blogging meme
Dec. 22nd, 2013 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
issenlloI realised belatedly that Winter Solstice in the west is 21 December, but for Chinese people it's 22 December. I'd always assumed they were the same. Well, well, well! East and west, forever twain.
Well, as no topic was suggested today, I'm forced to think of one.
Start at the beginning of... fandom-ish things?
Watching anime: no question, it started when I was a child with dubbed Doraemon and Candy Candy! (Does anyone remember Candy Candy, or am I dating myself? I didn't enjoy it much but simply watched as any child does who is put in front of the box and shown animated sequences.)
As for manga:
It started with my erhu teacher's senior student. Putting it like this sounds a bit wuxia-ish, doesn't it. I started learning the erhu at a community centre (as fees were the lowest there) at the age of fifteen, and the teacher's senior student, S, was about two years older and had been learning for about five or six years. At that time I suppose the idea of someone having played an instrument for five years seemed like an unbelievable achievement to me.
(Even though I had a few primary school classmates who had learnt the piano as children - and made sure everyone knew it - that never sunk in because I'd never touched a piano before and so people who played the piano might have well been from Mars for all I know.)
Anyway. S was the first person I knew who wasn't a classmate or a relative. And she played the erhu! Maybe that was why I didn't get suspicious or overly shy when she talked to me. Perhaps she was just the generous sort, I thought at that time, though now that I think about it, S must have a huge fangirl, because she pushed manga on me whenever we started chatting after lessons. Like, 8 or 9 volumes each week to take home to read, and I could return them to her next week! This was unprecedented generosity outside of libraries: even when I borrowed a book from a classmate, I was expected to return it within a few days. And libraries (at that time) had no manga. So manga was a very new phenomena to me (at that time, you could get manga only at specialist shops) and it was all in Chinese.
The first series I ever read was Ouke no Monshou (Chinese name: 尼罗河女儿), which translates roughly at "Daughter of the Nile". It's a really old shojo manga that started in 1976 by Hosokawa Chieko and can be found here. It's about Carol, the daughter of an American archeologist who travels back into the ancient world and falls in love with a young pharoah. They get married and the Eygptians love her because of her golden hair and blue eyes. Eventually, the other kings of Assyria and Babylonia believe that she is a gift from the gods and want to marry her too. It was hugely fascinating, though there were occasions for a bit of eyerolling (I'd started reading Elizabeth Peter's Amelia Peabody series at about the same, and reading related accounts of Egyptology and western archaeologists at the turn of the 19th century makes one cynical). I didn't finish the series, though, either because as S explained, she couldn't get the later volumes, or because the author hadn't finished the series. Or got stuck. (I can't remember now.)
I do remember that the manga was very old, with yellowed pages and some dog-erred corners: I was worried about accidentally tearing it. Possibly she got them from a secondhand place herself.
I was very grateful to have nice things to read and S seemed to be quite happy that I liked it. (She must be a fangirl, right?) So she introduced to me the works of 游素兰, a Taiwanese mangaka. Hm, I'm only now realising that it's another time-travelling series (but this one with reincarnation) - S liked this genre! The series is called 倾国怨伶 (which translates to, as the following link puts it, Melancholic Princess), about a girl who having strange dreams, then a female ghost keeps trying to kill her, and then she meets a mysterious, long-haired guy who is supposed to help. This one. Eventually there is a big revelation regarding gods, goddess and the creation of the universe. Pretty awesome in its way.
A couple of years later, when I had stopped learning erhu from that teacher (and so fell out of contact with S), I came across the sequel, which ran to seven or eight volumes (if I remember right) was 火王, most of which was set in ancient China. The plot was a bit scandalous (or daring?) for the portrayal of what seemed like a mortal girl falling in love with the god of fire and then the girl turning out to have been crossdressing all these years and was actually a male. These two. By then I was so invested in the story I didn't really care, so long as they got together in the end.
So. Daughter of the Nile was good, but 火王 was a solid punch at that impressionable age. I think very few manga (even when I got heavily into CLAMP, later) ever twisted me up with wanting so much to know what happened, waiting for chapter after chapter and hoping like hell they got together, finally!
Good times. I think I have 火王 somewhere in the depths of my shelves. (The series took so long to finish that I was able to save up enough money to buy them.)
ETA: Feel free to suggest a topic for other days! Comment either at DW or at LJ, either is fine.
Well, as no topic was suggested today, I'm forced to think of one.
Start at the beginning of... fandom-ish things?
Watching anime: no question, it started when I was a child with dubbed Doraemon and Candy Candy! (Does anyone remember Candy Candy, or am I dating myself? I didn't enjoy it much but simply watched as any child does who is put in front of the box and shown animated sequences.)
As for manga:
It started with my erhu teacher's senior student. Putting it like this sounds a bit wuxia-ish, doesn't it. I started learning the erhu at a community centre (as fees were the lowest there) at the age of fifteen, and the teacher's senior student, S, was about two years older and had been learning for about five or six years. At that time I suppose the idea of someone having played an instrument for five years seemed like an unbelievable achievement to me.
(Even though I had a few primary school classmates who had learnt the piano as children - and made sure everyone knew it - that never sunk in because I'd never touched a piano before and so people who played the piano might have well been from Mars for all I know.)
Anyway. S was the first person I knew who wasn't a classmate or a relative. And she played the erhu! Maybe that was why I didn't get suspicious or overly shy when she talked to me. Perhaps she was just the generous sort, I thought at that time, though now that I think about it, S must have a huge fangirl, because she pushed manga on me whenever we started chatting after lessons. Like, 8 or 9 volumes each week to take home to read, and I could return them to her next week! This was unprecedented generosity outside of libraries: even when I borrowed a book from a classmate, I was expected to return it within a few days. And libraries (at that time) had no manga. So manga was a very new phenomena to me (at that time, you could get manga only at specialist shops) and it was all in Chinese.
The first series I ever read was Ouke no Monshou (Chinese name: 尼罗河女儿), which translates roughly at "Daughter of the Nile". It's a really old shojo manga that started in 1976 by Hosokawa Chieko and can be found here. It's about Carol, the daughter of an American archeologist who travels back into the ancient world and falls in love with a young pharoah. They get married and the Eygptians love her because of her golden hair and blue eyes. Eventually, the other kings of Assyria and Babylonia believe that she is a gift from the gods and want to marry her too. It was hugely fascinating, though there were occasions for a bit of eyerolling (I'd started reading Elizabeth Peter's Amelia Peabody series at about the same, and reading related accounts of Egyptology and western archaeologists at the turn of the 19th century makes one cynical). I didn't finish the series, though, either because as S explained, she couldn't get the later volumes, or because the author hadn't finished the series. Or got stuck. (I can't remember now.)
I do remember that the manga was very old, with yellowed pages and some dog-erred corners: I was worried about accidentally tearing it. Possibly she got them from a secondhand place herself.
I was very grateful to have nice things to read and S seemed to be quite happy that I liked it. (She must be a fangirl, right?) So she introduced to me the works of 游素兰, a Taiwanese mangaka. Hm, I'm only now realising that it's another time-travelling series (but this one with reincarnation) - S liked this genre! The series is called 倾国怨伶 (which translates to, as the following link puts it, Melancholic Princess), about a girl who having strange dreams, then a female ghost keeps trying to kill her, and then she meets a mysterious, long-haired guy who is supposed to help. This one. Eventually there is a big revelation regarding gods, goddess and the creation of the universe. Pretty awesome in its way.
A couple of years later, when I had stopped learning erhu from that teacher (and so fell out of contact with S), I came across the sequel, which ran to seven or eight volumes (if I remember right) was 火王, most of which was set in ancient China. The plot was a bit scandalous (or daring?) for the portrayal of what seemed like a mortal girl falling in love with the god of fire and then the girl turning out to have been crossdressing all these years and was actually a male. These two. By then I was so invested in the story I didn't really care, so long as they got together in the end.
So. Daughter of the Nile was good, but 火王 was a solid punch at that impressionable age. I think very few manga (even when I got heavily into CLAMP, later) ever twisted me up with wanting so much to know what happened, waiting for chapter after chapter and hoping like hell they got together, finally!
Good times. I think I have 火王 somewhere in the depths of my shelves. (The series took so long to finish that I was able to save up enough money to buy them.)
ETA: Feel free to suggest a topic for other days! Comment either at DW or at LJ, either is fine.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-23 06:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-23 04:39 pm (UTC)