"Nothing could be more of a cliché than a love story, and that must go on, so long as it is treated interestingly." -- Charlie Chaplin (page 71)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
— the lines before his famous “(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” in Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself
— dearest reader friends, I’ve missed so much sending this story of meer-maids and coming-of-age adventurers and their confusions and heartaches, I’ve missed you so much that I’m contradicting myself, and thankful for the chance to. I can’t not keep sending you this story between us any longer. I tried writing just by myself but I missed you so, dear one, that I couldn’t take it any longer. So we’re back, my contradictions and all. Thank you for sticking with me!
~~~~~
Full steam ahead to our world:
Emil looked at the little meer-maid as he reached out his open hand to her, and held it there, steady, but only on the outside. This was the most tumultuous night of her life, though the tumults come and go and come again, like waves on her sea. Her life was precious, but she didn’t know it. And it was almost nothing to give it up, in her mind, for her prince’s. So many times, in the last days, as the celebration neared, she had found her life less and less worth living.
First below the surface, then until the celebration, and all between, her inner life had been tempest-tossed and temper-strewn. And Emil, who had swum with her since boyhood, from the sun-lit surfaces to the algen-carpeted deeps, from Prometheus’s rock to the Hänse sailing ships, he couldn’t let her go. Not when he knew her, as he did.
There comes a time, so he thought, when the ultimate sacrifice has to be made. And he’s read the tales and heard the ballads, of Lohengrin and Parzival and Tristram, of knights and heroes and sagas of yore. And it was his time now, and this was his maid. Wilhelmina Wang on the rocks by the shore be damned. It didn’t go through his mind in exactly that way, but as Pascal said, the heart has reasons reason knows not of. In his mind, if he thought of her, he would have thought Wilhelmina would be proud and happy because of his readiness to sacrifice for the little meer-maid. That was how his mind worked. And in a way, in a partial way, Wilhelmina was enormously proud of him, but it was not purchased without personal cost of pride, jealousy, and their company.
~~~~~
In wulin and on the jianghu, becoming the best martial artist was enormously important. In fact, it was only the importantest thing. Some martial artists may aid the poor and rob the rich, à la Robin of Loxley. Others go to the dark side, like Mei Chaofeng and her Nine Yin White Bone Claw technique (It’s all in Jin Yong, all in Jin Yong: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?”). What they have in common is an insatiable interest to challenge each other in martial combat until one emerges as the best. Do you ever have the thought that if only you were the best at something in the world, something magical and special will happen? Maybe you were too wise to think so, but everyone on the jianghu or in wulin thought so, except for the few, the old, who had tuichu-ed it or kanpo-ed something-something Red Dust. Maybe a few sages saging around, who had hung up their swords and now live in reed-roofed huts. But Tang Lili isn’t there yet. And neither is her daughter Wilhelmina Wang. And despite age, great-grandmother Dowager Li of the Li House of Flying Daggers never got there, nor had she any interest in getting there and hanging up her flying daggers, each made by a Jiangnan swordsmith in six hours’ time.
So the tournaments continue, the challenges are thrown, and one generation after another of martial artists fight to be the best. Perhaps not only martial artists.
Tang Lili didn’t feel sick, though she was. Her strength ebbed and waxed like the Bohai tide, that sea crossed by the Eight Immortals each in his or her own way. Shandong had many an immortal island besides Penglai, and from Shandong came many stories of the Shanhaijing. And those stories have become part of Shandong’s children, from Confucius then to Mo Yan now, just as those of Shaanxi became part of Jia Pingwa, and those of Zhejiang lodged themselves in Yu Hua.