Here is where I jot down all of my rambling thoughts. If you're looking for factual background, this is not the place :) 

Remember the Spring

I learned a lot about my culture just by researching for this story. Now I know the names of a couple deities whose statues I always bow to but never really understood who they were. Originally I had planned for something like Sun Wukong to be the MC, since I was familiar with Journey to the West. But Xuanzang was way cooler than the fictional characters of the story. Also, when I saw the Aim to Engage dragon prompt, my mind immediately went to the creation story of the Bones graphic novel series. It involved the Queen of Dragons being turned to stone.

A Belated Love Story

Holy, I haven't written such a long short story in a very long time. No wonder it took me three weeks to type up! 

So I really wanted to do something on the Qixi Festival because the google doodle (pictured below) grabbed me when I saw it earlier this month (aka August 2021). It's present in lots of East Asian and Southeast Asian cultures. But the problem I ran into was figuring out the moral of the story. Okay, the magpies have gone poof, but what's the real story? I definitely wanted to incorporate some commentary on how Chinese and Western cultures deal with expressing emotions, so that led me down another research rabbit hole until I came across Lady Meng Jiang. Chinese tales are sweet as they are tragic! 

There's an interesting article about how magpies can recognize human faces and form very close bonds with them. Thus was how the Qixi Festival and the Lady Meng Jiang crossover happened. 

Also, funnily enough my Vietnamese mom said that nothing was really celebrated on the Qixi Festival day back home. It rained, there were no magpies, but nothing special happened. I think it's because it was supposed to be a more somber day. I know that people pray for a happy lasting relationship as much as they hope their child isn't born on this "unlucky" day.