Work Text:
[INTRODUCTION]
This is How You Lose the Time War is an award-winning epistolary queer romance time-travel novella by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, written in stunningly beautiful prose and bursting at the seams with its love for language, for letter-writing, for history, for alternate histories, and, well, love between two people who come together almost exclusively through their words. It’s synesthetic, it’s sensual, it’s sexy; it’s delicate, it’s dreamy, it’s devastating. If the 37k fic didn’t tip you off, I’m still in love with it, and it’s been over a year now since I first inhaled it on a New York subway.
This fic borrows its structure, its worldbuilding, and almost all of its plot from Time War—the pattern of narration-letter-narration, the way Red/Lan Wangji and Blue/Wei Wuxian find letters in increasingly impossible forms, the danger of discovery, the intertwining of love and death, the curious relationship between memory and time-travel and resurrection and life. I had to shave off corners and make some dramatic decisions to fit CQL into this mold, especially since original Time War doesn’t have space for characters like Lan Xichen or Jiang Yanli. Red and Blue of Time War come together precisely because of their uniqueness and loneliness (they are the odd ducks of their own time-travelling cohorts). Any canon inconsistencies and stretching of CQL characterization, I’m afraid, comes from trying to make these two texts play nice with each other.
Part of the joy in reading Time War lies in following Red and Blue as they climb up and down the strands of time, visiting different moments in an infinite number of alternate universes (Atlantis! Dinosaurs! Shakespeare! Space battles!) and delighting in the references the authors weave into text. I decided to keep the historical references in wangxian!Time War exclusive to what I knew of Chinese history (…mostly historical fiction, to be honest) and the literary tradition, both for the challenge (dear god it was a challenge) and to show some love for the sheer breadth and diversity of Chinese history, as well as some of the wild, wild shit that goes down. I’ve hardly scraped the surface of it all, but the experience brought me much joy as I found myself reading Sina articles about Xia dynasty solar eclipses.
An important disclaimer: this fic is not intended to be historically accurate by any stretch of the imagination. I pull from historical texts, and many segments are inspired by events in history, but just as much (if not most) of this fic is informed by my consumption of period dramas and folktales in language textbooks and historical fiction and romanticized poetry and 野史 yeshi / ‘wild histories’ / unofficial histories.
That being said, I might have become a little drunk on power with the sheer number of references I made—thus, the existence of these annotations. A word of warning: we’re about to get real nerdy up in here.
[THE TITLE]
First, an explanation of the title:
If this fic had a singular theme song, it would be 叶倩文 Ye Qianwen / Sally Yeh’s 1991 hit, 《潇洒走一回》 Xiaosa Zou Yi Hui, which has alternately been translated as “Merry Go Round” and “Run Without Care.” The main translation tripping point in this title is the binome 潇洒 xiaosa, which doesn’t have a good equivalent in English. Usually, you’ll see it translated along the lines of “easygoing and unrestrained,” or “free and unaffected”—it’s extraordinarily charismatic, somewhat careless (or rather carefree), and at least a little bit, dare I say, dashing. The title of this song, then, is something along the lines of “to take a walk in a very xiaosa manner.”
(Of course, this “walk” is also a metaphor.)
Lyrics + Unofficial Translation:
天地悠悠 / heaven and earth—unending, unceasing
过客匆匆 / passing people—hurried, rushed
潮起又潮落 / the tide rises—the tide falls
恩恩怨怨 / fortune, favor—resentment, revenge
生死白头 / life and death—hair white with age
几人能看透 / who can see through it all?
红尘呀滚滚 痴痴呀情深 / the red dust tumbles—entranced we are by love
聚散终有时 / the days of our reunion and separation are preordained
留一半清 醒留一半醉 / half-awake, half-drunken
至少梦里有你追随 / at least in dreams, you follow me
我拿青春赌明天 / I’ll wager my youth against tomorrow
你用真情换此生 / you trade true love for this life
岁月不知人间 多少的忧伤/ the years do not know how many worries and sorrows exist in the human realm
何不潇洒走一回 / so why not take a walk, carefree and unrestrained
Throughout the text, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji quote unnamed prophets, both in their letters and in their internal narration. This is (as is everything else) inspired by Time War itself—at various points, Red and Blue playfully quote 60’s songs at each other (“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “The Mighty Quinn,” off the top of my head), attributing them to “the prophets.”
I, of course, fucking loved that idea, and also had an unparalleled opportunity to weave the soundtrack of my childhood into this fic. (blows kiss) this one’s for all the diaspora kids out there who grew up listening to their parents’ CD’s of 80’s and 90’s Mandopop on long car rides and through late-night karaoke.
[THE TEXT]
While wallowing in the prose of Time War, I was struck by the visceral synesthesia of it; the close proximity of its language to poetry/poetic sensibility meant that the descriptions of various sensory/speculative elements of the text could politely shove English literary conventions out of a high window. For me, this set off a lot of translator neurons in my brain; the Chinese language (gestures broadly and vaguely at an incredibly complex family of dialects, centuries, and literary traditions) is extraordinarily vivid in a way that can easily make daily vernacular sound like high art (if translated a certain way) or unbelievably earthy in its humor (much of internet slang). I’ve been studying this language off and on for over twenty years now, and it never fails to make me laugh in delight and, well, facepalm in resignation.
What I’m trying to say is that I sometimes took the liberty of 硬翻译 yin fanyi (literally, “hard translation”) / literally translating some words or phrases into the text, because sometimes, it can come out quite 雅 ya / elegant.
And sometimes, I was just being silly. Listen, I spent six months writing this fic, I needed to bring joy to myself somehow.
[1: LAN WANGJI]
“The dust of this mortal world cannot fall upon him…”
Starting out strong with a pun on the name of Lan Wangji’s sword—避尘 bichen, “avoiding worldly dust.”
“His skin is pale, the shadows around his eyes deep enough to pass for someone who has already gone down to that dark city and hailed the watchers at the gates…”
A nod to one of the lines in the first episode of CQL: 魂兮归来 hunxi guilai / 不下幽都 buxia youdu, which is in turn a reference to the《楚辞》Chuci / Songs of the South or Songs of Chu, one of the two oldest poetry collections in the Chinese literary tradition. Specifically, it refers to a line in 《招魂》Zhaohun / “Recalling Spirits” (David Hawkes translates it as “Summons of the Soul,’ which is much more badass). The line in the original is:
魂兮归来 hunxi guilai / O soul! Return!
君無下此幽都些 jun wuxia ciyoudu xie / Do not go down to that dark city
where the “dark city” is, naturally, the realm of the dead.
“Greetings, from the ghost in your machine!”
You know, I just spent a few paragraphs talking about why I chose only to use Chinese references in this fic, and then turned around and put this in Wei Wuxian’s first letter. What can I say? The reference was too fun to pass up, the ghost imagery works really well for Wei Wuxian, and this fic is really a love letter to being Chinese American and having access to various literary traditions. Fight me.
“…a single woman, dressed in the armor of a man, who will one day be memorialized in a song to move the heart…”
A stealth nod to the 《木兰辞》Mulan ci / “Ballad of Mulan,” and the fact that the origin of the Mulan mythos is a song. Also, I believe we’ve moved beyond bland, nationalistic adaptations of the Mulan mythos. It is time we as a society embraced the power in a version where Mulan is a non-Han, middle-aged lady-general (I will also accept fabulously genderqueer Mulan) with an eyepatch.
[2: WEI WUXIAN]
“None of it will be enough to recover the lost repository of texts within, including the final installment of one of the greatest novels in the literary tradition.”
The book Lan Wangji burns is 《红楼梦》 Hongloumeng / Dream of the Red Chamber, a Qing Dynasty novel by 曹雪芹 Cao Xueqin. It is known as one of the 四大名著 “Four Great Novels,” and famously, its last forty chapters were lost in transmission. The details of the warehouse fire and the vengeful cousin are based off of the story I was told, and are likely apocryphal.
“Alone, standing against the vaults of heaven, surveying the four seas,
Unceasing, wind and waves roil restlessness into the heart.
Spring waters, eastward surging, bring you only grief,
Only my song can release you from sorrow.”
I did, in fact, scribble out a poem in Chinese and translate it in order to write Lan Wangji’s poems to Wei Wuxian, although “poem” is a loose way of putting it since I have only the most superficial understanding of 平仄 pingze tone rules. The extent of my ability was to make the couplets rhyme.
For those of you who are curious, this poem was loosely based on the 七言绝句 qiyan jueju / seven-character quatrain form.
[3: LAN WANGJI]
“…she watches a pair of butterflies dance over the flowers in an overgrown garden and think about scrolls and tombs and stars crossing over two souls.”
The concerto in contention is the 梁祝小提琴协奏曲 / Butterfly Lovers’ Violin Concerto, composed in 1959 by 何占豪 He Zhanhao and 陈钢 Chen Gang (the young composer in this segment is completely fictional. Consider it an alternate timeline).
The Butterfly Lovers belong to the pantheon of star-crossed lovers along with Pyramus and Thisbe, Tristan and Isolde, Troilus and Cressida, Romeo and Juliet—but this time with more cross-dressing. Zhu Yingtai disguises herself as a man to study in Hangzhou, where she meets and slowly falls in love with her classmate, Liang Shanbo. Three years later, Zhu Yingtai is suddenly called home by her father, and Liang Shanbo sees her off, travelling a great distance with her. Zhu Yingtai promises to matchmake Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai’s imaginary “sister” in the future.
Eventually, Liang Shanbo discovers the truth, and the two of them fall deeper into love. However, Zhu Yingtai’s parents have already arranged for her to marry a wealthy merchant, Ma Wencai. Heartbroken at the news, Liang Shanbo becomes disconsolate and perishes from his sorrow. On the day of her wedding, Zhu Yingtai passes by Liang Shanbo’s grave, where she falls to her knees and begs for the grave to open. When the ground splits open, she throws herself in, and two butterflies arise out of the grave, the two lovers reunited once more.
“…I’ve sent her dreaming about instead are drunken chrysanthemums and ghost girls…”
A drive-by reference to one of the stories in the 《聊斋志异》Liaozhai Zhiyi / Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling, who shows up later in the story. Wei Wuxian, you could say, is a fan.
[4: WEI WUXIAN]
“Wei Wuxian shuffles forward in the line of pilgrims, visitors to the Gusu Museum of Classical History.”
This section is absolutely a rip-off of the section in Time War where Blue disguises herself as a pilgrim in a cyberpunk world to steal an important spiritual item. Like Blue, Wei Wuxian is handily foiled by Red/Lan Wangji’s intervention.
“It was said that Lan Jinghua had infused the ornament with decades of his own spiritual energy, until it held enough power to flatten a city.”
This detail didn’t make it in, but the spiritual power stored in Lan Jinghua’s guan is used to power the illusion of Lan Yi’s guqin. Meanwhile, Lan Jinghua’s name is a stealth pun on the idiom 水中月 shui zhong yue，镜中花 jing zhong hua / the moon in water, the flower in mirrors. The phrase is an elegant way of referring to illusions, i.e. things that do not actually exist.
“Welcome, Lan Weiren, an elegant scrawl of ink surfaces on the blank white wall beside him, then slowly fades.”
“Lan Weiren” is also a stealth pun—it is intended to be 为仁 / ‘to perform benevolence,’ but is homophonous with 伪人 / ‘counterfeit person.’ My beta also pointed out to me that this could also be 魏人, ‘Wei person.’
“mugwort, angelica, fragrant thoroughwort”
The characters Lan Wangji writes are艾 ai，芷 zhi，兰 lan, which are all flowers found in the 《楚辞》 Chuci.
“Then he grabs the painting that is most decidedly not a guqin, and runs.”
This reference is perhaps way too oblique, but it brought me delight, so it gets to be in this fic: both the painting and Lan Wangji’s poem are references to 杜甫 Du Fu’s poem 《画鹰》Hua Ying / “Painted Hawk.” The “crafty hare” in Lan Wangji’s poem is, in fact, the same “crafty hare” that appears in Du Fu’s poem. Often, this poem is read as an expression of Du Fu’s ambition and frustration—like the hawk in the painting, he is superior to other prey birds, but is leashed by his lack of position, unable to perform at his greatest potential. The painting is now lost to time, but lives on in Du Fu’s poem.
For those of you who are curious, the form of this poem is loosely based on the 五言绝句 wuyan jueju / five-character quatrain form. Du Fu’s original is a 五言律诗 wuyan lüshi / five-character regulated verse.
[5: LAN WANGJI]
“In fact, where he is working, the wall is but a distant, foolish dream of an emperor who aspires towards immortality…”
This is, rather predictably, 秦始皇 Qin Shihuang / the Qin First Emperor.
“In some tenth century strands, the philosophers of Greater Tang become obsessed with the principle of ganying, the phenomenon that makes the string of one guqin shiver when its counterpart is plucked on a sister instrument across the room. The idea that heaven and earth would respond in kind to appropriate human action, not unlike a plucked guqin string, would lead some strands to great flourishing, others to charred and smoldering ends.”
The principle of 天人感应 tianren ganying / Heaven-man interaction is an ancient one that goes all the way back into pre-modern cosmology and feeds into the importance of ritual propriety in dynastic China. A great deal of ritual, as presented in texts such as the 《礼记》Liji / The Book of Rites and the 《吕氏春秋》Lüshichunqiu / The Annals of Lü Buwei, is predicated on the belief that appropriate conduct/performance of ritual can win heavenly approval and benediction. It is by no means limited to the Tang Dynasty.
“Widow Meng will cry out—the heavens roaring in response—and a legend, ten myths, a hundred poems will be spawned.”
This is a reference to the legend of 孟姜女 Lady Meng Jiang, one of the 民间四大传说 “Four Great Folktales.” When Meng Jiang’s husband is conscripted as a corvee laborer in the Qin Dynasty to work on the Great Wall, she sets out to bring him winter clothes. When she arrives at the wall, no one can tell her where her husband is; she cries out so bitterly that the heavens respond, lightning striking the Great Wall and breaking it open to reveal piles of white bones hidden inside.
It is a folktale, as the kids say these days, with zero chill.
[6: WEI WUXIAN]
“There is a long tradition—of daggers hidden in fish, of knives hidden in maps, of lead weights hidden in instruments—but seldom has the tradition seen a master of the art as Wei Wuxian.”
The ‘art’ here refers to assassination—the literary tradition has a long history and fascination with assassins, and the ones referenced here all come from 司马迁Sima Qian’s 《史记·刺客列传》“The Biographies of the Assassin-Retainers.” 专诸 Zhuan Zhu hides a dagger in a fish （鱼肠剑）, which he uses to murder 吴王僚 the Wu King Liao; 荆轲 Jing Ke hides a poisoned knife at the end of a map, with which he tries (and fails) to assassinate the Qin First Emperor. 高渐离 Gao Jianli hides weights in his 击筑 jizhu (a stringed instrument not unlike a guzheng) and also fails to kill the Qin First Emperor.
“…he has the choice of twins, born already with a predisposition towards tragedy.”
This is just me being silly: a nod to the TVTrope “Angsty Surviving Twin.”
“Kill the poet, and their sibling will become a prophet, gifted with a feverish vision and destructive charisma that will send armies to their silent drowning in the corpselight of dying suns.”
Given that this entire fic is basically silkpunk science fantasy wangxian, it felt right to give a shout-out to two major silkpunk science fantasy series, Ninefox Gambit ofThe Machineries of Empire series by Yoon Ha Lee, and the Tensorate series by Neon Yang.
“Prophecies, like daggers, are also sometimes hidden in the bellies of fishes.”
Oh, this is a fun story! The peasant rebellion that brought the short-lived Qin Dynasty to an ignominious end was at least partially begun by two corvee laborers named 陈胜 Chen Sheng and 吴广 Wu Guang. Caught between a rock and a hard place, they wrote 陈胜王 King Chen Sheng in pig’s blood on a piece of cloth and stuffed it into the belly of a fish. When this fish was purchased and gutted, the prophecy naturally emerged, and people began paying attention to Chen Sheng, Wu Guang, and their rebellion.
For anyone who’s read Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty series, you may recognize this from the first book, The Grace of Kings. Ken Liu draws primarily on the events of the 楚汉相争 Chu-Han contention in his debut novel, with some elements of 《三国演义》 Romance of the Three Kingdoms thrown in there for flavor.
“Really! A rabbit on the moon!”
An incomplete list of things that are on the moon, according to Chinese folklore:
- A very beautiful, very sad immortal lady called 嫦娥 Chang’e
- An osmanthus tree
- A dude trying to cut down an osmanthus tree
- A jade rabbit, mixing medicine
Thus—Wei Wuxian finding the rabbit hilarious and maybe a little cringe.
[7: LAN WANGJI]
“He begins picking his way across the strand-weave of time, watershed moments compressed beneath his feet like flattened worlds drowned below the surface of a frozen lake in winter.”
For those of you who have seen 《庆余年》 Qingyunian / Joy of Life, this is absolutely inspired by that shot in episode 28. You know the one.
“They are singing a new song in the wine-houses of Bianjing,” Lan Wangji says. “Liu Yong may realize his ambitions yet.”
Ah, 柳永 Liu Yong—he was a Song Dynasty poet whose works were beloved among the song-towers and pleasure houses, but less so by 宋仁宗 Emperor Ren of Song. One of Liu Yong’s poems (《鹤冲天·黄金榜上》) contained the lines “忍把浮名，换了浅斟低唱,” which comes out to something along the lines of “I’d rather exchange superficial fame for a shallow cup of wine, humming songs under my breath” (wherein “superficial fame” refers to his success at the civil service exams). The story goes that Emperor Ren of Song took one look at this humble-brag and immediately struck Liu Yong’s name off of the rankings, saying “if he wants to drink wine and hum songs under his breath, by all means, let him go do so,” which pretty effectively killed Liu Yong’s future political career.
Liu Yong, of course, then goes around saying that he is 奉旨填词 writing poems by decree of the emperor himself. One of the stories surrounding Liu Yong’s death states that he was so penniless by the time of his passing, but still so beloved by the song-towers and pleasure houses, that courtesans and song-girls took pity on him and paid for his burial.
汴京 Bianjing is the archaic name for 开封 Kaifeng, which was the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty.
“Gusu…with all your rules and regulations, prohibitions and particularities, seeks to shape each individual in the mold of a Lan model of appropriate conduct, demanding perfection and conformity at once. One needs only observe your cold elegance, the austere beauty of your mercilessness, to see the shape of the music that made you…
“Yunmeng, in contrast, believes in the inherent completeness of being. Our task, then, becomes the illumination of each person’s uniqueness, the gentle guidance towards the fulfillment of individual potential.”
The differing models of human nature between Gusu Lan and Yunmeng Jiang is loosely modeled off of the 荀子 Xunzi – 孟子 Mengzi schism in early 儒家哲学 Confucian/Ruist thought. Gusu espouses a Xunzian school of thought—human nature is inherently corrupt, and must be rectified through the application of education and discipline—whereas Yunmeng favors Mengzian thought—human nature is inherently good, and must be nurtured through a supportive environment. Xunzi favors metaphors of craftsmanship and work, which dovetails nicely with the idea of music shaping Lan Wangji’s personhood; meanwhile, Mengzi often uses botanical metaphors, which felt appropriate for the naturalistic imagery of 江 “Jiang”/the River.
[8: WEI WUXIAN]
“In some strands, Sanxia is an unmitigated disaster—the dam floods the mountain valleys and applies pressure on tectonic plates, catalyzing a cascade of catastrophic earthquakes across the central floodplain. In other strands, Sanxia is an engineered miracle—the hydroelectricity generated launches the area towards a solarpunk future, drowned villages paving the path to utopia.”
The scenery of Sanxia is famous and well-attested in the literary tradition with its elegant mountains, its lush forested slopes, the swiftly flowing currents of the Yangtze River (it is also, incidentally, the location of Yiling). Sanxia is also the home of the Three Gorges Dam, a massive hydroelectric project that helps mitigate the damage caused by the Yangtze’s yearly floods. It generates over a hundred terawatt-hours a year, and increases the overall shipping capacity of the Yangtze River.
The building of the Three Gorges Dam also flooded canyons, drowned cultural and archaeological sites, and displaced over a million people. There has been speculation on how the shift in water pressure on the underlying tectonic plates affect seismic activity, among other environmental ramifications. Not unlike the history of the Hetch Hetchy Valley/Reservoir in California, the Three Gorges Dam remains controversial both domestically and abroad.
“The moon shines, reflected in the water, and Wei Wuxian toasts it silently with his wine. He’ll embrace it in the river another night, when the alcohol burns lazily in his veins and his ink spills black into the void of midnight water.”
A reference to an apocryphal death-story of Tang Dynasty poet-swordsman-extraordinaire 李白Li Bai, in which he drowns while drunkenly attempting to rescue the moon from a river.
“The letter comes to him in the form of a carp, its rippling form nosing up to Wei Wuxian’s fingers, still trailing in the water. He scoops it up in a swift, careless motion, and the carp wriggles for a moment, scales flashing silver in the cold light. Then, it shudders and splits into two—halves of a letterbox, cracking open to reveal its secret.”
The form of this letter is inspired by the 双鱼 doubled-fish letter box that often surfaces in Chinese poems (off the top of my head: “重泉若有双鱼寄”). Pre-modern letters were sent in boxes, which were often referred to as ‘fish’ or ‘doubled-fish’ due to their shape. I've seen opening a letter described in a poem as 烹鱼 pengyu, or ‘to cook a fish.’
“Wei Wuxian watches the arc of its body as it leaps upriver, toward some elusive dragon gate.”
This is a reference to perhaps one of the more well-known Chinese idioms in English: 鲤鱼跳龙门, “a carp leaping over a dragon gate,” refers to a folktale in which successfully leaping over Longmen would allow a lowly carp transform into a dragon. It is often used to metaphorically refer to achieving an impossibly high rank, or a great accomplishment.
“There is a thing, chaotic and complete, that came into being before Heaven and Earth, and some schools of thought took it as their way. From the way was born one, and from one, two was born. Two bore three, and three gave rise to the ten thousand material things. You speak of a multiplicity of truths—these are your myriad truths.
And so, when we seek to return to the one—prune away distractions, cut away falsehoods, from ten thousand to three, three to two, two to one, and one to that nameless thing that came into being before Heaven and Earth. There, we find the singularity that drives Gusu Lan.”
Oh god. The original draft of this letter had another three paragraphs in this vein, and I am fervently thankful that I cut them.
Lan Wangji is, in his letter, quoting from the 《道德经》Daodejing, a cryptic text of wisdom poetry and venerated Daoist text. Specifically, he quotes from chapters 25 and 42.
Any translation errors are mine, I’m afraid.
“It occurs to me, while I try to explain a fundamental truth of being that defies capture by words…”
This is barely a reference, but I can never resist some good 《庄子》 Zhuangzi:
“…A trap is for fish: when you’ve got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you’ve got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you’ve got the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find someone who’s forgotten words so I can have a word with him?...” – Chapter 26, “Outside Things,” trans. Paul Kjellberg
[9: LAN WANGJI]
“It is, as the prophets say: the tides rise, the tides fall, enmeshed in gratitude and grievances.”
Our first prophet sighting! This is still quoting 《潇洒走一回》 Xiaosa Zou Yi Hui, aka this fic’s theme song.
“And yet, the eunuch insists, proffering the lotus pouch with both hands.”
‘Lotus pouch,’ here, is a direct translation of 荷包 hebao, which are embroidered pouches often filled with fragrant spices and grasses (or small treasures), carried on one’s person.
“Once you and I have started arguing, if you win and I lose, then are you right and am I wrong? If I win and you lose, then am I really right and you really wrong?”
Wei Wuxian, here, is quoting one of my favorite mind-bending Zhuangzi passages:
“Once you and I have started arguing, if you win and I lose, then are you really right and am I really wrong? If I win and you lose, then am I really right and are you really wrong? Is one of us right and the other one wrong? Or are both of us right and both of us wrong? If you and I can’t understand one another, then other people will certainly be even more in the dark. Whom shall we get to set us right?...” – Chapter 2, “On Equalizing Things,” trans. Paul Kjellberg
“The prophets knew well the gravity-pull of loyalty and homecoming—gently, I must leave them behind for each assignment, and always, I miss them in the storms.”
A second prophet sighting! This time I’m pulling lyrics from only one of the best songs ever written, 齐秦 Qi Qin’s 1987 song《大约在冬季》 Dayue zai dongji / “Sometime in the Winter.” Wei Wuxian jumps from the first line of the song 轻轻的我将离开你 / gently, I must leave you behind to 我在风雨之中念着你 / I will miss you amidst the wind and rain.
“I think they’ve unlocked some sort of great secret of the universe in the flavor of their lamb, all open sky and grassfire dirt, the sharp slice of onion and the warm burn of barbarian pepper.”
"Barbarian pepper" is a bit of a literal translation for 胡椒 hujiao, which never fails to amuse me. It’s just black pepper.
[10: WEI WUXIAN]
“Nameless guest—”
I always imagined this salutation to be 无名客 wumingke, which isn’t a reference to anything in particular, I just liked the sound of it.
“But have you observed the thousand different tastes in a twist of huajuan? Of all handheld delicacies, it is close to the humblest one—only the slightest smear of oil and salt setting it apart from mantou. And yet, in huajuan alone, I could spend centuries...”
If you don’t know what 花卷 huajuan and 馒头 mantou are, I’m very sorry for your loss. I advise you to seek them out posthaste via Google. They are almost criminally easy to make.
“…you may ask the gulls and egrets who they sing with. And if you listen very carefully, you can listen to the flameless hearth doused by water, or find a rain-soaked cliff’s edge without the strength of stone.”
Lan Wangji, here, has handed Wei Wuxian several 字谜 character/word riddles, and they all sound stupidly poetic because I messed around with translations. The “flameless hearth doused by water” refers to the character 煁 chen / a brazier, or a hearth. Remove the 火 fire radical from the left, and you’re left with 甚； douse it with 氵 water, and that gets you to 湛 zhan, as in ‘Lan Zhan.’
The “rain-soaked cliff’s edge without the strength of stone” is a similar game; we start with 磡 kan / a cliff, or embankment. Strip away 石 stone from the left and 力 strength from the right, and you’re left with 甚. Soak that with 氵rain, and we’re once again back at 湛 zhan.
Lan Wangji’s hint of “ask[ing] the gulls and egrets who they sing with” is a reference to the lines “镜湖西畔秋千顷，鸥鹭共忘机”/ on the western shores of the mirror-like lake, a thousand autumns spill / the gulls and egrets share [wangji] from Song Dynasty poet 陆游 Lu You’s poem,《乌夜啼·世事从来惯见》. “Wangji,” in this case, refers more to the Daoist valence of the term (‘to forget device’), and 鸥鹭忘机 oulu wangji is a chengyu that refers to those who remain aloof/removed from society.
鸥鹭忘机 Oulu Wangji is also the name of a guqin piece.
[11: LAN WANGJI]
“…so far removed from his usual subsistence drinking in the eastern winds and lapping at morning dew.”
The phrase “drinking in the eastern winds and lapping at the morning dew” is a roundabout way of translating 饮露餐风 yinglu canfeng, a chengyu that refers to a supernatural/superhuman kind of ascetic life.
“Lan Wangji shakes his head wordlessly, the tremors of after-fear stealing his words.”
“After-fear” is a direct translation of the binome 后怕houpa, which refers to the feeling of fear for what might have gone wrong after an event has already passed.
“You may call me ‘baby,’ or ‘babe,’ for short, if you’d like.”
Wei Wuxian—in addition to being a little piece of shit—is playing on the semantic meaning of his personal name, 婴 ying / babe, infant.
“Alas, I am a professional, and long gone from this strand by now.”
If I’m being honest, I think this obsession with professionalism in this fic is a bit of a leftover running gag from SSMB.
[12: WEI WUXIAN]
“He reworks paragraphs while watching the Sima clan tear itself to pieces, burning arrows falling from the sky. He kneads letters into dough, stretching the lines between his hands like the elastic lamian he sells. He lies in a mass grave beneath a pyre of scrolls, and whispers phrases into the dirt with fading exhalations.”
Three quick-fire references: the first is a moment in the War of the Eight Princes, a truly truly wild time during the Jin Dynasty (specifically, it’s during the three-day siege of Luoyang by 司马冏 Sima Jiong). The second is—hilariously, please laugh—a vague reference to 周星驰 Stephen Chow’s kung-fu comedy film 《少林足球》 Shaolin Soccer and the loving shots of Mui kneading mantou. The third jumps back to the Qin Dynasty, in which the Qin First Emperor was infamous (and possibly historically slandered) for 焚书坑儒 fenshu kengru, “burning books and burying scholars [alive].”
[13: LAN WANGJI]
“The monk slants him an amused glance, and Lan Wangji is reminded that, no matter the lingering cultural importance of the stories spun about this monk, the man was neither as innocent nor as naïve as the stories painted him to be. Those eyes belonged to a keen scholar, one whose texts and commentaries would be studied for centuries; the set of his jaw betrayed a steely determination, which had led him to defy imperial edict and sweet-talk his way out of the gates of Yumen Pass.”
This monk is, in fact, 唐僧 Tang Seng, aka 唐玄奘 Tang Xuanzang, aka one of the major characters of 《西游记》 Xiyou Ji / Journey to the West. 《西游记》 Xiyou Ji is a Ming Dynasty novel which numbers among the Four Great Novels in the tradition, and is likely most well-known for bringing 齐天大圣美猴王 孙悟空 Sun Wukong / the Monkey King into popular culture. Jokes about his uselessness in the novel aside, Tang Xuanzang was pretty badass in history—he really did travel all the way from Tang Dynasty China to India to obtain Buddhist scriptures, and on the way ran into various adventures such as 1) sneaking out of 玉门关 Yumen Pass, one of the westernmost gates in the Great Wall, and 2) narrowly escaping from bandits on the Silk Road.
Lan Wangji, here, gifts Tang Xuanzang 白龙马 bailongma, the white dragon horse (and criminally underappreciated character) of the novel.
“Another wandering xiake,” the monk says, rummaging in his jiasha. “We shared the road for a week through the Tianshan Ranges, and he said much the same as you.”
侠客 xiake is sometimes translated as “knight-errant,” and refers to a wandering hero of martial prowess. 袈裟 jiasha are the robes of Buddhist monks.
“…the number of unsent letters I’ve burned since I wrote you last could have fed a wolf-pyre beacon and warned a state of invasion...”
“Wolf-pyre beacon” is a loose translation of the phrase 狼烟烽火 langyan fenghuo / literally “wolf smoke, beacon fires.” This is because emergency beacons at border posts used to be fueled by wolf dung, which is a lot less romantic once you know that piece of historical trivia.
[14: WEI WUXIAN]
“By his feet, the pile of soft-turtle shells, smooth and bone-pale and goreless, are ridden with hairline heat-cracks that guide the decisions of history, reshape the formlessness of tomorrows.”
These are Shang Dynasty oracle bones, which were used in—get this—pyromantic divination. Generally speaking, you carved your question into a turtle shell (or ox scapula), heated a metal rod, and pressed it against the bone until it cracked. Your diviner would then parse the pattern of cracks and declare how auspicious your course of action would be.
Archaeologists have dug up so many oracle bones in literal trash heaps, and we’re honestly not sure what to do with them.
[15: LAN WANGJI]
“He is the last giftbearer of the Song emperor, the masked face of an executioner who never stains his hand with blood.”
God this is such an aesthetic. I’m sorry to inform you everything about Lan Wangji in this scene is almost certainly poetic license.
“… for now, he lets himself into a darkened storeroom in a side courtyard, the last, life-taking poem of a man who was never meant to rule folded in his hand.
“Life-taking poem” is a sketchy translation of the phrase 绝命诗 juemingshi, which is, generally speaking, the last poem a poet ever writes. The poem in question is 《虞美人·春花秋月何时了》/ “when will the spring flowers and autumn moon end?” written by the last ruler of the kingdom of 南唐 Southern Tang, 李后主 Li Houzhu 李煜 Li Yu. Some stories say Li Yu wrote this poem upon receiving the pitcher of poisoned wine from the Song Emperor (one does not simply execute high-ranking figures in dynastic China; one merely presses them to commit suicide).
Li Yu was an incredible poet, but, ah, not the best ruler. In his defense, he spent the early years of his life washing his hands of politics, and only through an accident of succession got stuck with the throne.
“…he takes a deep breath and hums dalü, the pitch-standard for the third month of winter.”
Truly one of the most gratuitous and lazy references to the almanacs of the 《吕氏春秋》Lüshichunqiu / The Annals of Lü Buwei. The first twelve books of this Warring States text catalog the twelve months of the year, exhaustively detailing the constellations, numerical correlates, sacrificial organs, pitch-standards, and appropriate dress for the Son of Heaven (the ruler). 大吕 dalü / “The Great Regulator” is, in fact, the pitch-standard for the third month of winter according to the Almanacs. The third month of winter is the last of the year, and the season of winter in the almanacs is a curiously merciful one.
“Li Yu was a fascinating figure, and his poetry strums a particular heart-chord, like two guqin strings echoing each other on opposite sides of the room—‘in dreams, I forget this body is a guest.’”
A quote from another one of Li Yu’s poems, 《浪淘沙令·帘外雨潺潺》“Outside the curtain, the rain patters,” which is the ultimate melancholy post-resurrection Wei Wuxian poem in my mind:
帘外雨潺潺，春意阑珊。罗衾不耐五更寒。梦里不知身是客，一晌贪欢。
Outside the curtain, the rain patters—
the idea of spring decays.
Fine robes cannot withstand the winter of late night
In dreams, the body does not know it is a guest—
reaching back for those days, glut on joy.
独自莫凭栏，无限江山。别时容易见时难。流水落花春去也，天上人间。
Do not lean alone against the banister—
boundless, the rivers and mountains.
Parting is easy; reunion is hard.
Water flows, flowers fall, and spring has departed –
Heaven, and the human realm.
Damn, Li Yu. The man was onto something.
“I imagine another agent coming back from Spring-Autumn and tripping over my body.”
I changed my mind; this is the laziest possible reference in this fic, a brief nod to 春秋时期 the Spring and Autumn period.
“I have never carved a hole in a tree to whisper my confessions into…”
A reference to some truly baffling but oddly compelling dialogue from the 王家卫 Wong Kar-wai film 2046：
Chow Mo-wan: In the old days, if someone had a secret they didn't want to share... you know what they did?
Ah Ping: Have no idea.
Chow Mo-wan: They went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into the hole. Then they covered it with mud. And leave the secret there forever.
Ah Ping: What a pain! I'd just go to get laid.
Chow Mo-wan: Not everyone's like you.
[16: WEI WUXIAN]
“In the future, they will say that this city fell because of a woman. In myths, and idioms, and fables, they will say that the king squandered his beacons of aid, foolishly, for the chance to see her smile.”
This section references the story of 褒姒 Bao Si, one of the shockingly numerous women in the Chinese tradition described as 倾国倾城 qingguo qingcheng / that is, possessed of a beauty great enough to “fell kingdoms and topple dynasties.” Bao Si’s story is buried in several layers of superstition and myth, but the quick-and-dirty version of it would be an ancient Chinese version of the boy who cried wolf: 周幽王 King You of Zhou was extremely enamored of Bao Si’s smile, but she rarely deigned to laugh, or even smile. When King You of Zhou lit his warning beacons for no reason and called all of his vassal lords to arms, he managed to startle a laugh out of her. And so, like a dumbass, he kept doing so. Naturally, when someone actually did attack, no one responded to his cries for aid, and he was summarily deposed and killed.
“The red dust tumbles, entranced we are by love , the prophets say. The days of our reunion and separation are preordained.“
Another prophet spotting! Still the theme song of this entire fic.
“Foolish, really, to fortify the ramparts with railings and crenellations, yet leave the sheer length of stairs unguarded.”
This isn’t a reference, unless you count my ongoing love affair with the TV Trope “No OSHA Compliance” as a reference.
“Compare a letter to, say, a poem: both may write of the edge of moonlight against the lip of a well, or about one’s dinner of cold noodles the previous night, but what sets the letter apart from the poem (beyond its form, naturally) is its intended audience of one.”
“The edge of moonlight against the lip of a well” is an oblique reference to one of Li Bai’s most well-known poems, 《静夜思》Jing Ye Si / “Thoughts on a Quiet Night,” and the four different interpretations of first character in the poem. The poem about last night’s cold noodles is one of Du Fu’s.
“…there is a kind of time travel in letters too, isn’t there?”
I generally tried avoiding using lines from Time War verbatim, but I had to somehow include a nod to the weird time-compression shenaniganery that comes with writing snail mail. As a longtime practitioner of postcards and snail mail, I absolutely adored the way Time War played with its form and the weird, rambling musings that often happen in written letters.
[17: LAN WANGJI]
“He leans down, picking up the half-eaten peach…”
This is a reference to the story of 弥子霞 Mizi Xia and 余桃 yutao the bitten/leftover peach—famously, Mizi Xia was a male favorite of 卫灵公 Duke Ling of Wei. Mizi Xia once bit into a peach and found the taste so delicious that he saved the rest of it for his lord. His story is recorded in the 《韩非子》Hanfeizi, which is like, the OG text of the Legalist school of thought; originally, Mizi Xia’s story was intended to be a parable cautioning against the fickleness of rulers. However, the imagery of the leftover peach became vastly more alluded to in the tradition as a referent for homosexuality, similar to the historical allusion of 断袖 duanxiu / “cut sleeve.”
“During the reign of Taiyuan in the Jin Dynasty, a man of Wuling followed a creek until he forgot the distance to the road. Suddenly, he came upon a grove of peach blossom trees, flanked on either side by riverbanks a hundred paces tall. Fragrant grasses grew fresh and beautiful, fallen flowers a riot of color. At the end of the grove, there was a spring—beyond the spring, a mountain.”
Wei Wuxian, here, straight-up quotes the opening passage of the 《桃花源记》 Taohuayuan Ji, which is the text that originates the Peach Blossom Spring allusion. Written by Jin Dynasty literati 陶潜 Tao Qian / 陶渊明 Tao Yuanming, the Taohuayuan Ji follows a nameless “man of Wuling” who stumbles into a hidden utopia where everyone lives in quiet harmony with nature. After enjoying their hospitality for an afternoon, the man leaves, and no one ever finds the community again.
“Not just ‘Peach Blossom Spring,’ but specifically the hiddenness of it, the ‘world outside-worlds.’”
I think I explain the 桃花源 taohuayuan “Peach Blossom Spring” reference enough in the text itself, but these phrases specifically play on the formulation of the chengyu 世外桃源 shiwai taoyuan—literally, “outside the mortal realm, a peach spring.”
“Tao Qian’s poems did always feel rather performative to me: ‘I have tilled, I have planted / from time to time, I read my books’ –as if life could be that easy for the rest of us! Tending this grove alone took me years between assignments, and I certainly had no time to lie in the grass with a copy of King Zhou’s Tales… Though perhaps, when he wrote: ‘gazing up, I reach the vast universe / if this is not joy, what is it?’ there might be something to his words.”
Here, Wei Wuxian is referencing the Tao Qian poem 《读山海经之一》 “A Poem on Reading the Classic of Mountains and Seas,” in which Tao Qian talks about how great his pastoral life is, now that he has retreated (read: been exiled) from the imperial center. The specific lines Wei Wuxian quotes are: “泛覽《周王傳》，流觀《山海》圖。俯仰終宇宙，不樂復何如？”
[18: WEI WUXIAN]
“It was, Wei Wuxian muses, like the prophets said—I look down at the mountain streams, chasing the passing years and months.”
Prophet sighting!!! These lyrics are from 程琳 Cheng Lin’s 2002 song《信天游》Xin Tian You. The name of the song refers to a style of folk music from 陕西 Shaanxi Province, and Wei Wuxian quotes the first two lines: “我低头向山沟 追逐流逝的岁月.” This song is a total bop, although I tend to say that about any song that starts out strong with its electric guitar.
“There is nothing about his features that suggests his identity, though that kind of preternatural beauty would have immortalized him in the Songs of Chu…”
Am I coyly drawing comparisons between Lan Wangji and the lovely, reclusive, androgynous figure of the mountain spirit in 《山鬼》Shangui? You bet I am.
“Later, the seeker comes splashing through the glacial waters, kicking up flowers of spray in his haste, but Wei Wuxian is long gone.”
“Flowers of spray” is a literal translation of the binome 浪花 langhua, which is used to describe the foam of breaking waves.
“I once watched an avalanche fall from Zhumulangma’s peak…”
珠穆朗玛 “Zhumulangma” is the name for Mt. Everest. God, Lan Wangji, stop flexing.
“In the moments between my work, I, too, plucked chrysanthemums beneath the eastern fence and gazed leisurely on the southern mountains. The air of the mountains at dusk is lovely, and birds take to wing together, returning home… Within this lies true meaning, Tao Qian writes, and for the first time, I am inclined to agree.”
Lan Wangji, here, is quoting another Tao Qian poem back at Wei Wuxian; this time, he pulls his lines from《饮酒之五·结庐在人境》 “Drinking Wine: I Built My Thatched Cottage in the Human Realm.” Specifically, he references: “採菊東籬下，悠然見南山。山氣日夕佳，飛鳥相與還。此中有真意，欲辯已忘言。”
[19: LAN WANGJI]
“Lan Wangji pours himself another cup of tea, and thinks idly of some prophecy as he waits for it to cool—the skies are still the skies, the rain still the rain.”
Another prophet! This one is a 1992 number, 孟庭苇 Meng Tingwei’s 《冬季到台北来看雨》 “Coming to Taipei in the Winter to Watch the Rain.” This was, for some unknown reason, my karaoke favorite as a kid. I could not tell you why.
The lines Lan Wangji are thinking of are from the chorus: 天还是天，喔雨还是雨. For maximum foreshadowing pain, the next lines in the song are 我的伞下不再有你 beneath my umbrella, I will never have you again.
“I suppose it is my turn to introduce myself—I am Wei Ying, Wei Wuxian, a child with no envies, a collector of ghosts—and I am most delighted to make your acquaintance, Lan er-gongzi.”
It’s Wei Wuxian’s turn to make puns with his name! 无羡 wuxian, as most people know, means “without envies,” but “a collector of ghosts” is a very liberal dissection of the radicals of 魏 Wei into 千 qian / thousand and 鬼 gui / ghost. I'd say a thousand ghosts counts as a respectable collection.
“My husband is a good man, though distant; he comes from a family wealthy enough to keep us in comfort despite his lack of a civil position, and—bless his heart—still a few more decades to go until he reaches the status of gongshi. Most days, he leaves the manor after breakfast to sit at the crossroads where he offers tea to any travelers who will tell him a story of the strange—ghosts and spirits and the like.”
Wei Wuxian’s husband is a loose interpretation of 蒲松龄 Pu Songling, a Qing Dynasty writer most well-known for authoring the 《聊斋志异》 Liaozhai Zhiyi / Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. He didn’t receive the 贡士 gongshi degree until he was 71, and in the meantime, amused himself by collecting stories of the strange from travelers at a crossroads in exchange for a cup of tea.
I suppose I ought to address this whole “husband” business—this is also something that comes straight out of Time War. Blue is severely injured while protecting Red, and placed in a quiet strand, beloved of the Garden. I remember the sharp jolt of surprise I felt when she casually mentioned her husband to Red—they were, at this point, absolutely ride-or-die for each other—but as she went on to describe her days in the tranquility of her convalescence, it becomes readily apparent that, regardless of who Blue may be married to in the moment, she has room in her heart only for Red.
Likewise, I love wangxian—I love their devotion to each other, the way they fit each other’s jagged edges, the way they know each other so damn well—and I can’t imagine anything as small as one of Wei Wuxian’s marriages in an embedded life getting between them. Especially in the worldbuilding of this fic, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are living entire lives apart from each other, going years, decades, lifetimes between each letter, and the rarity of their connection is part of what makes their letters to each other feel that much more precious.
I am aware that including this detail may bring me flak from readers, but Time War stood by this choice, and so shall I.
[20: WEI WUXIAN]
“Years later, on the night of the third day in the ninth lunar month, the seeker stands on the edge of the stream, watching a path of wounded sun unfold across the water, turning half of the stream emerald green, the other half a glowing red. He watches the colors intensify, then fade as the sky dims. He does not wait for the bow-curve of the moon’s rising.”
The language in this passage borrows heavily from Tang Dynasty poet 白居易 Bai Juyi’s 《暮江吟》 “Evening River Song:”
一道残阳铺水中，/ A path of wounded sun, unfolding across the water,
半江瑟瑟半江红。/ Half the river emerald green, half the river glowing red.
可怜九月初三夜，/ Alas, for the night on the third day in the ninth month.
露似真珠月似弓。/Dew like pearls, moon like bow.
Not for any particular reason, beyond the fact that it is a whole Mood and was on my mind.
“I wanted to send you a sky lantern with the rest of them—I had grand visions for how it would look, like a flock of stars coming to rest around you—but Yunmeng Jiang’s defenses around your safe haven are quite formidable, and I had to discard that idea in order to confront the more pressing issue of how to get correspondence through to you at all.”
In the writing of this fic, I did in fact write a version of this—Lan Wangji was to be smuggling weapons down the southern coast when a sky-full of floating lanterns sent by Wei Wuxian came down to rest on the dark waters around him—but I couldn’t make it work for pacing/content reasons. I was mad about having to cut that, though, so I wrote it into a letter.
“A letter sewn into the lapel of a winter coat was far too clumsy and imprecise…you must not laugh at me, for scribing my letter onto a red leaf and setting it adrift on a high mountain stream like some court lady of the rear palace who still harbors romance in her heart.”
Both the “letter sewn into the lapel of a winter coat” and the red leaf are references to various ways ladies of the 后宫 hougong / lit. rear palace (i.e. the imperial harem) would sometimes smuggle out letters, poems, even love letters. The women often sewed winter coats for soldiers on the fronts, and could hide letters in the lining; other women wrote poems onto red maple leaves, and sent them floating along the artificial streams in the gardens until they escaped the walls of the imperial palace. I’m also fairly confident most of these stories are more fiction than reality, because if not, I’m going to have questions about waterproof ink.
“I thought to ask the south-flying swan geese to bring my words, but I seem to lack a way with the birds.”
STEALTH PROPHET! This line references 《红颜旧》 Hongyanjiu / “The Aging of a Beauty,” which some of you might recognize from the show that still owns my heart, five years later—《琅琊榜》Langyabang / Nirvana in Fire. The specific line comes from the chorus: 托鸿雁南去，不知此心何寄 / I ask the south-flying swan geese [to bear a letter], but do not know how to send this heart.
[21: LAN WANGJI]
“In seventeenth century Hebei, Lan Wangji opens the gates of Shanhai Pass and lets the Manchu Qing forces pour into the central provinces. Later generations will fabricate a love story of destructive proportions between a general and a courtesan, recite tales of the sky-breaking rage that brings the Ming Dynasty to an ignominious end until it becomes wild history, myth, idiom.”
Here is another reference to a woman of dynasty-toppling beauty, though this version of the fall of the Ming Dynasty is fictionalized and dramatized. 陈圆圆 Chen Yuanyuan is sometimes painted as the reason 吴三桂 Wu Sangui, the Ming general, surrendered the Shanhai Pass to the invading Manchu forces.
The “sky-breaking rage” here is a literal translation of 怒气冲天 nuqi chongtian / towering rage, and perhaps a nod to Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series. 怒气冲天 nuqi chongtian is in turn a roundabout reference to the phrase 英雄一怒为红颜 yingxiong yinu wei hongyan / heroes rage for their lovers, which in turn is a reference to—you guessed it—Chen Yuanyuan and Wu Sangui.
“In third century Shaanxi, Lan Wangji hacks his way through forested mountains, cutting open a new path for Liu Bang’s troops to come tearing out of the mountains after a short-lived exile.”
A reference to 楚汉相争 the Chu-Han contention, in which 刘邦 Liu Bang retreated into the mountains, promising his erstwhile ally 项羽 Xiang Yu that he definitely wouldn’t emerge and certainly had no designs on the throne. To demonstrate his sincerity, he destroyed the roads into the mountains, indicating that he would not come down.
Since those of us in the future know that Liu Bang eventually goes on to found the Han Dynasty, he absolutely did not stay in those mountains; instead, he cut new paths on a different slope, and came screaming back into the central plains.
“For three days and nights, Lan Wangji tracks the shadow across a stark, desolately beautiful no-man’s land. This high up, the conditions are too harsh, the land too unforgiving for human settlement. He passes herds of shaggy, large-eyed yaks and flighty, long-horned antelope. Thick-furred Himalayan wolves pad beside him, recognizing a fellow hunter in the highlands.”
In high school, I watched a film called 可可西里 Kekexili / Kekexili: Mountain Patrol about Tibetan antelope, the poachers who hunt them, and the people who protect them. That film has never quite left my mind. Famously, part of the Tibetan Plateau is called 无人区 wurenqu / no-man’s-land. It’s devastatingly beautiful and deadly—not due to any active dangers, but simply because the natural environment is so harsh.
“…sends him skidding downhill on a slope of black, bulletproof ice.”
The description “bulletproof ice” is stolen directly from Jon Krakaeur’s book Into Thin Air, which, fittingly, is about Mt. Everest, a Himalayan mountain.
“His momentum, arrested suddenly, dislocates his shoulder from its socket, and the pain of it punches the air out of Lan Wangji’s lungs.”
Why yes, this is karma for the fact that Lan Wangji’s little stunt with Wei Wuxian on the edge of a cliff in CQL would have certainly dislocated at least one of their arms, if not both.
“I have spent more than a few research trips sampling the different wines of the nine provinces, which was what passed for an extracurricular hobby before I began writing you.”
The “nine provinces” is a literal translation of the binome 九州 jiuzhou / an archaic way of referring to the territories of dynastic China.
”I hope you’re somewhere comfortable, Lan Zhan, with the open sky above you and the Silver River scattered across the heavens.”
The Milky Way in Chinese is called 银河 yinhe, literally “Silver River.”
“I move through the motions of this mortal life, let the time-light slip by like flowing water…”
"Time-light” is a literal translation of 时光 shiguang, and time is often described in Chinese as liquid, flowing away.
“…imagine us exploring the caverns beneath the earth, perhaps hearing those Zhuangzian pipes creak and bellow.”
The “pipes of earth” is a 赋 fu rhapsody embedded in chapter two of the Zhuangzi, and like all fu, it is… a lot.
“With me now, Lan Zhan—we’ll raise our cups to the sky. ‘All I wish for now is long and full lives, a thousand miles apart, gazing together at the moon.’”
Wei Wuxian, here, is quoting one of the most iconic Song Dynasty 词 ci poets, 苏轼 Su Shi, in one of his most famous poems, 《水调歌头·明月几时有》 “When did the bright moon first rise?” The poem is practically a microcosm of 80% of the Chinese literary tradition, as it features:
- the moon
- insomnia
- homesickness
- the eternal question: “what night is it tonight?”
- missing loved ones
- political allegory
- vague gestures at history
- alcohol
[22: WEI WUXIAN]
“He tilts the antenna of a radar transmission system a few degrees northward, so that an outgoing message strikes the sun. Doing so magnifies humanity’s call for extraterrestrial life into an unexplored galaxy, precipitates a cascade of events that will define the twenty-second century.”
This is a reference to the plot of《三体》 San Ti / The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, aka the Chinese science-fiction novel everyone was going on about (including President Obama) a few years ago.
“…it ranks up there right along with vivisection, scorpion-snake venom, and concerts for inferior musicians.”
“Scorpion-snake venom” is a throwaway reference to the 半月国 Banyue Kingdom arc of《天官赐福》 Tian Guan Ci Fu / Heavenly Official’s Blessing, one of MXTX’s other novels.
"Is it any wonder, then, that our words for love and loss are shaped the same way in our mouths?"
This is a bit of wordplay in Chinese—specifically calling out the fact that 爱 ai4 / love and 哀 ai1 / grief, sorrow are the same sound, different tone. Conveniently, "love" and "loss" also share similar sounds in English, so this pun works almost bilingually!
[23: LAN WANGJI]
“So the composite is letting his uncle take the lead in speaking to Lan Wangji today.”
Ah, a worldbuilding note.
Because this is fanfiction, and because I could, I borrowed the concept of composites from Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit (add this to the list of all the other things I’ve borrowed from YHL this year in various fic). It’s what it sounds like—the Grandmaster is a composited hivemind of multiple Lan elders, including Lan Qiren. The idea is two heads (or more) are better than one. The later reference to “voidmoths” in another segment is also a nod to Ninefox Gambit. Will I ever, ever get over Cheris and Jedao? All divinatory yarrow sticks point to no.
“I hardly know what to write, so I steal from the poets and send you a biyi bird in flight. If you will be patient—if you will wait for me—I’ll give you intertwined branches as well, travel the cosmos planting trees in pairs for the sole purpose of weaving their limbs together to let you know, everywhere you go, how much you are loved.”
The biyi bird and the interwoven trees are both symbols of eternal love in the Chinese tradition, and both feature in the last lines of Bai Juyi’s masterpiece,《长恨歌》 Changhenge / “Song of Everlasting Regret.” The poem is over eight hundred characters long, and both dramatizes and romanticizes the love between 唐玄宗 Emperor Xuanzong of Tang and his concubine, 杨玉环 Yang Yuhuan.
The lines in question:
在天愿作比翼鸟，/ in the heavens, let us be biyi birds
在地愿为连理枝。/ on earth, let us be interwoven trees
天长地久有时尽，/ heaven is long-lasting, earth long-enduring, but eventually, they will end
此恨绵绵无绝期。/ only this regret, unending, unbroken, will have no day of end.
A 比翼 biyi bird is a mythical bird that actually consists of two half-birds; only when they are paired together can they fly.
“At this rate, you’ll make a poet of me, or a prophet.”
What Wei Wuxian is saying here is that he’s so in love with Lan Wangji that he would write cheesy Mandopop songs.
[24: WEI WUXIAN]
“While he waits for the unlucky souls to arrive, he hums to himself amiably, prophetically—the ground walks beneath my feet, the water by my side flows on.”
Another prophet sighting! This time, it’s Cui Jian’s 《一无所有》 Yi Wu Suo You / “Nothing to My Name.” It is considered by some to be China’s first rock song, and it has the guitar riffs to show for it. Somewhere between all the 你何时跟我走 / when will you come with me’s, there are the lines 脚下的地在走，身边的水在流, which Wei Wuxian hums to himself here.
“…a plain forest rabbit pelts, full-speed, from the underbrush and crashes headfirst against Wei Wuxian’s stump.
He stares at it, nonplussed. He’s fairly confident that he’s not in a world where all idioms are literal—spears and shields clashing in contradiction, bamboo shoots growing skyscraper-high in the springtime—but still.”
Chinese idioms and proverbs are often so weird, so concrete, and so specific that the idea of a world where all of them are literal gave me a bit of a headache. There are three referenced in this section: 守株待兔 shouzhu daitu / lit. “to guard a stump and wait for a rabbit” (i.e. to wait idly for a windfall), 自相矛盾 zixiang maodun / lit. “to pit spear and shield against each other” (there’s a longer story to this, but it boils down to “self-contradictory”), and 雨后春笋 yuhou chunsun / lit. “after rain, bamboo shoots” (often used to describe the rapid growth of something).
[26: WEI WUXIAN]
“Wei Wuxian is stacking scrolls in the western wing of the Han archives when his death catches up to him.”
Wei Wuxian is participating in the great reorganization of texts during the Han dynasty. After the chaos of, well, the entire Qin Dynasty, 刘向 Liu Xiang was tasked by 汉成帝 Emperor Cheng of Han to reorganize the imperial archives—a truly massive bibliographic undertaking. A great deal of texts we consider ancient Chinese classics (including but not limited to texts like the 《孟子》 Mengzi, the 《荀子》 Xunzi, the 《庄子》 Zhuangzi, and the 《楚辞》 Chuci, just to name just a few) were compiled and formulated into the versions that have been transmitted down to us today. As a result, some Sinologists have made the argument that Liu Xiang could be considered the single most important figure in the Chinese literary tradition—not because of anything he wrote, but because of everything he edited.
“…he nearly drops the Kongzishilun before he notices what had caused his reaction.”
Wei Wuxian nearly drops the 《孔子诗论》Kongzi shilun / “Kongzi Discusses the Odes,” which is a Warring States manuscript currently in the collection of the Shanghai Museum. It’s particularly hot stuff because its text is seen in no other collected sayings of Kongzi (and trust me, there are many). The manuscript is also an interesting case study in the problem of the antiquities black market, but that is fascinating dilemma in academia/archaeology for another day.
“One day, Liu Xiang discovers that Wei Wuxian can not only decipher the bronzeware script on the library’s collection of bianzhong, but also play the vast instrument, and transfers him immediately to the music bureau, where Wei Wuxian transcribes a ballad about a one-eyed warrior maiden for a harmony of flute and guqin.”
The bianzhong is a big-ass instrument consisting of a set of bronze bells. I’m not going to get into archaeological musicology right now (two-toned bells! The crispness of chimes as metaphor for virtue! Hitting things to make pretty sounds!), but if you have time, you should look up the bells of the Marquis of Yi. They are over two thousand years old, and still perfectly playable.
“If there were ever a song to command all under Heaven, Wei Wuxian thinks, it might sound something like this.”
A sneaky nod to one of reported reasons for CQL being called, well, 陈情令 Chen Qing Ling—one of the producers, 杨夏 Yang Xia, supposedly said the title comes from the sentence 陈情一曲令天下 Chenqing yiqu ling tianxia / A song from Chenqing can command all under heaven.
“…It was a moment’s work to slip into the Xia palace, to steal a scroll, to lace an astrologer’s drink with powder and make him sleep through the sunlight hours…a total solar eclipse, the first in written history, that would plunge the capital into chaos as ritual officers scrambled about and soldiers banged spear into shield and the emperor offered increasingly ludicrous sacrifices and bribes to chase the tiangou away from the sun, all while the court astrologer slumbered, derelict in his duties.”
Any event attributed to the mythic Xia Dynasty should be taken with an entire saltshaker’s worth of salt, but I found this story so ridiculous and delightful that I wrote it into this fic: in 1948 B.C.E., a solar eclipse took the Xia court by surprise, throwing everything into chaos. The prevailing belief was that a giant beast, the 天狗 tiangou / lit. “heavenly dog,” had eaten the sun, and it was only after the eclipse had ended that the imperial ministers found the court astronomer/astrologer (the distinction in ancient China is perhaps part of a longer conversation about cosmology) passed out in his rooms, having slept through the entire affair. He really should’ve 1) predicted this event and 2) warned people about it, but this is prehistory, and he was drunk, and so he was executed the next day.
[28-END: LAN WANGJI]
“The sands sob dimly in the wind . The words of the prophets, mocking him. They long ago predicted our parting.”
Our last prophet sighting! This one is 黄莹莹 Huang Yingying / Tracy Huang’s 1990 song《哭砂》Kusha / “Crying Sand” about a woman crying out for her sailor-lover, which has powerful, uh, vibes:
Lyrics + Unofficial Translation:
你是我最苦涩的等待 / You are my bitterest waiting
让我欢喜又害怕未来 / making me both delight and fear the future
你最爱说你是一颗尘埃 / You loved saying that you were a speck of dust
偶而会恶作剧地飘进我眼里 / that would mischievously drift into my eye
宁愿我哭泣不让我爱你 / You would rather I cry instead of loving you
你就真的像尘埃消失在风里 / Will you truly dissolve like dust in the wind?
你是我最痛苦的抉择 / You are the most painful of my choices
为何你从不放弃漂泊 / Why can’t you give up drifting?
海对你是那么难分难舍 / Is the ocean for you that difficult to part from?
你总是带回满口袋的砂给我 / You always bring back pockets of sand to gift to me
难得来看我却又离开我 / You seldom come to see me; and yet, you leave me
让那手中泻落的砂像泪水流 / let the sand in hand fall away, like flowing tears
风吹来的砂落在悲伤的眼里 / The sand, blown by the wind, lands in sorrowful eyes
谁都看出我在等你 / anyone can see that I am waiting for you
风吹来的砂堆积在心里 / The sand, blown by the wind, piles inside the heart
是谁也擦不去的痕迹 / becoming scars that no one can erase
风吹来的砂穿过所有的记忆 / The sand, blown by the wind, threads through every memory
谁都知道我在想你 / anyone can see that I am thinking of you
风吹来的砂冥冥在哭泣 / The sand, blown by the wind, sob dimly
难道早就预言了分离 / could it be that they long ago predicted our parting?
Lan Wangji, here, is thinking of the last two lines of the chorus.
“These terms, the black smoke says, are accepted.”
Yes, this is a Stormlight Archive reference, and no, I’m not sorry.
“It was said that playing Cleansing for seven-times-seven, forty-nine days could sanctify even the most corrupted souls, render them pure and blank and malleable as the heart of an infant.”
The “seven-times-seven, forty-nine days” is a reference to, well, the tendency of the Chinese literary tradition to spell out the math by writing out 七七四十九天. Forty-nine days is also a significant number in Buddhism, said by some to be the number of days a soul wanders after death.
“The heart of an infant,” is a direct translation of 赤子之心 chizi zhi xin, which is used to describe a person’s innocence or moral goodness/sincerity. It is, uh, actually a profoundly positive compliment that I have mildly corrupted here in the text.
[ROADS NOT TAKEN]
I did most of my drafting for this fic by hand, and so my notebooks are filled with fragments and phrases that I meant to work in at some point and, well, never did. There is an entire page of alternate prophets and the song lyrics I could have quoted (I still sigh over not being able to work in 郑智化 Zheng Zhihua’s《水手》 Shuishou / “The Sailor,” because holy shit, those lyrics have zero chill); there is a separate doc of deleted scenes, back-up letters, historical figures to cameo, philosophical/cosmological principles to allude to, little reminders to make Gusu Lan even more cyberpunk, c’mon, you could have forehead ribbons made of circuitry or laser light or moving tattoos!
(Alas, for roads not taken)
My greatest regret, though, is probably the deleted scene of Lan Wangji meeting Qing Dynasty poet 纳兰性德 Nalan Xingde after Wei Wuxian’s death. Lan Wangji runs into Nalan Xingde as the poet visits the grave of his wife, and the two of them recite lines of poetry at each other (c’mon, you gotta) before having a conversation about grief. Here’s a bit of it:
“Lan Wangji sits back on his heels, closes his eyes as the truth washes over him again. Wei Wuxian was dead, and history was stuffed full with those who mourned for their entire lives. At least they had a tomb they could visit, Lan Wangji thinks bitterly—a place to put their hearts, to tend with care, to water the soil with the ashes of paper money and the salt of excess tears and the tenderness that no longer had a place to go. This, Lan Wangji understands now, is why humankind never stopped digging graves.
‘When will this grief end,’ Lan Wangji whispers, fingers curling loosely through the dirt.
‘Water drips on empty steps,’ says a voice behind him. ‘It is cold, and the rain has stopped.’ A groundling approaches—a young man, oil-cloth coat pulled over his shoulders, rainwater dripping from his hat. ‘Now is the weather for burying flowers.’”
The poem the two of them quote back and forth is Nalan Xingde’s 《金缕曲·亡妇忌日有感》 “Feelings on My Wife’s Remembrance Day,” which is one of the most devastating 悼亡 daowang / mourning poems I’ve ever read, and as such, has some powerful Lan Wangji vibes.
[LOOSE ENDS, or, LET’S TALK ABOUT LAN XICHEN]
First of all, to everyone who thought for a hot second that I’d killed Lan Xichen, I’m very sorry. He is, in fact, my favorite character, and I feel very strongly that he deserves the entire world (I’m working on it, I swear). At no point does Lan Wangji deliberately kill Lan Xichen in this fic—their fight was very much a staged fight in the vein of Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian’s in canon, and serves to provide Lan Xichen with an alibi for when Gusu shows up to investigate what the hell is going on with Lan Wangji.
My beta brought up this concern with me (they were right, as they always are), and I worked with the text again to try and make it clearer—Lan Xichen repeatedly reassures Lan Wangji that he’ll be fine, although since we’re anchored in Lan Wangji’s POV (not the most reliable, I gotta say), the focus is placed on his confusion and concern. There is a blink-and-you’ll miss it comment about a wound being deadly for a “groundling” (i.e. regular mortal folks bound by linear time), which thereby implies it would not be deadly for non-groundlings (i.e. time agents and retired time agents, like Lan Xichen himself). At the same time, it’s all very ambiguous and confusing because we’ve established that embedments are dangerous and agents like Wei Wuxian and Lan Xichen can, in fact, be killed in action, BUT also physical death is less dangerous for them because time agents are regularly decanted into alternate bodies/forms, BUT it still is dangerous for them because... Ah! Plot holes, everywhere, and I can only blame some of them on OG Time War canon, which is similarly vague about worldbuilding but better at diverting your attention about it.
Basically, the worldbuilding of this fic is 1) bonkers, 2) exceedingly abstruse, and 3) …probably full of holes, since I stretched Time War canon to fit the additional subplots and never bothered to explain the relationship of like, magical cultivation to literal time travel. That being said, I consider This is How You Lose the Time War to be a science fantasy text rather than hard SF, and it's also a novella that considers worldbuilding secondary to its conceit of DRAMA and ROMANCE and TIME-TRAVEL and ENEMIES TO LOVERS and SO MANY GOSH-DANGED LETTERS, DEAR GOD, CAN YOU TWO GET IT TOGETHER ALREADY.
But I’m getting distracted. The point I’m trying to make here is that Lan Xichen will not die on my watch.
That being said, Lan Xichen is one of the most glaring loose ends in this fic (much like his story in CQL itself), along with… well, everyone else in the cast. Jiang Yanli is still out there, as well as Jiang Cheng; I believe in an eventual Lan Qiren-Lan Wangji reconciliation, because I am a strong proponent of #JusticeForShufu. There are a lot more storylines and ongoing character conflicts and unresolved issues that get swept under the rug of the sweeping romance that is wangxian (again, much like CQL itself), but my blueprint runs out here. We don’t know what happens to Red and Blue after that last letter. Heck, we don’t even know if Red successfully breaks herself out of the Agency! We are left on this beautiful, hopeful note with such a tantalizing, optimistic future, and it works in the original novella.
The original novella, however, does not have Lan Xichen or Jiang Yanli-esque characters, but I found it impossible to write Lan Wangji without Lan Xichen, without the Twin Jades as twin forces of nature, temporal juggernauts, great and terrible and beautiful and inseparable until they are separated.
There’s a throwaway line, maybe a third of the way into the fic, where Lan Wangji notes that “he was never made to work alone,” and that encapsulates a great deal of how I conceptualized the Twin Jades’ dynamic in this particular iteration of their story. Lan Wangji loves Wei Wuxian, yes—this is a constant in every universe—but Lan Xichen is the solid ground Lan Wangji can brace against, can find his footing on. Lan Xichen is home, and crucially, Lan Wangji leaves that behind when he goes after Wei Wuxian. Home is an important and complex theme in this work, and one that remains open-ended by the end of the story.
It is, to me, absolutely critical that Lan Xichen be the one to tell Lan Wangji to go after Wei Wuxian. In OG Time War, there is no Lan Xichen figure—Red quite literally “kills time” in a furious, grief-stricken craze, and it isn’t until the happy collision of chance events (or perhaps, Blue’s Thanatos Gambit?) that the insane, impossible idea of saving Blue comes to her, whereupon she decides to burn all of her bridges to give that hope the slimmest of chances. But Time War’s Red doesn’t have anyone to fall back on, whereas Lan Wangji does.
Lan Wangji would have never dreamed of attempting to resurrect Wei Wuxian himself, because to do so, he would have to leave Lan Xichen behind. Lan Xichen, the warp to his weft. Lan Xichen, who Lan Wangji sacrificed everything for.
When we think of brotherly sacrifice in CQL, our minds immediately go to the Yunmeng Shuangjie, or to the Nie bros if we’ve seen 《乱魄》Fatal Journey. The willingness of older brothers to sacrifice their personhood and future; the lengths to which younger brothers will go to commemorate and avenge their older brothers’ memories. The Twin Jades, for all their personal tragedies, never face the same sorrows in the narrative as the Yunmeng Shuangjie or the Nie brothers, but I do not doubt for a second that should one of them die, the other would be similarly inconsolable, similarly shattered, and similarly vengeful as Jiang Cheng and Nie Huaisang.
Which is precisely why Lan Xichen, who knows what it’s like to love and lose someone, what it means to live on in the aftermath of everything, has to be the one to tell Lan Wangji to go after Wei Wuxian. Lan Wangji would never leave Lan Xichen behind, so Lan Xichen must initiate this himself, promising Lan Wangji that he’ll be okay, making sure Lan Wangji doesn’t have to live with the same regrets he does.
For many reasons on many levels, in both canon and in this fic, Lan Xichen makes wangxian possible.
But what happens to Lan Xichen after the end? Well, I suppose that depends on who you think wins the time war—is it wangxian, with their combined brilliance, against all odds? Is it Gusu Lan with their mathematical determinism, or Yunmeng Jiang with their protean adaptability? Or is the time war something more than a zero-sum game, one that cannot be simply resolved by “winning” or “losing?”
Who is Wei Wuxian, really, and what actually caused the Burial Mounds? What is Lan Wangji truly capable of, with his music unbound and his loyalties rewritten? What does Lan Qiren’s fury look like, and what does his forgiveness feel like? Where has Jiang Cheng been all this time? Who was Jiang Yanli, for Wei Wuxian to call her “the best of us?” And where does Lan Xichen fit in, among all of these loose ends?
Well. I consider “This is How You Lose the Time War, but make it wangxian” to be a completed project. I’ve gone as far as the original novella has given me guidelines for, but let’s just say that I’m not closing the door on finding out what happens next.