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jeannette_ng's profile
Jeannette Ng 吳志麗
Jeannette Ng 吳志麗
Jeannette Ng 吳志麗
@jeannette_ng

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Jeannette Ng 吳志麗

@jeannette_ng

Novelist. Won: Astounding, BFA Newcomer. Dabbles: history, costumes, sensitivity reads, #booknails. She/they. Repped by @jenniegoloboy

North East, England
medium.com/@nettlefish/
Joined January 2017

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    Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

    Jeannette Ng 吳志麗 Retweeted Jeannette Ng 吳志麗

    I think a lot about how mythology and folklore get used out of their own context. I don't even mean when they're appropriated or exoticised (though these examples are undoubtedly plentiful) but just when people move away, cultures change and context is lost.https://twitter.com/jeannette_ng/status/947021876450115585 …

    Jeannette Ng 吳志麗 added,

    Jeannette Ng 吳志麗 @jeannette_ng
    This doesn't mean one shouldn't use mythology for inspiration. But we need to stop treating it as though they're written in a vacuum. Or that they were unchanging. Or that they are sacrosanct.
    Show this thread
    8:30 PM - 6 Apr 2021
    • 75 Retweets
    • 345 Likes
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    5 replies 75 retweets 345 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        And some of it is historical, embedded into the evolution of those myths. They change to suit the needs of the teller, references to real people and places get lost along the way and new ones are put in. It's how stories roll.

        1 reply 5 retweets 83 likes
        Show this thread
      3. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        I've so often read yew being used as a magical material in an American novel about fairies, and it's just a cool word. But those scraps of folklore aren't random. It's not until I saw the surreal quiet around a yew tree (it's mildly poisonous) that I understood.

        2 replies 9 retweets 131 likes
        Show this thread
      4. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        Or half-broken rows of hawthorn still marking out old field borders. Mistletoe thriving strange & surreal atop seemingly dead trees. My point isn't that these things are sacred or inalterable, so much as I wonder about what it means when stories are uprooted, become an aesthetic

        3 replies 10 retweets 128 likes
        Show this thread
      5. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        And in part because I'm myself uprooted, that I am struggling to find my voice when being inspired by East Asian folklore. Perhaps selfishly, I want that moment of understanding I had when sitting under a yew tree and realising how intertwined it is with death.

        1 reply 6 retweets 112 likes
        Show this thread
      6. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        I don't feel the same when I see a peony, a flower I only ever see potted and pruned. I don't think I understand why it is king of the flowers, why a man could be executed for proclaiming that the crimson is superior (well, I do know, it's a political dunk)

        3 replies 4 retweets 70 likes
        Show this thread
      7. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        I'm not trying to imply diaspora are somehow not qualified to write whatever the fuck the want. Plus, modernity and cultural change can just as easily isolate one from why a story or phrase is the way it is. Not to mention folk (also pronounced faux) etymologies.

        1 reply 5 retweets 82 likes
        Show this thread
      8. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        I'm thinking about how fantastical otherworlds of folklore often start out as real places, ones that can be traveled to physically and then as knowledge pushes back the borders of the known, these places become abstract, spiritual and then finally, metaphors.

        1 reply 29 retweets 126 likes
        Show this thread
      9. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        I stress that it's not that ancient people are idiots that don't understand fiction so much as travel to these other worlds is always viscerally physical. So Arcadia is both a real place in the real world an also a literary, mythological and folkloric construct.

        1 reply 6 retweets 82 likes
        Show this thread
      10. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        And there's a level where when more non-Arcadians started realising the real world Arcadia seems less exciting than promised, the mythic travel there in your dreams Arcadia is born. I dunno, read any medieval travelogue. Or the Classic of Mountains and Seas.

        2 replies 6 retweets 63 likes
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      11. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        Speaking of folklore born from very specific references, I am pretty convinced that Tōfu-kozō is meant as a joke on overly enthusiastic tofu sellers thrusting samples in your face during the Edo period.pic.twitter.com/V9zPstoj2b

        4 replies 6 retweets 72 likes
        Show this thread
      12. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        I cannot stress enough that this isn't some sort of yearning for a lost authenticity so much as a desire to understand where folklore comes from and allowing that to shape how I use it. Where do these seemingly outlandish, exotic, whimsical ideas come from.

        1 reply 7 retweets 101 likes
        Show this thread
      13. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        At the same time, it can sometimes feel demystifying. Santa coming down the chimney can seem whimsical. Knowing it's from a Finnish story, set in a home built half underground with chimney and roof being the same opening... it can feel less "fun"?

        3 replies 6 retweets 74 likes
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      14. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        Or like, mermaids might have been born from the imagination of horny sailors seeing manatees but they're definitely become more than that. So much more has been added to the story. And more is being added still.

        2 replies 4 retweets 56 likes
        Show this thread
      15. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        On the subject of mermaids, I recommend Jen Campbell's "Aquarium Girl" and "The beginning of the World In the Middle of The Night", incidentally. Trung Le Nguyen's "The Magic Fish". Imogen Hermes Gower's "The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock".

        3 replies 10 retweets 65 likes
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      16. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        Maybe there's some sort of difference between how I encounter mermaids and yew trees, insofar as the former feels like a vast kaleidoscope of stories and meanings, whereas the latter often appears only as an aesthetic detail.

        1 reply 4 retweets 53 likes
        Show this thread
      17. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        I wonder sometimes how things from the present will get mythologised, when will we lose the things that anchor these phrases and metaphors and they become an empty aesthetic, what new meaning will they accrete.

        1 reply 4 retweets 64 likes
        Show this thread
      18. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        Godzilla accreted symbolism. Beginning as thid absolute monstrous thing of consequence and guilt in the old Japanese films. While in these new US versions, he is the God of Nature. And in between he has been a cute animated lizard teaching lessons about friendship.

        1 reply 7 retweets 75 likes
        Show this thread
      19. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        It's deeply unexamined within popular anglophone discourse but I'm also painfully aware of how much of "Chinese" mythology is a blend of regional traditions and monstrous caricatures of conquered people. So much of it is baked into paradigms that have been used for centuries.

        2 replies 8 retweets 81 likes
        Show this thread
      20. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        And that's being used as fuel in popular chinese fantasy now. Which themselves subvert and repurpose. Which itself inspires a new generation of diaspora writers looking to reconnect with their roots. By which I mean me. So much of my imagination is shaped by c-dramas.

        1 reply 3 retweets 65 likes
        Show this thread
      21. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        Does it matter then the word for shaman/witch might have come from Persian? Or the fact that Mulan might be a Turkic name meaning Cosmic Deer and thus has nothing to do with magnolias?

        3 replies 4 retweets 49 likes
        Show this thread
      22. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        I love Jin Yong's work, but "The Book and the Sword" has a decidedly racist depiction of Uighur people. For all that it may acknowledge brutal colonialism of the Manchus, it is also all about hold this means they're now one with the Han. Not the mention exotic love interests.

        3 replies 4 retweets 47 likes
        Show this thread
      23. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        I keep meaning to write something about that but I'm not sure anyone else has read book and sword and it's not like it has had any prestige drama adaptions lately so it all seems a bit academic.

        2 replies 2 retweets 36 likes
        Show this thread
      24. Jeannette Ng 吳志麗‏ @jeannette_ng Apr 6

        Anyway, I have drifted from my original point enough. Cannot stress enough that this isn't some sort of desire for an original authentic version of stories that we must stay true to all cost. It's more thread of navel gazing of what it all "means".

        1 reply 4 retweets 58 likes
        Show this thread
      25. End of conversation

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