Water Mirrored Moon - 水鏡月

Part I - Born of the Water Moon: 3. Letters Learned in the Mountain

A few months after her rescue from the river, Cui Xi sat outside with her head bent over a book, propping a cheek on one of her hands. Pulling her cloak tightly against the cold, she frowned as she read the words again:

All alone in a foreign land

I am twice as homesick on this day...*

Feeling restless, she shifted her grip on the brush and then put it back down on the holder before she could drip ink on the roll of scraped sticks. Sighing, she mused that the poem that she was so diligently copying was just so wrong... She was sure that Yang Ming Xi had given her a Tang dynasty piece from her own time, but everything she was learning about Tiansheng confirmed that this was not the China of the Tang dynasty or even the Song...not by a long shot. She wasn't even sure if it was the same universe.

However, the feeling of yearning for home, of being out of place as expressed by the poem, were tremendously apt to her situation.

Oh my God...what I would do for coffee...

She sighed again, rubbing her temple, wondering what to do.

Cui Xi had been born as Casey Leung in the modern era on the North American continent. She had rejected the mother tongue of her parents and her first words were actually in English. In fact, she had rejected everything about herself until she reached the age of thirty-six and realized that the culture that she had resented for so long had wonderful qualities that only she could reclaim.

And so, her long journey of rediscovery had started.

Her parents had been born in Hong Kong, so she was already at a disadvantage as she could only start with her almost non-existent Cantonese. China was a crazy foreign place for a banana. Without the tour guide she would have never been able to travel the country on her own. It was clear when people looked at her that she was a foreigner from North America.

However, she was a little glad that her obsession with marathoning hundreds of hours of C-dramas had actually become useful in the current absurd situation.

There was now little doubt that Cui Xi had fallen in the river that night and washed up on the riverbank of a completely different reality...a place that just so happened to resemble feudal China.

This is the worst: I'm a helpless, ordinary person in a time of bandits, heroes, and kings...

Of course, she still expected to wake up from this lengthy dream, but so far it had not happened. For now, she could only quell the memories of what she had left behind and try to make do with an uncertain future.

"A'Xi!" called Master Yang, breaking into her thoughts. He peaked around the fence and then pushed the gate open.

"Yifu," she greeted, using the words for 'foster father'. She waved, grinning at him as he came through the gate. Although she had initially felt a little awkward using this address, Master Yang and A'Yu had felt that it would be easier to explain why an orphaned girl had come to live with them if they said that she was a poor relative that they had brought back while on one of their herb picking journeys.