-->
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
-->
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?
