O for the emotional feelings --> OWN!
Li Chi, The Worm Slayer
I LIKE THE STORY. When I found Li Chi in the Asian Art Museum Storyteller's notebook, I was elated! Dancing! Shouting, finally, a real heroine from China in 200 BC! Li Chi slew the worm, the monster, that devoured girls in her village, she stopped the sacrifices. I told this story in the Chinese Gallery in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Boys and girls liked the story.
I realized that as a girl, I had to survive the male-dominant structure and his dictates on my feminine life. As a pre-teen youth reading fairytales, folktale, cautionary tales, and legends, I did absorb successes as other ways we could oppose traditions.
What helped me, as a girl child, was my dad, bless him. He pushed his daughter to believe in herself. He made me forced me to think of myself as a girl who could do anything she wanted. Only the male lines were there; I don't know if he could see them. I was not asked to go hunting, I could go fishing. For a profession, I could be a librarian, teacher, maid, bookkeeper, secretary, or prostitute. By the 1960's I could go to college. A woman with the future, not yet recognized as an author, artist, storyteller, lawyer, doctor, film producer, judge, president, and on and on. My life was confined by the fairytale and folktale restrictions still present in societies at this time.
As stated before, words for feminine always have a male word hovering inside, man, lad, or he. At least in Latin had an 'a' for the female, the anima, and 'us' for the male the animus. The yin and yang of the Chinese for equality are not true.
--> fe'male,' second to a male;
--> 'lad'y, second to a lad;
--> wo'man', second to the man;
--> s'he' or 'he'r, second to he;
--> 'hero'ine, second the hero;
--> t'he'y has he included;
--- t'he'ir has her included.
--> this has his included
--> the has he and can sound like he.
--> they include the word 'he'.
--> these include the word 'he'.
Unfortunately, 'he' still leads and solves the problems and dilemmas of our world. As a girl, a young feminine, I was pushed from the successes because of my sex, a 'damsel in distress' a maiden to be either an old Maid, unmarried or matron, married.
And what is funny for me, in high school when the school pictures were taken for the yearbook in all the clubs I was a member, and that was many, I wore a small crown in my hair. I did not care if my critical classmates saw or if they did, they were into what they wanted. I was traveling to places. All these years, I wondered what my teenager thought when wearing a crown.
After analyzing thousands of stories, written, told, or filmed, after wanting to be an artist of children's book and a storyteller and then write; after years of pushing for that girl, my youth to succeed; I knew. The maiden, damsel, the servant, the princess, the matron, the mom, the aunt, the grandma, the hag, the crone, the witch, even the sorceress 'had come of age'. I entered the University with a scholarship and loan from the government for a poor female with high grades. I had struggled with all the emotional empowerment from all the damsels in many stories; I won, not as a warrior, as an educated girl with places to go, people to meet, and successes to have.
