Super Ruwaxi's Origin Story

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Here's a super rough draft of an origin story for my character.  I wrote it in short story form and intend to transform it into a comic book form soon.  The writing will probably transform substantially in the process.  I'd like to use more of the over-the-top melodramatic humor of the comic book, and am hoping to draw some structural parallels with Superman's origin story (http://supermanthrutheages.com/origin/), though the premises are so different that I'm not sure it'll be possible.  I also need to transform Wu Ruwaxi into a semi-reasonable Chinese girl's name.

The Origin of Super Ruwaxi

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Once upon a time in the Middle Kingdom™, a gated community nestled in a bedroom suburb nestled in the urban sprawl of the City of Angels, there lived a girl on the brink of womanhood, Wu Ruwaxi.  Ruwaxi was the only living child of a hard-working Asian immigrant family, as her elder brother had died during childbirth.  Though she was not a boy and thus could not carry on the family name, she was the perfect filial child: loving, dutiful, obedient, and the embodiment of the Asian-American dream.

But Ruwaxi lived a double life.  By day she studied assiduously at her elite prep school: mastering calculus derivatives and doing Euclidian proofs, writing perfect 8-legged essays analyzing the English literary canon, and formulating economic theories to explain key policy moves in recent Sino-US relations.

At night, however, Ruwaxi put her books aside, as well as the modest, unfashionable clothes that her mother had lovingly stitched for her.  Binding her already small breasts, she would don combat boots, a wife-beater, camouflage pants, and sundry other items from the army surplus store.  Stealthily, she would slip out of the gates of the Great Wall of the Middle Kingdom™ and drive to the Promised Land, a club in Deep South Central LA where heavy beats and hip-hop prevailed.  There she would dance.

And when she danced she was fierce, unbound, and in her power.  Grounded, syncopated, percussive, and terribly musical (thanks to her extensive concert piano training), she could dance b-girl head-spins around the best of them.

One night at the Promised Land, a slight yet muscular young man called Fedora Boy, aka the Fed, approached her while she was dancing.  He wore a fedora with a bright red feather and had the whisper of a mustache: classic Asian boy wanna-be pick-up artist.  “Hey baby,” he said, and started grinding against her.

Alarmed, Ruwaxi shrunk in her skin.  “You’re a bad girl, aren’t you?” he said.  And he moved in.

Thrusting his pelvis against her, he continued, “I like to role-play.  Why don't we go back to my place, and we’ll see what we can do with that leather belt of yours?  And don’t worry, your parents will like me.  I’m in med school.  We can say we met in the library.”

Ruwaxi seethed.  She had been plotting an escape, mentally calculating the time it would take for her to run to the door and jump into her car, while the Fed was jabbering and grinding away.  But a hot flame of righteous anger engulfed her body.  Aggressive and erratic, her dance transformed, slipping skillfully away from the Fed’s pelvic thrusts, which fell predictably on the downbeat.  Her muscles popping and clenching, feet beating the floor in angry cross-rhythms, she danced faster and faster, while sweat poured from her brow and armpits, until a red fog and pungent odor filled the room...

As the fog and stench cleared away, Ruwaxi was shocked to find that the Fed was no longer Fedora Boy.  He was...Fedora Girl.  Sleeves hanging loosely around his lithe, lily-white arms, green mango breasts pressing against his T-shirt, he looked down at his lovely body in horror.  Then he looked up to see the steely, cold-fire gaze of Ruwaxi...and scurried out the door, clutching his breasts painfully as he ran.  The crowd watched as he ran, a sea of confused and surprised faces.

That night at home, Ruwaxi considered the evening’s events in disbelief.  “Perhaps I made it up,” she thought.  “How could that creep suddenly turn into a girl?”  She searched through her books and on the internet, reading theories of gender performativity, scientific studies on intersex people, anthropological fieldwork on dance-induced altered states of consciousness, to see if there was any rational explanation.  As happened often with her, book-worm that she was, she nodded off over her books, her bedside light still blaring on full.

While she was sleeping, she had a vision of a beautiful woman: sensual, fish-eyed, and copper-skinned with an hour-glass figure, dripping in jewels and dancing Kaisiki Vritti, the celestial dance of the apsaras.  “Who are you?” Ruwaxi asked, breathless with admiration. 

“Why, don’t you recognize yourself?” answered the beautiful woman.  “I am Urvashi.  Like you, I’m a damn good dancer, terribly sexy, too smart for my own good, and have the power to change people’s genders when they piss me off.  Why, I turned Arjuna himself into a female court dancer when he refused to sleep with me.”

As she listened Ruwaxi felt heat spreading in her loins, for she was finding this mysterious woman, so feminine and yet so compellingly crass, rather attractive.  “But wait,” she said.  “What do mean, ‘recognize myself’?  And why are our names so similar?  Wu Ruwaxi and Urvashi?”

Urvashi cocked an eyebrow in disbelief.  “What must I have done in my later lives to become this stupid?”

Ruwaxi said slowly, “But wait...no.  I don’t even believe in reincarnation.  I’m an atheist!  And you’re...Indian, right?”

Urvashi said impatiently, “Girl, if a human being can reincarnate as a dog, do you think we can’t switch races?  Yes, you were Indian in a past life.  Why do you think you have such a good sense of rhythm?”

She continued, “Anyway, as you can tell, we clearly have some unresolved karmic shit to work out.  I fought our fight – for a woman to be a public dancer, to own her sensuality, to not be legally tied to any man – during my time.  But now the issues are different.  You were put on this earth to fight the battle for Truth, Gender Justice, and Freedom of Sexual Expression.  And you might think it’s an ironic twist of fate that you were born into this conservative East Asian family, but that’s where your work is most needed.  It’s time to break down the house of oppression. 

--> And your most powerful tools are your righteous rage and the womanly stench of your body odor.  Yes, you’re Super Ruwaxi, the Hairy-Arm Pitted Feminist.  Never shave your pits or you’ll lose your power.”

Here are a few mock comic book covers:

And some pages in progress:

page 2.  thought bubble reads: "Maybe Ba would be more comfortable if I brought him his slippers..."

page 3

page 4 (those are confucius and shakespeare)

  FEEDBACK QUESTIONS:
(1) How do you feel about the "dream" device?  (Part of me hates it because it's such a "cheap" trick in fiction, but it might be fitting for an Amar Chitra Katha take-off, given the prevalence of visions and miracles in Hindu mythology.)
(2) Do you think this origin story resolves some of the problems in intersecting Urvashi, the Hairy Arm-pitted Feminist, and the Good Little Confucian Girl?  Specify how it does or doesn't.
(3) What connections, aesthetic and otherwise, do you see between this story and my Super Urvashi trailer?  How might you imagine the two intersecting in performance if at all?
(4) Any parts of the story you particularly like?  That you find confusing or less compelling?  Any unanswered questions or parts that need to be developed further?
(5) Any ideas about visuals?  Which comic book cover do you prefer and why?