Rarepair Exchange Director’s Commentary
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
– I looked up so many references to noodle cooking for this one. I read about Changsha-style rice noodles and I rewatched Tampopo and I looked up recipes, and then I used almost none of it in the actual fic. So it goes.
What we see in the drama looks like a fairly plain bowl of flat noodles, without extra vegetables but once with some crab meat. Er Yuehong calls them yangchun (spring) noodles. (Which… should have had skinnier noodles but we’ll let that go. Personal preferences, etc.)
Yang Chun Mian/阳春面, literally meaning “Spring Noodles”, is also known as Guang Mian/光面 or Qing Tang Mian/清汤面 in Chinese. It’s one of the most humble dishes popular in the Jiangnan region … Yang Chun Mian epitomizes simplicity, allowing each element of the dish to shine through with its clean, natural flavors. A simple bowlful lets you enjoy the subtle aroma of wheat, the umami from the stock and soy sauce, the mild pungency of scallions, and the rich fragrance of sesame oil (or traditionally, lard).
(https://redhousespice.com/yang-chun-mian/)
As signature dishes go it suits Yatou, both in the lower class cuisine and the simplicity that lets each ingredient sing.
There would have been a lot of careful cooking that went into that clear broth. Simmer out bone marrow, let water from rehydrated mushrooms in there for flavour, don’t get it too hot or it will cloud, etc. And I wanted to show Yatou exercising an actual skill instead of (admittedly v. sweetly) ladling water over the pretty flowers. I still love the paragraph of her skilful cleaver work.
– Also, this is one of those times where I learn something about the characters as I write the story. In this case: Why does Er Yuehong love Yatou so much? Well, apart from just that she’s a very sweet young lady… maybe she lets him be simple, instead of the young master of the Hong family, the star performer of the troupe, the expert grave robber, all of those roles played perfectly by necessity. Maybe she lets him be a simple man.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
– This is sort of a sequel to “Broth” but can be read separately. I wanted to explore Fo-ye’s relationship with this new marriage that appeared on his horizon. I, ah, didn’t expect him to be quite so sad at the end but so it goes. The scene that I built this around was both Fo-ye and Yatou sitting in the back of the theatre with her sharing stories about Er-ye as a boy. I just liked the different shades of intimacy these two people had with Er-ye.
I did a fair chunk of reading for this one, but unlike “Broth” I could put a lot of it on the page. \o/
– Also interesting to explore Er-ye’s lifelong career specialising in female roles – and then, when he walks around at home he has those intricate, delicate clothes, but also he walks and sits and stands in the most self-conscious manspreading in the show. A bit of an onion, that man.
– So it turns out there were female performers sneaking onto the stage as early as the late Qing Dynasty despite an official ban, which was revoked around 1912. Old Master Hong comes across as a bit of a dick in the short stories and the Qing Shan Haitang movie, so it pleased me to make him a hardline stickler and his son pointedly training female apprentices both to please Yatou and as a grand up-yours to his dad. That said, Hong Xiu and Hong Dou do belong in drama canon – from the side movie Flowers Bloom in February, – and they have a lovely time with the acrobatics and the fighting and the looking elegant at all times, just like their teacher. Good for them!
The roles Er-ye demonstrates on stage were the qingyi (elegant young lady), huadan (beguiling young lady), xiaosheng (young man, complete with scripted puberty-driven voice-breaking), and wudan (martial lady). I had to break the pattern of girl roles because of the voice-breaking. I had to.
– (It’s not just that Yatou comes from a noodle shop that’s making people unwilling to discuss the story. To round up the money to redeem her in a hurry, Er-ye broke a grave robber taboo and raided a grave that was only three months old. Nor does Fo-ye exactly know that, in the drama, until Qi Tiezui explains that to him. As far as fic-worldbuilding goes, in this continuity no-one really wanted to be the one who told Fo-ye his besty had made such a transgression and there was a lot of hemming and hawing until it became old news.)
– Fo-ye wondering if Yatou’s name was really ‘Qionghua’ was… Well. I’d put in a bit about how he couldn’t work out where she came from, because she’s so lower-class and non-crimey that she doesn’t even figure in his mental map of the city and people are a bit too scandalised to discuss her origins just now. I thought I might get in a droll reference to one of those stories about beautiful women appearing out of bookmarks and marrying poor scholars but couldn’t remember the details. So I opened up a copy of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio and the very first page I turned to was about a man who makes friends with the courtesan Qionghua (or ‘Coral’ in the translation I have) and eventually they get married and live happily as platonic, loving companions for decades raising his kid from his first, disastrous marriage, and then at the end she’s revealed to be a heavenly maiden come to earth… and it seemed to fit that air Er-ye and Yatou both have, of being a little more, I dunno, innocent? less trammeled in mortal dust? than their companions, so I stuck with that.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
– You know how sometimes there’s a ship you don’t have any particular feelings about, and then maybe one or two fics drop and suddenly you’re all Ohhhhh? Thank you mumblemutter and lunarriviera – your work is inspiring. Thank you Mo_on_raccoon for requesting this pairing!
– Titles came a bit hard for this one – the working name was “Travails of a Thing-less Man” which seemed a little inelegant, but I ended up with “Circumlocutions” because that conversation at the dinner table does involve a lot of talking around the things they’re talking about, and because Wu Xie does a lot of circling around the main topic throughout the fic. (But he’s enjoying himself.)
– Speaking of the dinner table, it’s not a huge deal, but one of the Rain Village stories mentions that Wu Xie used to eat prawns, rice, and white vinegar a lot when he was a small child, when it was just him and his dad. I wanted a homey feel to the scene.
– It didn’t quite make it to the finished fic – killed the flow – but there was originally a section about Wu Xie deliberately encouraging Xiao-Bai and Xiaoge to spend time together, for the entirely pragmatic reason that he wanted somebody to care as much about Xiaoge as he and Pangzi did – someone who had a few decades of extra life in their body. (Caring for Zhang Qiling takes a dynasty.)
– While the focus of this was Xiao-Bai getting to climb that old man, and being petted and pleased and admired while she did so, fics don’t happen in a vacuum either. This isn’t a sequel to “And set them as a banner” any more than it’s a sequel to “Getting It Sorted”, or “Peanuts” for that matter – they are all of them standalone stories. But they’re not unrelated either, exploring approaches to physical and emotional intimacy.
Eh. The very first version of Wu Xie I saw was in Reboot, and in that he backpedals pretty fast from romantic advances by people he’s clearly fond of. There’s certainly room for calling that bad timing or that he’s saving it for Xiaoge. But there’s also room for calling that a person who’s good at a lot of different kinds of intimacy but sex? romance stuff? Would rather not. Contrast that with Xiaoge, who adores Wu Xie but also spends a lot of his time watching from a distance and hugs rarely… that made for an interesting dynamic. For the purposes of this fic, once Xiaoge decides that sex might be a fun thing to do he has very few hang-ups about it. It’s fun, if he’s not doing it there are other fun things to do, but also… being able to choose something just because it’s fun is also a huge deal for him and he’s enjoying that freedom. Still, in this fic at least, falling properly asleep with a warm body nearby is something that he wants to do but struggles with.
(I’m not sure if Xiao-Bai has any particular issues. But she’s getting rawed by the Zhang Patriarch while her crush of several years looks on in wonderment so I think whatever her needs might be they are being fulfilled adequately, yeah?)
– I was trying pretty hard to give all members of the threesome equal weight despite the asymmetry of who’s doing what and of how long various pairs have known each other, and there was a deliberate choice to put in echoes between characters. Wu Xie and Xiao-Bai both blush right down to the neckline and call Xiaoge bossy; Wu Xie admires both Xiaoge and Xiao-Bai’s exquisitely toned musculature; Xiaoge and Wu Xie both touch Xiao-Bai with the backs of their curled up fingers. Everybody gets a spot where they admire the other two, sort of thing.
Anyway anyway, I love stories where people decide how they’re going to be together in their own way, a way that works for them. So this was fun to work on, and I hope folk enjoy the extra I snuck in once reveals were over.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
– So the story I recorded here is one of the ones that turned me onto the Xiao-Bai/Wu Xie/Zhang Qiling ship (thank you, thank you). It’s both extremely steamy and very, very sweet and I loved all the scene details (dark aroma baijiu, Xiao-Bai’s little dangly earrings, the tapping language at the end. You know.)
– The fic does not at any point mention that it’s raining outside, but I was podding this as a gift and the recipient mentioned they liked rain sounds, so I shamelessly tucked in a little soundscape of a sudden rain shower as Pangzi’s car drives off. And there’s something a little lovely about people dashing through unexpected weather together. (Also, rain does come up figuratively a couple of times. I quoted them on the cover!) Anyway anyway, I don’t normally mess with the text of a fic so much, and I hope lunarriviera will forgive me. But I certainly had fun recording it!
