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Personal Information
Name: Filipa
Age: 22
Personal Journal: None
Email / Plurk / Discord / Other: filipa_snow@hotmail.com and my plurk is Inkilite
Current Character(s): None.
Character Information
Character Name: Fang Ray Shin
Fandom: Detention
Character History: Ray is the only child of an average working class family in the village of Greenwood, a town near the city of Hualien. Initially, she and her family live a somewhat stable life despite the era, but Ray was born during the beginning of Taiwan’s period of martial law, and as the state of the country degenerated around her family, her father turned to drinking. Ray, once extremely cheerful and academically gifted, began slowly drifting away from other people, becoming depressed and losing interest in her studies. Taiwan’s martial law meant her father’s employment was always hanging by a thread as people were continually thrown in jail or executed all around them. Ray’s mother became depressed and paranoid as the country’s situation grew worse, leaving Ray with no one to talk to at home.
At school, the only comfort Ray had was her teacher, Ms. Yin, who stopped other students from bullying the obviously troubled young girl and sent her to the guidance counselor to try to help her get her life back on track. Ray developed a crush on the guidance counselor, Mr. Chang, admiring him for having forged his own path in life where she felt helpless and as if making any real choices was impossible. Mr. Chang saw in Ray an echo of one of his dead sisters, executed for having violated one too many of Taiwan’s laws about freedom of speech. They became good friends as the school year progressed, eventually culminating in Ray expressing her feelings to him. Hesitant to return her feelings and possibly lose someone he loved again, as his entire family had been killed or imprisoned already, he told her that should she still love him after her first year of university, they would marry. Until then, he kept his dates with her to what he considered to be appropriate actions for her age – going to the movies, buying her books, talking to her and holding hands. Chang was the only real light in Ray’s life by that point, as her father had started cheating on her mother and Ray was having regular nightmares about ending up like her mother on top of that. Only one of her old friends was still somewhat friendly to her at school, her friend Wei Chung Ting. Things were better, but things were still fragile.
Under Taiwanese martial law, reading prohibited books was highly illegal, but Ms. Yin wanted her students to have the freedom to read and explore the world of literature that she had enjoyed as a child, so she created a secret book club where students could come to further their education. Only the students she trusted most were let in on this, including Ray’s friend Wei, who subsequently let her in. There, Ray made a number of new friends and this boost in morale greatly improved her attitude and grades overall, but then two things went wrong. The first was that Ms. Yin found out about Ray and Chang’s relationship and asked them to break it off due to both Ray’s age and Chang’s involvement in the book club (which could get anyone connected to him killed, including Ray). The second was that Ray overheard this conversation, which sent her into a downward spiral. On its’ own these two things might not have totally broken her, but that night, when Ray came home from school, her mother had finally had enough of her husband’s cheating and had him arrested for corruption. This allowed her to be free of his drunken verbal abuse and was the one legal way a woman could own property in 1961 Taiwan, since there were no men in the house to do it. What she didn’t realize was it was another thing for the other students at school to make Ray’s life hell over, on top of also placing her daughter under suspicion of being a communist by Instructor Bai, a war veteran school guard at Ray’s school.
When Mr. Chang broke off their relationship that night at the movies, it was the last straw. Ray took the list of books that Ms. Yin wanted and turned it over to Instructor Bai along with a list of everyone she claimed to have heard was involved in the book club. If Ms. Yin went away, then she could have Chang back, have her last bit of hope back, but she wasn’t aware Chang was the book supplier, which was a much more severe crime. Two days after Instructor Bai was given the list, all the book club members were arrested, those who resisted arrest were shot, Ms. Yin disappeared to flee the country, and Wei refused to give up the last member of the book club (there were nineteen desks in the club, but only eighteen names on the list, as Ray had omitted hers), meaning he was slated to be tortured for information. Mr. Chang was immediately slated for execution that day due to his high position and a history of infractions. Everything Ray had ever had was gone in under a week. When Wei refused to break under interrogation, he was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. Over half of the book club was dead.
Ray killed herself, throwing herself off the top of the school building. She woke up in Purgatory, as she was not given a proper burial, without her memories of what had happened. Though the game draws heavily from Taiwanese culture and mythology, that is not typical of either; rather, the sheer trauma of what had transpired was so intense Ray’s mind blocked it all out, even after death. In Purgatory, she met a phantom version of Wei briefly before becoming trapped in a ghostly, warped version of her high school, where she slowly regained her memories of the latter part of her life and how she died, ultimately being confronted with a shadowy version of herself. Refusing to take responsibility for her own horrifying actions, she repeated the cycle of waking up in the high school auditorium on a single chair set up on the stage – the chair where she had sat when she accepted her reward for patriotism in front of the school, and the chair where, at the end of each cycle of regaining her memories, the weight of it all drove her to try to hang herself in Purgatory. Since no one can die in Purgatory, instead it just erased her memories and placed her back where she started, as the only way out would be to, eventually, admit to her shadow self that everything was her fault and accept the blame and her fate, for even though the world she lived in was cruel, that was not truly an excuse for her actions.
For the sake of clarity and continuity, I’m taking her from before she gets on the chair and her memories/the cycle resets, but not before she’s had any resets at all, as her inability to accept events is crucial to her character.
Character Personality: Ray’s personality is greatly influenced by her depression, to the point it affects her everyday interactions with people. She is not very loud, doesn’t laugh easily and never once yells in canon. She is shown to be self-conscious about her high-pitched laugh, her prominent collarbones, her unusual name and her family life, which she compensates for by being as casual and friendly as possible. For instance, she never insists on having younger students call her by her surname, always calls teachers by the polite form of their names, volunteers to help whenever she can, and doesn’t talk back to people who speak poorly of her or gossip about her. Ray’s self-esteem has been greatly affected by her depression and her family’s poor standing in her community, as seen by her disbelief and surprise when people give her a compliment or express interest in her. Though she lacks the energy to keep up with schoolwork and social activities at times, she is very invested in what others think of her while also despising that society’s constraints on everyone are so tight.
A major theme of Ray’s character is wanting to run away or otherwise escape from the Taiwan she has grown up in. She longs for the Taiwan of movies and books where things seem so much happier and easier. When Mr. Chang points out that such a Taiwan did once exist and might again, she is initially contented, fascinated by his experiences abroad and his stories of how things used to be, but as her family situation deteriorates her view of her country’s future dims. She has worries about being constrained by her gender, by society’s view that women shouldn’t pursue college, that she’ll end up like her mother, that she won’t ever leave her town let alone Taiwan, and that eventually everyone will leave her altogether. Seeing her friends turn to gossip quickly when she faltered only amplified this feeling of hopeless to the point that, when she was dating Mr. Chang and things were at their best, she still had irrational fears about him leaving her for Ms. Yin, who was closer to his age and much more attractive. In Ray’s mind, she had envisioned an ending for her life’s story where she could run away to a more forward-thinking place with him as her husband. The threat of having her escape taken from her was too much to bear.
The fact that her parents are unhappy now is not an indicator of how they used to be. When the full impact of martial law had yet to set in fully in the countryside, they were happy together and as a family. Ray’s family was always important to her. Despite her father’s drinking and her mother’s emotional distance, she loved them and tried to keep the peace by getting good grades so she could be someone they could be proud of. She worked hard to keep her room clean, her grades up, her after school activities aced and her appearance spotless, trying to bring them together by supplying the bulk of dinnertime conversations and soothing over arguments where she could. When she couldn’t keep them from growing apart, she took it as a personal failure. Notably, it’s the one thing that she acknowledges even in the worst ending of the game as being her fault. She loved her parents, the life they had together, the way they used to listen to the radio together or listen to her father’s stories about the city he grew up in over dinner. When her mother has her father arrested, Ray begins wearing the white jade deer pendant her father originally gave her mother, as a way to keep something of his and a piece of the good old days behind.
Blame is something Ray struggles with. Guilt and taking responsibility are major themes of her own personal purgatory for a reason. In Taiwanese belief, Purgatory as a place is structured according to what a person fears most, and everything about her Purgatory revolves around the people she got killed or sentenced to jail, around the gossip of her classmates and around being on stage when she wakes up there the same way she was on stage when she accepted her reward for patriotism. These are the moments she regrets most, the things that she can’t accept that she’s done. The fear of public perception and being blamed for her family dissolving follows her home, as when she visits her house in Purgatory, there are eyes hidden throughout the artwork, watching her, judging. Even the ghosts that follow Ray around are Taiwanese personifications of guilt: a shadowy version of herself, a version of herself that is mindless and destroys all it touches, helpless puppets and the Lantern Ghost, whose light makes her reflection shine off of surfaces and forces her to meet her own gaze. When she can’t avoid her reflection in the mirror at school, her reflection asks her, “Forgotten? Or too afraid to remember?” and the mirror shatters, forcing her to recall the shattered glass the day the members of the book club were arrested and the shattered glass on the ground the day her father came home drunk and broke things. Guilt is haunting her. Blame occupies a huge portion of her thoughts. And rather than trying to deal with them, she keeps trying to run away.
It would be a misrepresentation of Ray’s character and of Taiwan’s period of martial law to paint her as uniquely unequipped to deal with responsibility. Rather, the problem was that the weight piled up on her to graduate, do better than the generation before her, overcome her poor family life and handle what she perceived to be a betrayal by the two teachers she trusted most was too much to put on her over the course of two years flat. Everything was too much and it was not fair that she be asked to try to pretend things were fine when they weren’t, especially when so many avenues of hope were being shut down left and right. Ray’s breakdown and subsequent betrayal of the book club is of course an obvious lapse of judgment and could be seen as her trying to pass responsibility onto the government, but she had every reason to believe that the same way her mother made her problems go away by throwing someone in jail, she could too. Ray was perfectly capable of holding it together when she had Chang’s love still intact. He represented hope that life could get better. What is exemplified in her breakdown and her turning in the booklist is that Ray’s depression is, like her grades and perception of herself, based largely in those around her. She isn’t wholly irresponsible, she’s trying to find reasons to keep some semblance of hope up. One of the paper airplanes she made that Mr. Chang found contained a drawing she had done of herself hanging from a noose. That she later killed herself was her way of doing what she perceived to be the responsible thing by removing herself from a world she wasn’t making any better.
Her denial of reality when she goes through each loop of Purgatory is proof that she does feel remorse, regardless of what she tells her shadow self at points. People who are not remorseful don’t try to kill themselves despite being already dead. While it is never outright stated, it’s implied through paper airplane imagery that she genuinely believes as she walks onto the stage in the afterlife that she’ll mess up here, as well. She can’t see the present day, unlike other ghosts in Purgatory. The only moments she can see are the past, which make her so certain she’s going to screw up again that she can’t take it. Ray is not, no matter what her shadow self says, bad. To get the game’s good ending, Ray has to both refute that everything was her fault, as the system Taiwan had set up was corrupt, while also denying that absolutely nothing was her fault. And it isn’t surprising, really, that at the age of seventeen she has yet to find that balance. She has been too alone in too many ways to truly know what to do with the hand life dealt her, and so like a child, all she can do is run away from it, again and again, forever if necessary.
Powers and Abilities: None other than being academically gifted and a quick learner. Ray is not notably strong or genius level smart, and upon waking up in Nautilus she will no longer have what few powers Lingered (Taiwanese traditional ghosts) have. It’s implied she cannot access them in-game because she refuses to process being dead at all.
Samples
Network:
[The camera is a little unsteady, as always. Ray has still not yet acclimated to using modern cameras, though she forces a believable enough smile for it when she sees that it’s on before speaking.]
Ah, hello. I hope I’m not interrupting anyone’s day. I was just wondering if anyone would mind telling me if there are movies here available for people to watch? The only ones back home that we had had to make it past a review board, so parts of most movies were taken out. I would love to be able to see more if I could, especially if it takes place outside of Taiwan. And if anyone here has any books they would recommend from the library that are good, I would like that, too. Even if I’m still not sure what I’m doing here, it’s a good opportunity to learn, don’t you think? Ha, anyway, I’m sorry for rambling. Have a good day, everyone.
Third Person:
The library in Nautilus was huge compared to any she would ever have access to at home, and for a moment Ray stood in its’ doorway, staring into the shelves intently without truly seeing. There were more books here than might have been written in all of Taiwan. Once upon a time, she would have reveled in picking out the best ones she could find to share with Chang; they would have put piles together and packed a lunch before sitting out under the banyan tree in his yard, reading for hours. Now, suddenly, like an impact, she felt all the ways in which he was absent. Never again would she share a story with her love, with her friends, with Ms. Yin. Her eyes shut as if in pain, her exhale loud in the quiet space. Ms. Yin would love this, would adore everything about this place. Knowing it was her fault that neither of them could be here made Ray want to sink to her knees and weep, if she were given over to weeping.
Instead, ghostlike in her silence, face as stoic as it always had been through her father’s rampages and angry shouting, she moved among the rows, trying to lose herself in the books. The fiction they offered up was no less real than their facts, after the life she had lived. One hand fiddling with her white jade deer pendant, her other glided over smooth book spines, even the most worn so much better than what her school could have afforded. For a moment she could almost picture Wei’s enthusiasm at the comic books here, a rare and expensive Western treasure he rarely got to partake in. With more force than was necessary, she turned away and marched resolutely towards another section. She couldn’t undo what had happened, and she couldn’t think about the past without bleakness seeping into her like cold in winter. All she could do, she told herself as she pulled out a book at random, was deal with things here and now. Here and now, she was in a warm library, with all the books she could ever have envisioned in her wildest fantasies all around her, in a place where no one was put in prison for reading them.
It was everything she had ever wanted, and somehow, that only made her feel worse.
Name: Filipa
Age: 22
Personal Journal: None
Email / Plurk / Discord / Other: filipa_snow@hotmail.com and my plurk is Inkilite
Current Character(s): None.
Character Information
Character Name: Fang Ray Shin
Fandom: Detention
Character History: Ray is the only child of an average working class family in the village of Greenwood, a town near the city of Hualien. Initially, she and her family live a somewhat stable life despite the era, but Ray was born during the beginning of Taiwan’s period of martial law, and as the state of the country degenerated around her family, her father turned to drinking. Ray, once extremely cheerful and academically gifted, began slowly drifting away from other people, becoming depressed and losing interest in her studies. Taiwan’s martial law meant her father’s employment was always hanging by a thread as people were continually thrown in jail or executed all around them. Ray’s mother became depressed and paranoid as the country’s situation grew worse, leaving Ray with no one to talk to at home.
At school, the only comfort Ray had was her teacher, Ms. Yin, who stopped other students from bullying the obviously troubled young girl and sent her to the guidance counselor to try to help her get her life back on track. Ray developed a crush on the guidance counselor, Mr. Chang, admiring him for having forged his own path in life where she felt helpless and as if making any real choices was impossible. Mr. Chang saw in Ray an echo of one of his dead sisters, executed for having violated one too many of Taiwan’s laws about freedom of speech. They became good friends as the school year progressed, eventually culminating in Ray expressing her feelings to him. Hesitant to return her feelings and possibly lose someone he loved again, as his entire family had been killed or imprisoned already, he told her that should she still love him after her first year of university, they would marry. Until then, he kept his dates with her to what he considered to be appropriate actions for her age – going to the movies, buying her books, talking to her and holding hands. Chang was the only real light in Ray’s life by that point, as her father had started cheating on her mother and Ray was having regular nightmares about ending up like her mother on top of that. Only one of her old friends was still somewhat friendly to her at school, her friend Wei Chung Ting. Things were better, but things were still fragile.
Under Taiwanese martial law, reading prohibited books was highly illegal, but Ms. Yin wanted her students to have the freedom to read and explore the world of literature that she had enjoyed as a child, so she created a secret book club where students could come to further their education. Only the students she trusted most were let in on this, including Ray’s friend Wei, who subsequently let her in. There, Ray made a number of new friends and this boost in morale greatly improved her attitude and grades overall, but then two things went wrong. The first was that Ms. Yin found out about Ray and Chang’s relationship and asked them to break it off due to both Ray’s age and Chang’s involvement in the book club (which could get anyone connected to him killed, including Ray). The second was that Ray overheard this conversation, which sent her into a downward spiral. On its’ own these two things might not have totally broken her, but that night, when Ray came home from school, her mother had finally had enough of her husband’s cheating and had him arrested for corruption. This allowed her to be free of his drunken verbal abuse and was the one legal way a woman could own property in 1961 Taiwan, since there were no men in the house to do it. What she didn’t realize was it was another thing for the other students at school to make Ray’s life hell over, on top of also placing her daughter under suspicion of being a communist by Instructor Bai, a war veteran school guard at Ray’s school.
When Mr. Chang broke off their relationship that night at the movies, it was the last straw. Ray took the list of books that Ms. Yin wanted and turned it over to Instructor Bai along with a list of everyone she claimed to have heard was involved in the book club. If Ms. Yin went away, then she could have Chang back, have her last bit of hope back, but she wasn’t aware Chang was the book supplier, which was a much more severe crime. Two days after Instructor Bai was given the list, all the book club members were arrested, those who resisted arrest were shot, Ms. Yin disappeared to flee the country, and Wei refused to give up the last member of the book club (there were nineteen desks in the club, but only eighteen names on the list, as Ray had omitted hers), meaning he was slated to be tortured for information. Mr. Chang was immediately slated for execution that day due to his high position and a history of infractions. Everything Ray had ever had was gone in under a week. When Wei refused to break under interrogation, he was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. Over half of the book club was dead.
Ray killed herself, throwing herself off the top of the school building. She woke up in Purgatory, as she was not given a proper burial, without her memories of what had happened. Though the game draws heavily from Taiwanese culture and mythology, that is not typical of either; rather, the sheer trauma of what had transpired was so intense Ray’s mind blocked it all out, even after death. In Purgatory, she met a phantom version of Wei briefly before becoming trapped in a ghostly, warped version of her high school, where she slowly regained her memories of the latter part of her life and how she died, ultimately being confronted with a shadowy version of herself. Refusing to take responsibility for her own horrifying actions, she repeated the cycle of waking up in the high school auditorium on a single chair set up on the stage – the chair where she had sat when she accepted her reward for patriotism in front of the school, and the chair where, at the end of each cycle of regaining her memories, the weight of it all drove her to try to hang herself in Purgatory. Since no one can die in Purgatory, instead it just erased her memories and placed her back where she started, as the only way out would be to, eventually, admit to her shadow self that everything was her fault and accept the blame and her fate, for even though the world she lived in was cruel, that was not truly an excuse for her actions.
For the sake of clarity and continuity, I’m taking her from before she gets on the chair and her memories/the cycle resets, but not before she’s had any resets at all, as her inability to accept events is crucial to her character.
Character Personality: Ray’s personality is greatly influenced by her depression, to the point it affects her everyday interactions with people. She is not very loud, doesn’t laugh easily and never once yells in canon. She is shown to be self-conscious about her high-pitched laugh, her prominent collarbones, her unusual name and her family life, which she compensates for by being as casual and friendly as possible. For instance, she never insists on having younger students call her by her surname, always calls teachers by the polite form of their names, volunteers to help whenever she can, and doesn’t talk back to people who speak poorly of her or gossip about her. Ray’s self-esteem has been greatly affected by her depression and her family’s poor standing in her community, as seen by her disbelief and surprise when people give her a compliment or express interest in her. Though she lacks the energy to keep up with schoolwork and social activities at times, she is very invested in what others think of her while also despising that society’s constraints on everyone are so tight.
A major theme of Ray’s character is wanting to run away or otherwise escape from the Taiwan she has grown up in. She longs for the Taiwan of movies and books where things seem so much happier and easier. When Mr. Chang points out that such a Taiwan did once exist and might again, she is initially contented, fascinated by his experiences abroad and his stories of how things used to be, but as her family situation deteriorates her view of her country’s future dims. She has worries about being constrained by her gender, by society’s view that women shouldn’t pursue college, that she’ll end up like her mother, that she won’t ever leave her town let alone Taiwan, and that eventually everyone will leave her altogether. Seeing her friends turn to gossip quickly when she faltered only amplified this feeling of hopeless to the point that, when she was dating Mr. Chang and things were at their best, she still had irrational fears about him leaving her for Ms. Yin, who was closer to his age and much more attractive. In Ray’s mind, she had envisioned an ending for her life’s story where she could run away to a more forward-thinking place with him as her husband. The threat of having her escape taken from her was too much to bear.
The fact that her parents are unhappy now is not an indicator of how they used to be. When the full impact of martial law had yet to set in fully in the countryside, they were happy together and as a family. Ray’s family was always important to her. Despite her father’s drinking and her mother’s emotional distance, she loved them and tried to keep the peace by getting good grades so she could be someone they could be proud of. She worked hard to keep her room clean, her grades up, her after school activities aced and her appearance spotless, trying to bring them together by supplying the bulk of dinnertime conversations and soothing over arguments where she could. When she couldn’t keep them from growing apart, she took it as a personal failure. Notably, it’s the one thing that she acknowledges even in the worst ending of the game as being her fault. She loved her parents, the life they had together, the way they used to listen to the radio together or listen to her father’s stories about the city he grew up in over dinner. When her mother has her father arrested, Ray begins wearing the white jade deer pendant her father originally gave her mother, as a way to keep something of his and a piece of the good old days behind.
Blame is something Ray struggles with. Guilt and taking responsibility are major themes of her own personal purgatory for a reason. In Taiwanese belief, Purgatory as a place is structured according to what a person fears most, and everything about her Purgatory revolves around the people she got killed or sentenced to jail, around the gossip of her classmates and around being on stage when she wakes up there the same way she was on stage when she accepted her reward for patriotism. These are the moments she regrets most, the things that she can’t accept that she’s done. The fear of public perception and being blamed for her family dissolving follows her home, as when she visits her house in Purgatory, there are eyes hidden throughout the artwork, watching her, judging. Even the ghosts that follow Ray around are Taiwanese personifications of guilt: a shadowy version of herself, a version of herself that is mindless and destroys all it touches, helpless puppets and the Lantern Ghost, whose light makes her reflection shine off of surfaces and forces her to meet her own gaze. When she can’t avoid her reflection in the mirror at school, her reflection asks her, “Forgotten? Or too afraid to remember?” and the mirror shatters, forcing her to recall the shattered glass the day the members of the book club were arrested and the shattered glass on the ground the day her father came home drunk and broke things. Guilt is haunting her. Blame occupies a huge portion of her thoughts. And rather than trying to deal with them, she keeps trying to run away.
It would be a misrepresentation of Ray’s character and of Taiwan’s period of martial law to paint her as uniquely unequipped to deal with responsibility. Rather, the problem was that the weight piled up on her to graduate, do better than the generation before her, overcome her poor family life and handle what she perceived to be a betrayal by the two teachers she trusted most was too much to put on her over the course of two years flat. Everything was too much and it was not fair that she be asked to try to pretend things were fine when they weren’t, especially when so many avenues of hope were being shut down left and right. Ray’s breakdown and subsequent betrayal of the book club is of course an obvious lapse of judgment and could be seen as her trying to pass responsibility onto the government, but she had every reason to believe that the same way her mother made her problems go away by throwing someone in jail, she could too. Ray was perfectly capable of holding it together when she had Chang’s love still intact. He represented hope that life could get better. What is exemplified in her breakdown and her turning in the booklist is that Ray’s depression is, like her grades and perception of herself, based largely in those around her. She isn’t wholly irresponsible, she’s trying to find reasons to keep some semblance of hope up. One of the paper airplanes she made that Mr. Chang found contained a drawing she had done of herself hanging from a noose. That she later killed herself was her way of doing what she perceived to be the responsible thing by removing herself from a world she wasn’t making any better.
Her denial of reality when she goes through each loop of Purgatory is proof that she does feel remorse, regardless of what she tells her shadow self at points. People who are not remorseful don’t try to kill themselves despite being already dead. While it is never outright stated, it’s implied through paper airplane imagery that she genuinely believes as she walks onto the stage in the afterlife that she’ll mess up here, as well. She can’t see the present day, unlike other ghosts in Purgatory. The only moments she can see are the past, which make her so certain she’s going to screw up again that she can’t take it. Ray is not, no matter what her shadow self says, bad. To get the game’s good ending, Ray has to both refute that everything was her fault, as the system Taiwan had set up was corrupt, while also denying that absolutely nothing was her fault. And it isn’t surprising, really, that at the age of seventeen she has yet to find that balance. She has been too alone in too many ways to truly know what to do with the hand life dealt her, and so like a child, all she can do is run away from it, again and again, forever if necessary.
Powers and Abilities: None other than being academically gifted and a quick learner. Ray is not notably strong or genius level smart, and upon waking up in Nautilus she will no longer have what few powers Lingered (Taiwanese traditional ghosts) have. It’s implied she cannot access them in-game because she refuses to process being dead at all.
Samples
Network:
[The camera is a little unsteady, as always. Ray has still not yet acclimated to using modern cameras, though she forces a believable enough smile for it when she sees that it’s on before speaking.]
Ah, hello. I hope I’m not interrupting anyone’s day. I was just wondering if anyone would mind telling me if there are movies here available for people to watch? The only ones back home that we had had to make it past a review board, so parts of most movies were taken out. I would love to be able to see more if I could, especially if it takes place outside of Taiwan. And if anyone here has any books they would recommend from the library that are good, I would like that, too. Even if I’m still not sure what I’m doing here, it’s a good opportunity to learn, don’t you think? Ha, anyway, I’m sorry for rambling. Have a good day, everyone.
Third Person:
The library in Nautilus was huge compared to any she would ever have access to at home, and for a moment Ray stood in its’ doorway, staring into the shelves intently without truly seeing. There were more books here than might have been written in all of Taiwan. Once upon a time, she would have reveled in picking out the best ones she could find to share with Chang; they would have put piles together and packed a lunch before sitting out under the banyan tree in his yard, reading for hours. Now, suddenly, like an impact, she felt all the ways in which he was absent. Never again would she share a story with her love, with her friends, with Ms. Yin. Her eyes shut as if in pain, her exhale loud in the quiet space. Ms. Yin would love this, would adore everything about this place. Knowing it was her fault that neither of them could be here made Ray want to sink to her knees and weep, if she were given over to weeping.
Instead, ghostlike in her silence, face as stoic as it always had been through her father’s rampages and angry shouting, she moved among the rows, trying to lose herself in the books. The fiction they offered up was no less real than their facts, after the life she had lived. One hand fiddling with her white jade deer pendant, her other glided over smooth book spines, even the most worn so much better than what her school could have afforded. For a moment she could almost picture Wei’s enthusiasm at the comic books here, a rare and expensive Western treasure he rarely got to partake in. With more force than was necessary, she turned away and marched resolutely towards another section. She couldn’t undo what had happened, and she couldn’t think about the past without bleakness seeping into her like cold in winter. All she could do, she told herself as she pulled out a book at random, was deal with things here and now. Here and now, she was in a warm library, with all the books she could ever have envisioned in her wildest fantasies all around her, in a place where no one was put in prison for reading them.
It was everything she had ever wanted, and somehow, that only made her feel worse.
