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Author Insight
Fight Confining Norms
As a girl child, my mother, bless her, helped. She pushed her daughter to believe in herself. My mom was a warrior; she worked outside the home for money against the social norms. She forced me to think of myself as a girl who could almost do anything she wanted. Then, in the 1960s, money make available for females of poor economic background to go to college. I was a woman with a future as a teacher, yet no recognition to be an author, artist, lawyer, doctor, film producer, judge, president, and on and on. My life still confined by the male narratives in fairy tales and folktales and laws. Women saved as servant dominate and restrict literature past, present, and in the future. * * * Interestingly, words denoting the feminine always have a male word hovering inside. Always check the pronouns used and the narrator’s writing or speaking; these pronouns are suppressors in our language.
Book Excerpt
Damsels Overcome
Weeding the rice field with four sisters, Li Chi stopped to watch her father, mother, and oldest sister waiting. The ancient, rounded, bent sorceress and the tall, thin magistrate walked up the road with an ox-led cart. They wore gowns of silk embroidery flowers of golden and bright-colored threads. This day was the tenth day of the eighth month when a young maiden of twelve years old offered to the eighty-meter worm that lived on the mountain. Li Chi knew the pain and tears of her oldest sister. Her family worked exceptionally hard, and this year the rain and Earth Dragons provided five extra bags of rice to pay the bribe to the sorceress and the magistrate, saving her oldest sister.
Li Chi yelled, “That worm will never eat me, never!”
Since a baby, Li Chi heard stories about the eighty-meter long, hundred toothed, wide-eyed, rice barrel thick worm that slid down the mountain to eat chickens, pigs, sheep, oxen, and goats, sometimes farmers, and several times a magistrate.
Some years ago, a sorceress traveled into town. She informed, "In a dream, the worm asked for a young maiden aged twelve to eat. The farmers must pay rice to save their daughters.
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