“If there be dragons, I am not afraid. For I am descended from dragons.”
Her black eyes ablaze, her black hair wild in the sea-wind, and her yellow skin the hue of wheat and millet, Wilhelmina Wang sat before her guzheng on the deck, and plucking the copper strings of the zither, began to play. The pentatonic music of “Mountains and Rivers”, “Han Palace Autumn Moon”, and all the songs of her youth and childhood came to her fingers, flowed into the wooden box of the zither, then out over the deck, and into the wind and the sea. Where it was heard.
Every people has its own beauty, its own origins, and its own spark of divinity.
When Time itself was still young and foolish, there lived a beautiful princess named Europa. She was carried off and seduced by a white bull, who was Jupiter in disguise, the greatest of the old gods. From her came the Europeans, and the continent of Europa, and from him came the spark of divinity in its people yet. Her name’s been carried to the heavens by Galileo Galilei, who named the most beautiful of his moons after her, and it’s been bestowed on that rarest of rare-earth elements europium by Eugène-Anatole Demarçay, the colleague of Marie Curie.
In the far away east there was a great yellow dragon. From him came the divinity in the people Cathayans. From him came the Yellow River and the Yellow Sea. From him came the yellow-metal (which is what Cathayans call gold) and the yellow millet, that ancient neolithic grain, which is still grown, harvested, and threshed upon the banks of the Yellow River, still eaten (by me, too, when I was a child). The flag of the emperor bears the yellow dragon in flight, talons outstretched, an emblem of the ancient, a continuation of the divine.