes I’d loop the same few minutes over and over just so I could indulge in the emotions my characters were feeling, extreme things like rage and heartbreak that I never had the opportunity to experience in my mundane life. Meanwhile I wrote Chapter Ones in notebooks, filling five pages before giving up and ripping the pages out, or finding a new notebook. In the fifth grade we read Kensuke’s Kingdom, so I wrote a few sentences about two sisters who lived on a boat, but never got around to their actual adventures. In the sixth grade, I actually managed to complete a short story called Firesong (I’d taken the title off a random book spine in the primary school library; I loved the sound of it; I thought it was genius). It was full of moments transcribed from my favorite manga, One Piece, that probably made no sense. I used the Papyrus font, which I would not see again until I started taking piano lessons at the Conservatoire and my teacher used it to write the recital programs. Jiaqi Kang: Clair de lune. 

I stopped setting my nightly daydreams in other authors’ universes when I started working on my fantasy series called “The Sonata Dilemma”, which occupied me between the ages of 11 and 15. At first, it was an amalgamation of everything I’d ever read: the fictional world was called Fiore (like in Fairy Tail), and characters had golems (like in D. Gray Man), and they travelled among island states (like in One Piece). Some characters were twists on fairy tales, including the three little pigs, who were named Edgar, Allan, and Poe (like how Lemony Snicket uses literary references.) Most of the names, though, were either taken from people I knew in real life, or were a significant word that got put through three layers of Google Translate to seem symbolic. During the peak of my My Chemical Romance phase, I planned to integrate lyrics to songs into my books. For a while I was deeply ashamed of this serial plagiarism, unable to believe that preteen me had had the nerve to rip off these known works. But now I don’t care: after all, all books speak of other books. I was just a misunderstood postmodern prodigy. I was reading so much, devouring volume after volume, and my brain was becoming so unbearably full of information and ideas that I just had to vomit it back out somewhere. 

What does still baffle me, though, is the internalised racism in part thanks to a Jacqueline Wilson childhood: out of 12 main characters, all but one were conceptualised as white. (Yifei was Chinese, and her name came from the badass academic in Aiqing Gongyu.) I would later reconfigure around 40% of the names so that they indicated ethnic backgrounds. These days, the only times white characters appear in my stories are when they’re the bad guys. Ha. 

The original idea for the Sonata Dilemma was twelve 12-year-old girls who are recruited by the government as part of Project Olympia to become secret agents fighting against the evil mafia led by Yue Sonata, due to their magical powers, the nature of which corresponded to the 12 Olympian gods (Percy Jackson.) A twelve-book series that got darker and more serious as it progressed (Harry Potter.) I’d always loved stories with sad endings, so at some point the government became evil and manipulative, which the girls would realise in the final book. They would then get together with the bad guys (who were actually good) and activate S.T.A.R.D.O.M., a weapon that would bring about the apocalypse (Rave Master… I think.) Not bad for an eleven year old.

I could finally put an end to my awful habit of abandoning new stories halfway through. The scope of the series, and the multitude of side characters, meant that there were endless prequels and sequels and spin-offs to be added that stayed within the same universe and same wider pictures. I would record these ideas, assign them to a character (usually as a tragic backstory for a member of Yue Sonata’s cabal), and promise myself to get to it after I’d finished writing the core series. I created a highly complex family tree that linked every single character in the whole franchise through blood, adoption, or marriage (A Series of Unfortunate Events.) The ancestors’ names started with A and B, and their children were C and D, and so on. (Also A Series of Unfortunate Events.) Yue Sonata was second-to-last in the Sonata clan, but that didn’t mean he was the second youngest. There was a lot of time travel involved because the universe was made up of 4 worlds, whose names I’ve unfortunately forgotten: one was our normal world; another was Fiore, a parallel world in which magic and mermaids existed that was ruled by a series of matriarchs; another was a post-apocalyptic future; and Åsgard was an eerie wasteland that connected everything together, a liminal space through which characters travelled to get from one world to another. Most of the action took place in Fiore, but would spill over into the others, and linear time was hardly important. The drama of one hugely complicated family would ruin everything. The Sonata Dilemma. 

Naturally, the stories were to be written under a pseudonym: Lokki Montgomery (previously Adel), who was also a character and was the sole survivor of not one but two horrible tragedies (also A Series of Unfortunate Events): the end of the world, but also the battle that turned Åsgard into the barren landscape it is today, where all of her friends from L.E.A.F’s first generation were killed, including her lover (again… A Series of Unfortunate Events.) L.E.A.F, whose initials represented the 4 worlds (I really forgot what L and E stood for), was the name for Fiore’s Queen’s elite intelligence squad, also comprised of 12 agents. I don’t remember why they died anymore, although I think there were monsters and that it had been under the Queen’s own orders, but they were later replaced by a second generation, who would each be assigned a Project Olympia candidate to secretly supervise from birth until they were ready to be activated. Project Olympia, in turn, was initiated, and the candidates artificially being given superpowers, as defense in case Yue Sonata’s organisation ever decided to come back for a second revolution after they’d failed horribly the first time. The first time was known as the S.I.E.G.E., because there was a siege, at the capital, and it had ended with Yue being cryogenically frozen in the dungeon. His underlings, who were in fact an alliance made up of 4 different criminal groups, planned for over a decade to return and release him. 

Spinoffs included a book titled “Crime and Cowardice” (get it? Like Pride and Prejudice), set in late 19th-century Canada and loosely inspired by Pandora Hearts, about an aristocratic girl named Lacie Watsun who runs away from a forced marriage and takes up with a homeless guy, and they fall in love. Or the stories set in the post apocalyptic future: Enma (name stolen from Katekyo Hitman Reborn) grew up in an orphanage after his father died shielding him from a nuclear blast, but everyone hates him because his face is scarred. One day, looking out from the window, he sees a young girl in the playground, and I forget the rest, but it was all based on the MCR song “S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W”; Walker Edgecombe (named after a teacher at my school, Mr. E-W) is collectively raised by teachers in a utopia’s Children’s Village and has a chip in his brain that records his thoughts, but one day discovers a warehouse for old chips and is compelled by a vagabond boy, Holly, his future second-in-command when he leads the Revolution, to search for a blind girl with powers who will answer his questions. 

And so on and so forth. Not bad for an eleven year old. 

I wrote the first draft of the first book, about a mermaid named Phoenix Alora whose arm can turn into a hammer, on our family iPad. At the time I didn’t know about caps lock, so I would hit shift for every letter that I wanted in capitals, including chapter titles and shouting dialogue. I drew pictures of my characters and filled out Rick Riordan’s personality questionnaires to develop them, assigning likes and dislikes and degrees of messiness. I posted the first few chapters on Wattpad and designed my own cover, with a phoenix painting I stole off Deviantart and Century Gothic as the title font. Or was it Copperplate? I polished the manuscript for years until, at around 13, I got the courage to print it out and put it in a binder for my friends’ mother, a published author, to read. She gave a lot of constructive feedback that helped me a lot with the world building, but for a long time after that I was embarrassed that I’d wasted her time with my awful writing. 

My mom said that I couldn’t just make things up and that everything I wrote had to be grounded in reality. I thought she was trying to tell me I wasn’t allowed to write about these things unless I’d actually experienced them. I stood by my imaginative credibility. 

Now I can only write things grounded in reality. Looking back at a short story I’d wrriten at the age of 14 about a girl and her imaginary boyfriend, I can’t believe I’d managed to write about romance without experiencing it, although I guess that’s where the “imaginary” part comes in. The latest thing I’ve written, an absurdist novel I’ve been working on since 2014, is deeply rooted in my own memories - it’s about a diasporic Chinese girl living in Geneva who makes friends at root seeking camp in China and wants to achieve great things. 

Lately I’ve been thinking about adaptation. A year ago I came up with an idea for a TV show (unfortunately it’s all lost because my Notes app on my laptop crashed). It’s a space opera with martial arts, about 5 ragtag girls from vastly different backgrounds (showcasing the diversity of Chineseness) who become sworn sisters who save a vampire’s life. In return she breaks them out of jail (I forget why) and recruits them into an underground resistance group against the evil British space empire. They get separated and all learn martial arts over the next few years, eventually becoming the 5 greats, like in Legend of the Condor Heroes. They reunite to lead the revolution but end up being assassinated by imperial forces and fail. It’s supposed to be a sci-fi Jin Yong story. I still think about it every once in a while. 

Another adaptation I want to do is a modern day Three Kingdoms TV show. It’s set in some city in the 21st century, and the kingdoms are bookshops that are vying to hold the midnight release of the last Harry Potter book, thus ensuring their survival in an age where paper books are dying and everything is being ruined by Amazon. Also, they have machine guns, for the exaggerated Tarantino esque violence. Also, it’s all women of color, and most of them are lesbians, because that’s really cool. I really like this idea and I hope that some day I can pitch it to Netflix, but first I actually have to watch and read Three Kingdoms to understand the basis. 

My boyfriend said he’d love to see me write a screenplay, because it would probably be really interesting. I’d love to see me write a screenplay too. I’ve tried to write stories but I can’t. I try to fashion a coming of age narrative out of feelings of alienation, fear of the future, and anxiety over the inevitable forwardness of time, all emotions that pretty much consume my every waking moment, but nothing comes out. Whereas as a child I’d been full of plot twists and character arcs, now, I guess, I can only write about myself, and even then it’s not particularly enthusiastic. Now I can’t imagine anyone writing fiction that isnt based on themselves. Obviously fiction is really about combining imagination and truth. What is at the center is always true.

But at the same time I don’t want to be that author who can only write about people like em. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s body of work is full of stories about educated Nigerian women who sometimes move to New England for some academic Ivy League reason and stay there. The New Yorker girls in Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart are all from Shanghai, all are connected to Long Island, all have an academic parent. One went to Stanford and has a much younger brother.  I love Jenny. But I hope her next work goes further from her comfort zone. Then again, it is her début. 

I havent written a story in a very long time. I hope that it’ll come back to me someday.