Kaleidoscope 2011 (and stealth booklog)
Dec. 16th, 2011 10:57 pmVery belated post! I received one story, Beyond These Walls, from Fumi Yoshinaga's Ōoku, which is a very neat look at Iemitsu (the first female shogun, following a plague that only targets men) and the boundaries she lives within - I liked it a lot.
Beyond These Walls (1141 words) by
lastingdreams
Fandom: Ōoku
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Madenokoji Arikoto/Tokugawa Iemitsu
Characters: Madenokoji Arikoto, Tokugawa Iemitsu, Kasuga
And I also received a treat - six bro'Town icons, by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
softestbullet - see current icon for Vale looking (briefly)) triumphant! Um. Unless you're reading this on lj, where I will eventually get around to making the icons match up. I am inordinately fond of Oscar Kightley in pretty much any form.
I wrote Paper Tigers, which takes a very briefly mentioned character from Jan Wong's memoir Red China Blues (covers her development from an idealistic Canadian Chinese student who goes to China in the 1970s to her disillusionment at Tiananmen Square) and gives him a life of his own. Writing this was slightly terrifying. I initially wanted to do a few characters, especially Fu - Jan Wong's language tutor and a Red Guard - but almost all the books I could find about China in the 1970s were memoirs of intellectual/academic family members, who do very badly in the Cultural Revolution and subsequent fallout, but go on to escape and/or become famous on Western terms, which is a very particular experience and one I didn't want to recreate (Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai, Mary Weiijun Collin's Desert Rose, chunks of Jung Chang's Wild Swans although none of the libraries with a copy were open to check, and her book on Mao was dense and fascinating and also unhelpful for what I wanted). I also read Baiqiao Tang's My Two Chinas (student leader, at Tiananmen Square, useful if I ever need information on what bored prison guards do for entertainment) and ended up in some rather disturbing places on the internet. Fortunately I found Lijia Zhang's "Socialism is Great!", which is an actual worker memoir, and at least that gave me something to work on. (then I submitted it, read Peter Hessler's Country Driving, and realised I really should have had Chen Li smoke a suitably aspirational cigarette brand. Oh well.)
Paper Tigers (1401 words) byCyphomandra
Fandom: Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao To Now RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Jan Wong
Summary:
Beyond These Walls (1141 words) by
Fandom: Ōoku
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Madenokoji Arikoto/Tokugawa Iemitsu
Characters: Madenokoji Arikoto, Tokugawa Iemitsu, Kasuga
And I also received a treat - six bro'Town icons, by
softestbullet - see current icon for Vale looking (briefly)) triumphant! Um. Unless you're reading this on lj, where I will eventually get around to making the icons match up. I am inordinately fond of Oscar Kightley in pretty much any form.I wrote Paper Tigers, which takes a very briefly mentioned character from Jan Wong's memoir Red China Blues (covers her development from an idealistic Canadian Chinese student who goes to China in the 1970s to her disillusionment at Tiananmen Square) and gives him a life of his own. Writing this was slightly terrifying. I initially wanted to do a few characters, especially Fu - Jan Wong's language tutor and a Red Guard - but almost all the books I could find about China in the 1970s were memoirs of intellectual/academic family members, who do very badly in the Cultural Revolution and subsequent fallout, but go on to escape and/or become famous on Western terms, which is a very particular experience and one I didn't want to recreate (Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai, Mary Weiijun Collin's Desert Rose, chunks of Jung Chang's Wild Swans although none of the libraries with a copy were open to check, and her book on Mao was dense and fascinating and also unhelpful for what I wanted). I also read Baiqiao Tang's My Two Chinas (student leader, at Tiananmen Square, useful if I ever need information on what bored prison guards do for entertainment) and ended up in some rather disturbing places on the internet. Fortunately I found Lijia Zhang's "Socialism is Great!", which is an actual worker memoir, and at least that gave me something to work on. (then I submitted it, read Peter Hessler's Country Driving, and realised I really should have had Chen Li smoke a suitably aspirational cigarette brand. Oh well.)
Paper Tigers (1401 words) by
Fandom: Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao To Now RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Jan Wong
Summary:
On her first trip to China, Jan Wong met a factory worker at the Canton Zoo.
