The Fairy of Ku-She by M. Lucie Chin. Ace Books, 1988.
Table of Contents
M. Lucie Chin in the Great Unread
Reading The Fairy of Ku-She
Some Productive Themes; Or, Why Critics Will Want to Read This One
The Fairy of Ku-She …by Its Cover(s)
Envoi: Parting with Ku-She
Footnotes
M. Lucie Chin in the Great Unread
My bookshelves are an archive. They are stacked with hundreds of fantasy mass market paperbacks published during the period I am most critically interested in, the 1960s to the 1990s. I’ve built this collection by foraging used bookstores across Michigan, Ohio, upstate New York, and wherever I travel, every chance I get. This has given me a broad knowledge of fantasy publishing’s scope, diversity, and trends in the postwar period. My favorite finds are books by authors I’ve never heard of—and more so, books by authors who only wrote one or two novels, maybe a few short stories, before disappearing from the scene. My shelves are a microcosm, a small sliver of the pie, of the period when modern genre fantasy emerged and blossomed into mass market success, sending out shoots that sprouted into new publishers and imprints, that sustained (if only for a brief time) the writing careers of hundreds of authors, now mostly forgotten, who wrote countless books waiting to be reread into a better, fuller history of fantasy.
Fantasy studies, like the bulk of literary studies, for better and worse, tends toward the major names and has, as a result, rendered a vast “great unread” of fantasy novels, to borrow Margaret Cohen’s term for all of the literature that gets left out of popular and scholarly narratives of literary history (see footnote!).[1] It is thus difficult to trace the scope of the genre as it unfolded and to discover who lay at its edges and who is being forgotten, without returning to the materials themselves, the physical books that stocked bookstore shelves then and have turned up at used bookstores for a second or third go at unlocking their treasures to readers. Searching through used bookstores is, for me, a critically fruitful way to build my archive, and, more importantly, great fun.
One of my finds, one of these one(ish)-hit wonders of fantasy’s great unread, is M. Lucie Chin. She wrote one novel, The Fairy of Ku-She, and 8 short stories, all in the decade between 1978 and 1988. Chin’s first three stories were science fiction, published in 1978–1979 in the short-lived magazine Galileo, and concerned cloning, while her next five stories and her one novel were (historical) fantasies set in China that drew heavily on Chinese mythology and folk- and fairy tales. I had initially thought, based on this information, that Chin was herself Chinese American—and I was quite excited about this possibility, as there were very few Asian American writers in sff prior to the 2000s: for example, Glen Chang, Ted Chiang, Brenda W. Clough, Yoon-Ha Lee, S.P. Somtow (Somtow Sucharitkul), Michelle (Sagara) West, William F. Wu, and Laurence Yep.[2] But Chin is a white woman, born Mary Lucie Choate, and her surname comes from her ex-husband, whom she divorced sometime in the late 1980s.[3] (The novel is dedicated to David and Memi Chin, who would appear to be her parents-in-law.)
Though Chin’s career was short—and she is still alive, having spent decades in the NYC theater and arts scene, for example, as a Shakespearean fight choreographer—her stories were much valued in their time and the history of their publication and reprinting suggests an author who was only just beginning, who was on the rise. Her 1981 novelette “Lan Lung” appeared in DAW’s The Year’s Best Fantasy, vol. 7, edited by Arthur Saha, where it sat alongside stories by Roger Zelazny, Orson Scott Card, Tanith Lee, Gene Wolfe, and Jane Yolen, among others, and was reprinted in two others major anthologies in 1985 and 1993. As a result of this trajectory from small magazines like Galileo and Ares to a Year’s Best Fantasy volume, Chin’s last three works of short fiction appeared in boutique anthologies, like Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold’s Elsewhere: Tales of Fantasy (1981) and Windling’s Faery! (1985). The Fairy of Ku-She—which is an expansion of her novelette “The Snow Fairy” in the latter Windling anthology—made it onto the 1989 Locus longlist for Best First Novel. So it comes as some surprise that, following the publication of her first and only novel in 1988, Chin stopped publishing completely.[4] All the more surprising because The Fairy of Ku-She is so damn good.
Reading The Fairy of Ku-She
It all starts with a prank by a rowdy Daoist magician bored with his preternaturally long life and his many escapes from the Judges of the Dead. It is a small prank but one that disrupts the natural and heavenly order of the cosmos—the snowflake that heralds the coming blizzard and will have lasting consequences for Heaven and earth alike, leading to untold deaths, countless miseries, and the near-obliteration of the world. The prank starts in Heaven sometime during the Chinese Ming dynasty (1368–1644)—considered by nationalists to be a golden age that flourished between dynasties of invaders, the Yuan and the Qing—and the action of the novel is split between the realms of Chinese mythology—especially Heaven and the Land of the Dead—and the otherwise mundane world of historical China. Though Chin is precise about the dynasty, she refuses to be preciser; to mark her words from the brief author’s note: without laying the blame of this historical fantasy at the feet of real personages, “history has enough to answer for” (n.p.).
The Fairy of Ku-She concerns the eponymous fairy, elsewhere described as an “elemental guardian” (11, 241–242) and one of many translations for the Chinese term xian/仙. Ku-She is one of the minor servants of the Jade Emperor, who like all fairies has a special designated purpose in the natural order: a duty she must perform which affects and in part governs the state of the world. In her case, Ku-She is in charge of how much snow falls on the earth, which has many ripple effects and in turn determines the severity of the winter, the amount of snowmelt in the spring, and the prosperity of crops. At the direction of Chou Ch’ung-i, matron of Hibiscus Village, “home of the fairies and lowly earth spirits” (7), Ku-She accomplishes her task by using the Golden Chopsticks to remove snowflakes from the Crystal Snow-vase kept by her sister Tung Shuang-Ch’eng:
For every flake Ku-She removes from the vase with her Golden Chopsticks, a foot of snow will fall upon the Earth. If Ku-She drops the flakes delicately from atop a cloud, the snowfall will be gentle, the snow fluffy, soft and beautiful. If several flakes are given to the White Tiger to carry to earth in his mouth, there will be a fierce blizzard with great winds and bitter cold. Tung Shuang-Ch’eng must guard the vase carefully lest it become broken or overturned, for then the world below would be buried in snow nearly to the height of Heaven itself, and mankind would be in danger of perishing. (8)
But in the midst of an unusually hot summer, just as Lung Wang the dragon king of the northwest has come to request more snowfall to prevent future drought that year, Ku-She discovers that the Golden Chopsticks have been stolen by a Daoist prankster monk. The monk, Wei Pan Ch’ao, has achieved near immortality, living many generations both by Daoist longevity magic and by his own cunning, having always escaped his arraignments with the Court of the Dead. Ku-She, along with her fairy maidservant Yin Whun (first introduced as Yin-Whun, but the hyphen is dropped by the next iteration; 17), travel to the mortal world to seek out Pan Ch’ao and the stolen chopsticks.
The search for the Golden Chopsticks takes up the first third of the book, which is divided into three roughly equal parts (there are no chapters, just section breaks, with each section anywhere between a paragraph and ten, twelve, twenty pages, depending on the scene). Ku-She and Yin Whun’s travels take them to Wuchang in Wuhan, to the house of Pan Ch’ao’s “nephew” (by many generations) Wei K’e-yung, a young scholar studying to pass the imperial examinations and so enter civil service. Ku-She has heard that K’e-yung was given a special gift by Pan Ch’ao, which she believes to be her chopsticks. To ingratiate herself with the young scholar, she allows herself to be courted and married, taking the name Pao Shih, but soon learns that K’e-yung—whom she truly loves—does not possess the Golden Chopsticks, only some books given him by Pan Ch’ao. Now pregnant and living in a “dying world” (39) as the effects of a snowless winter begin to take their toll, Ku-She is afforded an opportunity to confront Pan Ch’ao when he visits to celebrate the birth of K’e-yung and Ku-She’s child, Wei T’ai-Tsung. But Pan Ch’ao—“[t]he faint glow of magic, like infant dragon fire, hung about his person and flickered slightly as it mingled with the shadows of great age” (41)—does not have the chopsticks, having traded them off to a farmer shortly after stealing them. Ku-She impresses upon Pan Ch’ao the dire state of the world without the chopsticks, and notes particularly that the Jade Emperor does not seem to be fixing the problems caused by the chopsticks’ loss. And so the fairy and the monk set out (with Yin Whun taking Ku-She’s place as wife, using fairy powers to conceal herself) to find the chopsticks and restore natural order.
Pan Ch’ao and Ku-She eventually come to the house of an imperial minister in Peking (i.e. Beijing; Chin uses the Wade-Giles transliterations), where the fairy reveals herself and demands the chopsticks back: “The world is dying, Man. Do you know why? Has it not occurred to you to wonder?” (62). Though she successfully returns the chopsticks to Heaven, the Jade Emperor is displeased with Ku-She’s behavior (marrying without permission, bearing a child with a mortal) and strips her of her immortality, cursing her to live in the mortal world, and decreeing that her son be brought to Heaven to test if he is human or fairy on his twelfth birthday. Should he be fairy, he will enter Heaven’s service and Ku-She will never see him again. Only upon her death will Ku-She be given back her immortality and reinstated as keeper of the Golden Chopsticks. And so Ku-She is returned to earth as Pao Shih, wife of K’e-yung, mortal human woman.
Where the first part of The Fairy of Ku-She roams across Heaven, the Land of the Dead, and China in the driven search for the Golden Chopsticks, part two is much more domestic, taking place almost entirely within the Wei household in Kaifeng a decade later. K’e-yung, being a rather remarkable scholar and civil servant, and without the influence of Yin Whun’s magic (for she is still a fairy, too low in the hierarchy of Heaven for the Jade Emperor to even notice she is missing), is now the governor of Honan (i.e. Henan) and has taken Yin Whun as a second wife. T’ai-Tsung is a calm, reflective child and intellectually gifted like his father, carefully watched over by his two mothers for any sign of fairy powers. Everything seems to be going perfectly until T’ai-Tsung, in a moment of frustration, accidentally transforms a dog into a rock before K’e-yung’s eyes. In one of those perfectly providential moments in literature, K’e-yung goes to Ku-She to tell her that something is wrong with their son, just as Ku-She has decided it is time to tell K’e-yung everything about her origins and the Jade Emperor’s decree about T’ai-Tsung’s twelfth birthday.
The revelations shake K’e-yung’s world—“it was not merely the deception now, that was bad enough, but the fact that […] for all these years his household had existed in two realms at once and he had been totally blind to it” (105); “he was no longer sure in which emperor’s service he had really been all these years. Heaven had certainly not seen fit to inform him of his agency, and yet he had been its agent. He had raised the child, albeit unknowingly, for a post no man could aspire to” (105)—he and Ku-She make up and, with Yin Whun (also now revealed), the three of them endeavor to train T’ai-Tsung how to control his powers, which activate when he is angry. At stake in all of this, too, is the question of what his powers are, since they seem to cross over the domains of different gods and spirits, allowing him to control animals, transmogrify things, and much more. This is unusual in the immortal world, since everything has its proper place, its specific and ordained function in the cosmos.
When T’ai-Tsung turns twelve, he is taken abruptly to Heaven and tested, where in a moment of anger he reveals his fairy blood and is sent to work as a clerk for the Judges of the Dead. Ku-She, returned to earth, becomes a broken shell of herself; Yin Whun takes charge, fakes T’ai-Tsung’s death, orders a funeral, bribes a poor couple to use their recently deceased son’s body, and sets up a shrine for T’ai-Tsung—all to ensure the governor’s household is not socially or politically hurt by an eldest son’s sudden disappearance. But praying the wrong name over the wrong body creates a bureaucratic mess in the Land of the Dead, one that the newest clerk oversees. And when T’ai-Tsung discovers that his parents are mourning him as dead, thinking they have turned their backs on him, he decides he will spend the rest of his life seeking vengeance on them and the whole of Heaven and earth. This sets up part three of the novel, which will detail how T’ai-Tsung’s vengeance unfolds, turning the sensitive, studious boy into a brutal trickster god villain—a transformation Chin handles in the last few pages of part two so succinctly, and yet so convincingly as T’ai-Tsung confronts his childlike notion that his parents could “rescue” him from Heaven, could defy the Jade Emperor, and as he turns instead to grimness, seething anger, and cold resolution.
The second part of the novel is the most simply recounted of the three parts, but it is perhaps more interesting than either other part—at least to me—since Chin’s facility with dialogue, emotion, and character becomes readily apparent as Ku-She/Pao Shih, Yin Whun, and K’e-yung grow from the relatively flat figures of the first seventy pages into lively beings with depth and personality. The Fairy of Ku-She as a whole is epic and grand in scale, but most of the best action in the novel takes place in domestic settings, in the gardens, pavilions, offices, and bedrooms of the Wei household, in scenes fueled by dialogue, not necessarily by action set pieces (though those become increasingly common in the last quarter of the novel). For the most part, when things do “happen” they are related to the reader as if a fairy tale, with distance and curiosity, their outcomes strange and slightly unpredictable. I could read Chin’s characters discussing the politics of Heaven and Ming China alike, their hierarchies and their injustices, for hundreds of pages—she mixes the best of historical fiction and the best of political fantasy. But I am particularly taken by Chin’s strong, complex, multifaceted relationships between Ku-She/Pao Shih and her husband, Ke’-yung, and between Ku-She and Yin Whun. They are distinct relationships, each governed by different norms, levels of social and personal familiarity, experiences of the (mortal and immortal) world(s), and each navigating the complexities of their relationship to Heaven and what the future brings for T’ai-Tsung. They are deeply heartfelt relationships, often sweet and loving, willing to compromise and learn and grow from/with one another, and they are very endearing to me as a reader.
Part three turns back to the action and further deepens the characters—especially Ku-She, Yin Whun, and K’e-yung—and complicates their relationships. Six years have gone by and the final third of the book opens with two and a half pages of breathless description of the sad state of the world, the natural order slowly but surely coming apart. It’s worth quoting this at length, since it captures how Chin’s elegant prose deftly balances the demands of historical fiction and fairy tale, rendering the storyworld at scales both human and divine:
The dragons were angry.
And there was rain. An endless springtime of rain—cold and stinging. The sky was grey as slate for days upon days—dark, gloomy afternoons—and often it was difficult to know precisely when the sun had risen in the mornings. The thunder growled and rumbled, a sound so constant that after a while it ceased to be noticed, until it would suddenly explode in great crashing, ear-shattering clashes and the lightning would tear into the earth.
The dragons were angry indeed. They sought something…something of their own. For when those towering, twisted lances of fire fell from the sky, scorching and shattering whatever they struck, the cause was well known to men. The Lung Wang was enraged and sought to punish the object of his displeasure. That the lives and property of men often fell victim to his vengeful rages was of no consequence to him, for the Great Dragons were all but oblivious to the doings and concerns of men. They ruled the waters and the rain, all the scaled creatures that moved upon the Earth and all that lived in the waters. And when the storms broke so violently and the rains lasted so long this early in the year, it was not merely the peasants and common men who believed such things. Even the pragmatic, skeptical, learned men of the Imperial Government had to give credit to such thoughts…and worry.
There was flooding, from the spring thaw and the runoff of so much rain. Even the fields too high to fear the rivers and ponds were drenched, soaked so a man could not walk across them. There was no planting in such ground…in such weather. Carts stood mired to their hubs, oxen and horses sank past their knees in sodden pastures and, if they could not be pulled free, died where they stood. Mud ran ankle-deep through the doorways, covering the floors of peasant cottages, which often leaked from untiled roofs when the endless days of rain soaked through the thatch. The homes of the more prosperous were somewhat better off, but the cold wetness was bone deep and the driving rain battered the shuttered windows and sometimes sleet rattled on the tiled roofs…and everywhere the lightning fell, shattering trees, gouging roads and fields and smashing homes and city walls…and sometimes people died, in ruined buildings or mud slides, or occasionally where the lightning found them on the roads.
It had begun to rain early in the Second Month, in the northeast provinces of Chingshu and Shantung and the northern finger of Honan. By the Third Month the rains had spread to the eastern provinces—Nanking, Chekiang, the remainder of Honan and the northeast wing of Hukwang, which included the city of Wuchang and the many lakes and rivers of the Wuhan District. For these two months it rained without pity, and a dozen days into the Fourth Month as well, but by then the violence of the weather had diminished to an occasional brief assault of lightning. Mainly it rained. Not in torrents anymore, but a steady, grey drizzle which kept the fields mired in uselessness, rotted the wood of house frames and roof beams, and made the people miserable. […]
[Ku-She’s] husband had his own concerns and they were formidable. His province, along with Hukwang and Nanking, formed the heart of the great Central Plain of China and it was already far too late for the spring crops to be anything but a dismal failure. Occasionally there were brief respites in the relentless rain and, even more rarely, a break in the clouds. The sun would pour down through these rifts in glorious, golden shafts, lighting brief shimmers of rainbows across the sky, or the evening sun would color the horizon a dull, but discernible, rose and purple. But just as hope of an end began to rise, these small gifts would be withdrawn and the drizzle would come again.
Wei K’e-yung and his fellow officials knew if the end was not in sight soon, and the ground did not dry out quickly after the rain was gone, there would be no planting at all this season, not even a miserable one. The winter wheat and other early harvest crops were lost. Unless relief came soon, there would be no autumn harvest to speak of either. The produce of the south and west would not be enough to sustain the entire nation[.] (163–165)
This breathless introduction to the state of the world six years later pulls no punches. It moves swiftly from the etiological source of storms in Chinese mythology—the angry dragons, which in this fantasy world are the actual source of the storms—to the vast ecological, social, political, and economic problems that arise in their wake. Chin carefully describes the experience of the storms, showing the almighty power of what happens when the weather cycle goes awry. Her description, with its repeated use of ellipses, rushes us along, unceasing like the rain; the details are so specific and familiarize us with the effects of the storms at every level of the social order, betraying an almost archival quality, as though quoted from actual Ming-era annals. These storms are so powerful that they make imperial officials on earth question whether what they ostensibly believe about the cosmos, about their mythology, is in fact real: the proof is so great, so intense.[5] And it’s going to get worse. Already, we know from K’e-yung gubernatorial worries, things are verging toward widespread famine and economic ruin. While this is partly the doing of the dragons, it’s just the start of the vengeance a now fully grown T’ai-Tsung is looking to wreak on the world, for he has stolen several dragon pearls—the “something” they are seeking (163)—and now has personal control over the weather systems of the northeast and east. The movement of the storms from the Second to the Fourth Months tracks T’ai-Tsung progress stealing the pearls, his power slowly growing.
In the midst of this, Ku-She remains in despair at the loss of her son. Over the past six years, she has ceded the running of the Wei household to Yin Whun and has maintained only a passing, cordial relationship with K’e-yung. As the third part of the novel unfolds, as the disasters facing the mortal realm grow increasingly dire, and as various fairies of Hibiscus Village secretly visit bringing knowledge of what’s happening in Heaven, Ku-She repairs her relationships with her sister-wife and husband (the scenes are very tender, very touching). She decides to seek out T’ai-Tsung to confront and stop him, for she has learned that he is destroying the world out of a misunderstanding, out of hatred for her. Ku-She believes she can correct her child’s understandable misunderstanding: that she abandoned him to Heaven’s will, forgot about him, treated him as dead, and moved on. But she soon discovers that T’ai-Tsung has spent too many years honing his hatred and is unwilling to listen to reason. He even kills his own father in a harrowing, heartbreaking scene. With the bond between parent and child completely severed in this violent moment and with T’ai-Tsung’s powers growing to monstrous heights—he has assaulted and taken multiple goddesses prisoner, stolen most of the dragon pearls, released animals from domestication, dissolved the boundaries between the Land of the Dead and the moral realm, sent elementals of fire to burn the world, stolen the Golden Ax of the War God, captured and tortured and killed Yin Whun, and shaken the very pillars of Heaven to near collapse, among other feats that have brought absolute mayhem to earth and killed tens of thousands of people—Ku-She resolves to bring bring about T’ai-Tsung’s end before he enacts his plan to steal every last dragon pearl and “raise a flood that will cover the world to very gates of Heaven. To the steps of the Jade Emperor’s palace itself!” (238).
With the help of Pan Ch’ao, and with her immortality and fairy powers restored by the (mostly useless) Jade Emperor, she is able to trick T’ai-Tsung and temporarily weaken him by first secretly stealing the pearl of the dragon of the east from his collection, weakening his hold over the east’s dragons and their storms, and then by luring him out to sea, where all of the dragons will be beyond his control and can converge together to destroy him. Appropriately, for a novel that takes a small fairy tale—the idea of the snow fairy and her Golden Chopsticks (which, as far as I can tell, is not a real Chinese fairy tale or myth, but Chin’s own invention)—and turns it into a sprawling historical fantasy, the idea for how to trick T’ai-Tsung is supplied by a child remembering a fairy tale:
Ku-She set about devising a lure commensurate with Wei T’ai-Tsung’s ambitions and style. The children [of Yin Whun and Ku-She’s sister-in-law] […] crowded close to listen and help if they could.
There were many things in the sea that might tempt him and most of the gods and spirits would be amply willing to assist in any plan that seemed likely. The Maid of the Sea might offer to become one of his wives as a bribe to leave her realm unmolested. He would surely take her, and her realm, too […]. There were sea-demons with whom he might be tempted to seek an alliance as he had with the Monkey King, though the demons themselves would be of no direct help. There was countless wealth to be harvested from the sea and the power of the Great Waves if he could steal the artifacts of the Water Spirits. The children had many ideas as well, especially the boys, but they were largely impractical until little Yun-Chih Te-Hsing […] recited a story of a man in the ancient land of Chi in the Kingdom of Wei who had a daughter who was desired by a demon who refused to pay the bride price. Insulted and fearing the demon would steal the child, he went to the sea and called upon the Lady of the Sea Turtles, who agreed to hide his daughter for him if he would steal a casket of Wishing Pearls from a dragon for her. (254)
Here, Chin demonstrates that myths and fairy tales have real-world power, for they are world-historical facts, and they organize humans’ and immortals’ knowledge of the world in important ways, offering not just moral lessons but a cognitive mapping of the cosmos and of nature’s interrelationships. Put another way, fairy tales and myths give order and meaning to an otherwise chaotic world. From this “little tale” (254), recalled by a tired and scared child on the eve of apocalypse, comes the idea for T’ai-Tsung’s undoing: Ku-She hints to her cocksure son that the rest of the dragons’ pearls are “in the keeping of the deadly Sea Urchins” who “ruled the ocean floors” (255). Drawing him away from land just long enough for the dragons to array against him in secret, T’ai-Tsung is weakened and defeated—killed—on the shore.
Order is restored in Heaven and on earth, thanks to a child’s “little tale” (254) and the brave actions of a mother, a fairy, a lowly servant of the Jade Emperor. Pan Ch’ao has disappeared after surviving a deadly blow from the Golden Ax by T’ai-Tsung (and disappeared with the ax, too). Yin Whun is dead, having been transformed into a rock and crushed to dust by T’ai-Tsung. K’e-yung is dead, too, ripped apart by his own son in a fit of anger. And, of course, T’ai-Tsung has died—a just death, but one Ku-She cannot bring herself to watch nor to celebrate. “Yin Whun, her husband, her son, the accursed monk. All these things were gone now. […] There was nothing left to tie her to the mortal world and she could not deny that she had been punished” for her earlier transgressions against Heaven (263). With no place in the mortal world, she returns with melancholy and in solace to the primordial cycles of nature disrupted since Pan Ch’ao’s fateful prank, “hoping that Heaven would have some small place for her amid the rubble and ruin where she could rest and prepare for the coming winter” (263).
Some Productive Themes; Or, Why Critics Will Want to Read This One
There is so much in The Fairy of Ku-She to recommend it to unfamiliar readers and to critics and scholars of fantasy. It is beautifully written, lush with detail; as an artist herself (per Yaszek, “illustrator, freelance graphic artist, dollmaker, photographer, and theater professional,” 449; see [3]), Chin is particularly attentive to the material details of clothing, art, and architecture. The material world of Ming China comes to life through Chin’s prose and her meticulous interweaving of fables, fairy tales, myths, and references to the pantheon of traditional Chinese folk religion and Daoist beliefs. Chin also remixes and references a good deal of Ming literature, like Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West or Shi Nai’an’s Water Margin / Outlaws of the Marsh, as well as later Qing literature like the anonymous Chinese detective novel (gong’an) Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, made popular in the U.S. by Robert van Gulik’s 1949 English translation. The novel also makes liberal use of figures, concepts, and contexts from genres like xianxia and xuanhuan (check out this graph by Yilin Wang), as well as from numerous Chinese fairy tales and myths recorded over the past two thousand years. It would thus be a rich text for source studies and for discussions about genre, historicity, fairy tales, Western reception and (re)use of Chinese mythology and culture, and Western understandings of Daoism (T’ai-Tsung, for example, might be read as an antithesis of the Daoist messianic figure Li Hong).
As a story focused on the experience of two deeply connected women, and one woman’s sincere love for a man—so much so that she risks the Jade Emperor’s wrath and is exiled from Heaven, giving birth to a son with whom she has a, let’s say, complicated relationship—The Fairy of Ku-She would also be well-placed for discussions of gender, homosociality, queerness, femininity, marriage, sex, love, and motherhood, as well as the novel’s intertextuality with gender and sexuality in Chinese and American history that serve as the storyworld’s backdrop and the novel’s publishing context. Given that a significant number of fairy tale retellings emerged in the 1970s and 1980s that were explicitly feminist, and that Chin’s short career and her one novel are so obviously indebted to the idea of remixing Chinese fairy tale and myth, as evidenced by her work appearing in multiple anthologies (co-)edited by Terri Windling (see also her work editing the The Fairy Tale Series novels for Ace), there’s clearly fruitful ground to consider The Fairy of Ku-She in the contexts of feminist and queer readings of fairy tales.
Of course, there’s an important cultural studies angle to The Fairy of Ku-She and Chin’s writing career that highlights important questions about race, ethnicity, cultural appropriation, and authenticity—something behind both of the previous themes discussed: the fact that Chin is a white woman writing about Chinese culture and history. One does have to wonder, in a pre-internet world, how many readers assumed Chin was Chinese American, like I initially did, and therefore attributed some sense of authenticity to her Chinese historical fantasy. Names and what they suggest to readers play an important part in how we understand stories, where they come from, and who is telling them. Take for example Shannon Chakraborty, who initially published her Daevabad trilogy—a historical fantasy in a world influenced by MENA cultures—under the name “S.A. Chakraborty,” leading some readers to suspect she did so to hide her whiteness and create some sense of cultural authenticity to her writing at a time when readers were searching for non-European fantasy created by non-white authors. This is not the case—in fact, Chakraborty converted to Islam as a teenager and her husband’s last name, which she adopted, is South Asian not MENA—but has followed Chakraborty nonetheless.
Chin’s name may have suggested (unearned) authenticity from her name alone, but The Fairy of Ku-She gives the sense—unlike more bastardized forms of orientalist fiction—of having been deeply researched, both historically and literarily (as we’ll see below), even if there are elements that stand out as questionably authentic (e.g. the Golden Chopsticks). Still, without being raised in Chinese culture and/or without having spent years studying Chinese culture, history, religions, and folk traditions, there are surely things I will have missed but which to those readers are jarringly out of place or humorously wrong for a fantasy set in historical China and remixing Chinese mythology. And further still, it is entirely fair for liberties in storytelling and worldbuilding to be taken, so long as the efforts are respectful and—as I think they are in this novel—done with great familiarity with the topic. This is the essence of Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward’s arguments in their Writing the Other book and workshop.
Knowing Chin is white, The Fairy of Ku-She can be productively read in a tradition of twentieth-century American orientalist fictions that try to capture the “beauty” of China for American audiences, what the Encyclopedia of Fantasy refers to as Chinoiserie. These include a range of novels with different levels of, familiarity with, and approaches to representation, stereotype, and the historical realities of Chinese people and culture, from Pearl Buck’s House of Earth trilogy (1931, 1932, 1935), Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung novels and stories (1900–1940), Barry Hughart’s The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox trilogy (1984, 1988, 1990), Stephen Marley’s Chia Black Dragon trilogy (1988, 1991, 1993), and C.J. Cherryh’s Paladin (1988), not to mention Dungeons & Dragons’s attempt to create an East Asian-inspired setting, problematically titled Oriental Adventures (1985). Not for nothing, the American edition of The Fairy of Ku-She explicitly compares it to Hughart in its cover copy: “M. Lucie Chin creates a magical world of Oriental adventure in the splendid tradition of Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds.” John C. Bunnell, reviewing The Fairy of Ku-She in the official D&D magazine Dragon #141 (January 1989), speaks to the novel’s timeliness for D&D players, noting that “the wealth of detail will ably assist AD&D Oriental Adventures referees” with its “almost encyclopedic […] tour of the Chinese heavens” (65, 64). These novels and others—like Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s Tomoe Gozen Saga (1981, 1982, 1984), historical fantasies in a Japanese-inspired storyworld, or Kara Dalkey’s The Nightingale, a Japanese fairy tale retelling in Windling’s Ace series—as well as the responses to Chin’s demonstrate that there was a general interest in “Asian” and especially Chinese fantasy in the 1980s. Much remains to be said about this particular moment of growing interest in writing “Asian” fantasy and The Fairy of Ku-She would be an important part of that story.
These are just some of the critical approaches that would productively place Chin’s novel in cultural historical, publishing, and generic contexts. There are so many more possible approaches to this rich novel.
For one, The Fairy of Ku-She is deeply interested in questions of scale, as it zooms regularly from the interpersonal to the household to the social to the cosmological. I provided one example of this in the lengthy quotation about, from the opening of part three. That passage alone is a treasure trove for folks thinking about scale, storyworld, and place in fantasy, fairy tale, or literature more broadly. Moreover, as the passage and, really, the entire novel—from the opening descriptions of the importance of proper snowfall to the litany of natural disasters caused by T’ai-Tsung—make clear, The Fairy of Ku-She would be a stellar text for anyone working on ecocriticism and the ecological side of fantasy fiction (all the more so given the strong undercurrent of environmental history in Chinese historiography, and the fact that environmental disaster is written into Chinese mythology itself; see [5]). All of these themes—scale, place, storyworld, cosmology, environment—play into the larger philosophical concerns the novel has regarding the relationship between society and nature, order and chaos, the individual and the social, bureaucracy and the messiness of social life, mortality and immortality, life and death, the divine and the profane, and other such profound and fundamental binaries that Chin brings together, sometimes quite violently, for some serious dialectical questioning.
We can keep going. The Fairy of Ku-She is also about social and political hierarchies, both in Heaven and on earth, between individuals and across classes. No page is untouched by discourses on social order and disorder, on government and rulership, whether in the household or in the province or in the empire or in Heaven. And when social order begins to fail, the novel has a lot to say about how those invested with social and political power fail to respond, leaving people to protect themselves in times of crisis (see esp. 214–217). When push comes to shove, the novel shows how power severely underestimates those it considers lowly. There is a strong sense, for example, that servants—whether the servants of human elites (much time is spent discussing how to best hire them, how they can best serve, and so on), the (maid)servant of a great fairy (as Yin Whun is to Ku-she), or the servants of the Jade Emperor himself (as all fairies are to the demigods and gods)—despite their low status and their limited political autonomy are much more capable than their masters, who are often shown to be inept—most succinctly: “the High Gods are fools” (215). Because servants often go unnoticed, they become expert at mapping power and social relations in ways those invested with authority cannot comprehend. This gives servants a special salience in the world of The Fairy of Ku-She; it’s how T’ai-Tsung accrues so much power before anyone notices; it’s how the fairies can slip secret messages to Ku-She in part three; it’s how Ku-She can marry a mortal and disappear from the Jade Emperor’s awareness in part one.
And we could go one further. For The Fairy of Ku-She is very much about emotion and affect. Emotion—love, fear, anger, boredom, despair—are central to the action of the novel. While the cultural texture of this novel might be different, and, indeed, Phyllis McDonald in her review for British sff magazine Interzone #37 (July 1990) noted the novel was “refreshingly different” for “drawing upon a mythology with which few European readers are familiar” (67), the centrality of such emotions to mythology should be wholly familiar to readers of Greek and Roman myth. There, as here, emotion is a powerful disrupter of the divine order of things—gods and goddesses are just as rageful, just as petty, just as jealous or self-indulgent as humans—and we see this time and again in both the actions of the Jade Emperor and in the reactions of the gods and goddesses to T’ai-Tsung, where he manipulates their emotions and their fundamental humanness to get his way. Moreover, savvy critics might find it interesting to read the novel’s affects against its generic and gender horizons, to map affect to the novel’s claims about power and authority, or to its understandings of Chinese belief systems like Daoism.
Suffice to say, there’s a lot in Chin’s one novel to keep critics busy.
The Fairy of Ku-She …by Its Cover(s)
There were, regrettably, only two editions of The Fairy of Ku-She ever in print—and now, even more regrettably, out of print—both in mass market paperback: an American edition by Ace Books (1988; also distributed in Canada) and a British edition by Fontana (1990; also distributed in Australia and New Zealand). Neither cover is anything special, but they’re striking in their own ways and tell us a lot about how publishers sought to entice readers to a Chinese-themed fantasy novel by a relatively unknown author.
The Ace cover was painted by Kang Yi, who did a number of Ace covers between 1988 and 1991, especially for the military sf Star Commandos series by P.M. Griffin. I haven’t been able to find any information on Kang Yi other than what ISFDB provides, but Yi’s covers are quintessentially of the late 1980s/early 1990s style that makes sff book covers from that period so beautiful. Perhaps Yi’s best cover is the gorgeous wrap-around painting for A.A. Attanasio’s prehistoric fantasy novel Hunting the Ghost Dancer (1991). For The Fairy of Ku-She, Yi has chosen to layer a painting in a stylized version of a Chinese hanging scroll over a rather plain background painting that features speckled snow resolving into solid white-blue. At the top, glimpsed through the snowfall, are the shadowy eyes of who we can assume is Ku-She, and at the bottom are the Golden Chopsticks and the box in which they’re kept. The combination of the scroll painting hanging down the right side of the cover, with the snowy image and title on the left, makes for a cluttered and awkward composition. It stands out more for its design strangeness, than for its artistry. The hanging scroll depicts the back of a man, in a robe, his sharp-fingered hands raised to fend off a Chinese lung dragon descending from the mountains. This is most likely meant to represent the final showdown between T’ai-Tsung and the dragons, even if the details are wrong. (Moreover, in the period during which the novel is set, the queue hairstyle was not in use among the Han Chinese; that was imposed/popularized much later by the Manchu authorities of the Qing dynasty.) The cover is meh and leans hardcore into the particular brand of fantasy Chinoiserie characteristic of the period (see the section below). Moreover, it includes the nonsensical tagline “Beyond the shores of ancient China the dragons await…” above the title, which has nothing to do with the book (the dragons are important to the climax, but don’t live “beyond the shores,” nor do the dragons await Ku-She).
The Fontana edition is a much better fit for the novel, but I cannot find any artist information (I don’t own this edition and ISFDB has no data). The cover depicts Ku-She with beautiful, shining snowflake jewelry. She is imposed over a mountain topped by a pavilion—perhaps representing Hibiscus Village or alluding to the pavilion she keeps in the Wei household—with snow-covered trees, or perhaps flowers (the visual confusion here works), cascading down the mountains and covering/acting partly as Ku-She’s hair. The pavilion-topped mountain is centered in the cover, in the midst of a misty valley (which stretches around the back of the cover); high, jagged mountains rise in the background. The sun is rising, or just setting, and provides a calm yellow hue to the scene. This is a much more interesting cover and the trippiness of Ku-She imposed into/onto the mountain, with the visual play between flowers and snow, really works for the fantastical, fairy-tale-esque story of the novel and lends an appropriate austere, eerie quality to Ku-She. The cover includes the tagline “A Magical Tale of Ancient China,” which recalls the tagline used to sell Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds (1984; see the section below): “A novel of an Ancient China that never was.” Of course, Ming China is not “ancient,” but we’ll let that slide.
Envoi: Parting with Ku-She
The great unread of fantasy’s history is vast, and it is itself a fantasy to think that we could ever actually get a handle on it all. Still, I am committed to the unrealistic project that every fantasy novel lost to the great unread deserves some amount of critical attention, especially if we are to tell a better and truer story about the shape of fantasy’s history. But not every novel needs sustained attention and certainly not every novel should be reprinted and brought to a new generation of readers. The Fairy Ku-She, however, deserves both: critical attention and to be reprinted.
As I hope I’ve made clear, The Fairy of Ku-She—this largely forgotten, out-of-print novel from 1988—is an expert work of historical fantasy; the novel is a critic’s bounty. It is a fascinating, achingly beautiful, and brilliantly conceived novel that emerged from an earlier moment of interest in Chinese fantasy and of fairy tale retellings and which clearly understood and refined both assignments. Chin tells a completely new story set in a world that is richly historically and culturally textured, and which, I think, very much respects its inspirations. Here are characters whose trials and loves and relationships we can care about even if they feel at a remove from us, beyond our complete understanding, bound as they are to the immortal world of the Jade Emperor and to another time, somewhere in the centuries of Ming rule. Yet Chin brings us into their lives, into their domestic sphere, their quarrels and their triumphs, she weaves us into their complex social world, into the political hierarchies of empires mortal and immortal, and makes us savvy accomplices to Ku-She, Yin Whun, Pan Ch’ao, and K’e-yung’s efforts to stem the tide of one silly little prank’s shockwaves through Heaven and earth.
As I write this envoi, snow is falling and more is on the horizon. I can’t help wondering, just briefly, whether I might be in Ku-She’s world; and, in this mindset, awed by the beauty of this winter bounty, I am reminded what those like Pan Ch’ao, who mess blindly and blithely with nature, or like T’ai-Tsung, who consolidate power and threaten to bring down the four pillars of the sky when they should just go to therapy, can—and happily—do to our world.
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Footnotes
[1] The term “great unread” appears only once in Margaret Cohen’s The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton UP, 1999), on pg. 23. This book is a groundbreaking study of the emergence of a certain conception of the novel—and its strong associations with realism—in 19th century France, which eschews given narratives about the development of the novel from “traditional literary history” and looks instead to the archive, especially to the many works of literature—in this case, fiction belonging to the “sentimental novel” genre—which have been forgotten (purposefully or otherwise) but which constitute part of the actual, fuller history of the French novel. Her book is “literary history written from the archive” rather than from the bibliography of those who came before. It is a recovery project that fuels my own interest in telling a fuller, from-the-archive history of genre fantasy fiction in the postwar twentieth century. It’s important to note that Cohen’s “unread” here does not mean that the works she studies—or the novels I want to pay attention to—were never read, but that they have not been “read” often, if at all, in the context of literary history. Thus, literary history is a largely incomplete narrative about the past. Moreover, the “great unread” is so great, so vast, that it cannot fully be read by a single scholar, and so only a portion of literary history can ever really be brought into scope by one person. The concept of the “great unread” was deployed throughout the 2010s by scholars experimenting with modes of reading, e.g. distant reading, during a period in literary studies’s history that in retrospect can only, really, look like a period of internal self-questioning and crisis, and which often balked at what to do with popular fiction, opting generally to ignore it, while hand-wringing over how to better tell the history of literature given the scale of the subject beyond the canon. Still, more than a decade later, not all that much has changed in literary studies, even if there’s a great deal more science fiction and, less often, fantasy included in the mainstream of the field; but misconceptions about these genres’ histories proliferate largely because the actual, fuller history of these genres is woefully underread.
[2] Thanks to Nick Mamatas and Dennis Wise for the reminders and to Chris Fan for a name I wasn’t familiar with: Glen(n) Chang, who published several sff short stories between 1969 and 1981. Fan also pointed out that George Takei co-wrote a 1979 sf novel with Robert Asprin.
[3] Relevant biographical details can be found in Lisa Yaszek’s The Future Is Female! Volume Two, The 1970s: More Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, which reprints Chin’s first story, “The Best is Yet to Be” (1978). A copy of the biographical note on M. Lucie Chin was kindly supplied to me by Cait Coker.
[4] A mutual acquaintance who has been friends with Chin for some years now told me that Chin worked on another fantasy novel after Ku-She, but was unable to or uninterested in completing it.
[5] That the imperial officials might doubt the veracity of “old” Chinese myths makes some historical sense. After all, the Ming thought of themselves as modern. According to Lihui Yang and Deming An, in their Handbook of Chinese Mythology (2005), “myths about world calamities in the remote past are quite numerous,” but even in the high medieval period, during the “golden age” of the Ming dynasty, they were myths of the “remote past”: “They tell how and why the former world or human race was disturbed or even destroyed during the catastrophes, which usually happened in the form of deluge, worldwide fire, rare snow, the collapse of the sky pillars, more than one sun rising in heaven, and so forth” (73; see the whole section on “Cosmic Disasters and Restorations,” 73–76). For the storyworld of the novel, the ancient myths associated with figures like Nüwa, Gun, Yu, and Yi, who fought against the destruction of the world by natural disaster and restored it afterward, are ancient, thousands of years old, but the events of those myths—the floods, the fires, the famines, and much more—are coming true today. It’s something of an epistemological crisis for them!
Sean Guynes 
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