the tree of life | writer's commentary
It's been a week since the tree of life has been finished! On a whim, I wrote some authors' commentary of the story about where the inspiration of the story came from and some thought processes behind it. It contains initial ideas, a VERY bad summary of certain legends and myths that this story contains, and a bit about how my faith shaped the writing journey.
Thank you <3.
The idea of the story began because of the train tracks next to my grandmother's apartment building. I remember almost ten years ago taking a walk around the neighborhood and seeing a set of train tracks that ran right through the busiest, bustling parts of the city that sort of melted into a quiet, overgrown path lined with banana trees. The train tracks had been long abandoned, so people would walk along the tracks to get through town, as there were little short-cut entry points to quieter neighborhoods. If you looked down the set of tracks, you would see people milling about, carrying sun umbrellas or their shopping, or sitting on the edges of the tracks on their lunch break.
As soon as I saw the tracks, I knew I wanted to make a story about them. Growing up loving Spirited Away, I immediately latched onto the idea of a train that ran on a long-overgrown line that took people to another world filled with mythology and folk magic. The idea kept stewing in my mind, taking on different forms and different characters. Ideas came and went, as did characters, but the train tracks always remained.
Link Click has been such a blessing to me because it has, on at least two occasions, given me a place to write the stories that I've always wanted to write for years but never could dream of how. After watching The Boy and the Heron, and having an extremely tender spot for stories about grief, folk fantasy, and meeting the ones you love when they were children, I felt the itch to create. And I was about two months into my Link Click brainrot, so I wanted to insert Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang into every story I could think of. A story about grief was not a hard one to put them in.
Initially, I wanted the tree of life to be a complete AU. I wasn't going to include any of their abilities, let alone Cheng Xiaoshi's whole death node situation. Cheng Xiaoshi would have died for the first and only time. I wanted it to run a lot more parallel to The Boy and the Heron—upon his death, Cheng Xiaoshi's heart would have been donated to Li Tianxi, who had a difficult heart condition. Qiao Ling would have made an effort to try connecting to Li Tianxi whiel Lu Guang resented her for it. At one point, Lu Guang would have accused Qiao Ling of trying to get a replacement younger sibling, but he can't get his best friend back. Li Tianxi would have been distressed to hear that and ran away, and Lu Guang would feel guilty and follow, and that was how they went into the other world.
I scrapped that idea for several reasons, including that I do not feel confident enough to write the Li twins in such a substantial role, and also as much as I wanted it to be Lu Guang's journey, I couldn't reason a way why Li Tianchen and Qiao Ling wouldn't just run after them, and I did not think I had it in me to balance a narrative where THREE people were getting isekai'd.
So Lu Guang became the only one. There was a moment where I seriously asked myself what was the point of writing it as a Link Click fic and why not trying to turn it into an original fic. Then I was like screw it, let's just start writing—and canon trickled into the story naturally.
What convinced me to keep their abilities in the narrative was to use Lu Guang's now solitary ability as a way to frame the flashbacks—to give him specific photos to peek into specific memories of Cheng Xiaoshi while he was still alive and explain it as him grieving, regretting things, seeing the past with hindsight, with many unanswered questions. It mattered to me that Lu Guang would fixate on these memories and see all the ways he had failed at loving Cheng Xiaoshi in lots of detail, and then the narrative itself was sprinkled with very fleeting, passing mentions of how Lu Guang actually showed his love a great deal to Cheng Xiaoshi, but Lu Guang's grief and self-blame draw his attention away from them.
I wanted Lu Guang's story in the World to be somewhat episodic. I had some inspiration from The Green Knight—and frankly, just about any fairy tale/legend—where you meet one character, solve their problem, say goodbye, then journey to meet the next character, solve their problem, etc. I also wanted each episode per se to reflect one of The Four Great Folktales of China. It didn't have to be a direct parallel—I would prefer it not to be—but enough of a reference that those who did know the folktale could recognize the elements, while those who didn't would still enjoy the story and comprehend it. With that in mind, I built which characters Lu Guang and Cheng Xiaoshi meet around them. Liu Meng and Chen Xiao shared the Tale of the Butterfly Lovers. Li Tianxi's magpie bridge was to reflect The Weaver and the Cowherd. I had intentions to really flesh out Emma and her parents with The Tale of Lady Meng Jiang, but the narrative took the reins from me and I realised I would interrupt my own narrative flow if I went with my original idea, and decided to let go of that perfect parallel (And actually, Lady Meng Jiang was initially going to be Chen Bin's wife to score that parallel, but then the further along I wrote I realised Emma was a better fit). And then, way too subtle for me to expect anyone to notice, Cheng Xiaoshi feeding tangyuan to the carp that would become Cheung Fun would have been a nod to The Legend of White Snake.
A quick guide on some of the legends if you are unfamiliar with them:
The Butterfly Lovers - VERY famous, considered China's Romeo and Juliet so to speak albeit probably quite a bit older but idk who knows. A young woman from a rich family wants to go to school but her father won't allow her, I think because of the fact that she's a woman. So she disguises herself as a boy and goes to school and befriends a classmate, eventually falling in love with him. She is of course very coy and dropping hints that she's a woman and he's Not Getting It but he cares deeply about her. She offers that he come visit her, maybe to meet her 'sister'. Eventually he does find out she's a girl and they fall deeply in love, but she gets betrothed to someone that her father approves. The boy dies of heartbreak and the girl is so devastated that she jumps into his grave and their souls become two butterflies dancing in the wind together.
The Weaver and the Cowherd - The young goddess and daughter of the Jade Emperor goes down to Earth to bathe in the river, where a cowherd boy falls in love with her. He steals her clothes and is cheeky with her and then they fall in love and have children and live together on earth. However her parents are very upset that she married a mortal and using the Queen's comb created the Milky Way to separate them forever. But once a year, on Qixi Festival day, the magpies take pity on them and form a bridge across the stars so that he and the children can meet her halfway and reunite.
The Lady Meng Jiang - a young couple are separated when the husband is drafted to build the Great Wall for the Emperor. After some time, the wife sets out to go find him and travels all the way to the construction of the Great Wall. She asks around but cannot find him, and then is told that her husband had actually perished in the building process, as many people unfortunately had. She begins to cry so hard that her cries split the wall apart and revealed where his bones had been interred.
The Legend of the White Snake - A young boy, by circumstances, drops magical tangyuan from a bridge that a white snake consumes and gains immortality and powers. Because of that, the white snake feels devoted to the boy. Fast forward, the boy grows into a young man and the white snake transforms into a beautiful young woman. They meet and fall in love and run a medicine shop together until a Daoist monk manipulates the husband into revealing his wife's true form, which kills him. The wife, as well as her companion who is a human-ified Green Snake, set out together to bring him back to life.
Other elements of fantasy were sprinkled into the world to give it that feeling of Another, albeit maybe a sense of familiarity for readers more familiar with them. I remember watching a video on YouTube breaking down the folkloric elements and references in Spirited Away that was really intriguing to me because of the way they were simply present in the narrative without needing too much attention drawn to them to make them magical, and how I am someone who didn't know Japanese folklore and wouldn't have recognized them in the story but enjoyed the magic of them all the same, while someone who would have that background would have felt homey among them. I wanted my fic to have that quality to it, so that I could share Chinese folklore while not needing it to be like a class or dissertation on them.
A brief summary of the ones I remember: Cheng Xiaoshi's cave behind the waterfall as a nod to Sun Wukong's monkey hideout in The Journey to the West, Lu Guang's tiger shoes coming from a giant goldfish as a nod to the Tale of Ye Xian (colloquially known as Chinese's Cinderella story, the goldfish is the godmother), carps that can transcend into dragons. Of course, the Chinese lions were a non-negotiable for me to add to the world, and the jade rabbits being literally made of jade were an indulgence. I wanted to include a fenghuang somewhere in the story, but no opportunity ever came up. Red-crowned cranes have associations with heaven and being the chaperones for souls as they depart, so NATURALLY they gotta show up. The jade suit is like, the only element that actually gets explained in-universe. Lu Guang comparing Cheng Xiaoshi to Nezha (Nezha is born from a lotus flower). The three-legged crow representing the sun in China's sun mythology.
The titular tree of life full of peaches is very dear to me. Peaches of immortality are a very quintessential element of Chinese mythology. And with a story about grief and death and beyond, it would feel like a disservice to not include them. It felt needed, and it also gave Lu Guang more of a mission while he was in this world rather than to simply spend as much time as he could with baby Cheng Xiaoshi. I also drew inspiration for the peaches from my faith in Christ, and what a tree of life is according to the Book of Revelations, when it describes the new heaven and earth after Jesus' return where there is no more death or tears or suffering—"bearing twelve of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations." I wanted to write this concept of the fruit from this tree as both a fruit that grants immortal life, in a sense, as well as healing and restoration and hope—true life. Just immortality is a curse if we must remain in a world full of pain and death and injustice. The more I wrote about Cheng Xiaoshi's death and thought of all the loved ones' deaths we have and will have to face in real life, the more I just kept longing for heaven. For it to not be a goodbye, but a see you later. I'm sure many of us do, regardless of how differently we may believe. So I wrote Lu Guang and Cheng Xiaoshi's conversation on the bridge, which was in some ways Cheng Xiaoshi saying the words I know I'll need to hear, when the time comes. A lot of this story in general was writing the words I have needed to hear, or know that I will one day, or both. I hope it could be cathartic or comforting for you as it was for me.
And Cheung Fun! I love river noodle dragons so so much and so it was really joyful for me to get to write one, finally. I admit that when I first started writing Cheung Fun, I wasn't really sure what he would do in the narrative other than be a cool river noodle dragon, until he started talking to Lu Guang by the river. I wrote that scene and suddenly Cheung Fun began to speak and explain the nature of the world, and it clicked—his purpose, this magical world's purpose, this story's. And then everything else started to make sense. It was honestly almost by stumbling that he become extremely humble as well as glorious. He's a majestic and powerful dragon…and he used to be a carp. He's patient and infinitely wise…and his name literally means Rice Noodle Roll. He is a terrifying king in the river …and a gardener. I didn't know that he would be all of this when I began to write. I just wanted a dragon in the story. But the more I wrote a story where Lu Guang has to live through my greatest fear, I ultimately wrote Cheung Fun with the qualities of a companion I would want with me when I'm grieving. And thus, the Aslan Jesus vibes.
Writing this story really was like going on a journey. And life threw some personal challenges in the midst of it, which made moments in the story become they way that they are because they were lines I sort of hobbled out of a battlefield leaning on them like a crutch to keep me going, that kept me upright. Much of it, especially conversations between Lu Guang and Cheung Fun, were just me in a sense praying out loud like "Jesus, life is HARD!! Death SUCKS!! Why do we have to do this?" and then being gently consoled and called out and sat with through it all. I've mentioned before, this fic took a longer time to write than I expected, almost a year. And yet, if I had finished writing it any sooner, I'm certain that it would not have become the way that it was because there were things I had not yet learned enough to say it myself.
Thank you for being curious enough to read my notes. It means a lot that you would want to, and I also totally understand if people choose not to because they want to keep the story in their heart as they receive it. This commentary got a lot more personal than my usual ones, as I'm very much not a scholar enough to go into details about folk stories and mythology. But yeah, it was quite the journey to write this, and it makes me feel happy to be able to share it, even if it's just to write it all out and articulate it to myself. Thanks for loving the story <3, and being gracious to me.
