Xiangpu

"What are you writing, Xiangpu?" "A... a story. A tale of wanderers." "Wanderers? Let me see... Do they really speak like this? Have you ever even encountered one?" "No..." "If you've never seen one, how can you weave a story about them?" A story. What constitutes a story? She remembered when she was a child, she sat on a stool by the storyteller's feet at the market, who spoke of the enthralling cry of "Are kings and nobles born to their high stations?" Was that a story? Crouching by the schoolroom window under the guise of fetching her brother, she overheard the line, "A life taken every ten paces, a thousand miles traveled without a trace." Was that a story? And what about the tales of wandering grandmasters, which were deemed too crude for refined tastes yet were hidden beneath her pillow? If these were stories, was there anyone within them I yearned to become? How were they crafted? And how could I summon such a tale from my own brush? Xiangpu did not know. She could only write on and on, without end. In the depths of the palace, sweeping endless leaves day after day while watching the sky wither into darkness was too bitter. The elder maids whispered of chaotic times, where one might be laughing yesterday only to be carried out today, shrouded in a coarse straw mat. It was too frightening. The storybooks she struggled to write ended up being torn to shreds by the head matron and flung into her face. It was too painful. Beyond enduring this bitterness, this dread, this pain, where else could she turn? Back to the home that bartered her away for a few strings of coins? Or resign herself to fate, wilting within these high walls until death? The world is so vast; why, then, did she feel there was no place for her in it? She had no choice but to write. She wrote of the jianghu she had never seen, of the bold vengeance and gratified debts she dared not even dream of, of the hero in black who would never come to her rescue... until she wrote Yingying into existence. Yingying was a palace maid as well, yet she eventually leaped over the palace walls and became a great heroine. If Yingying could, why couldn't I? Even if a good story eludes me today, as long as I keep working at it, I'll make it someday, won't I? Just like Yingying, attempting to escape the palace time and again within those pages, there must be a way out, right? "The Jingwei bird carries twigs to fill the vast sea. If one year fails her, she looks ahead to ten; if this life fails her, she holds no regrets." She shall become "Yingying."