After some six years or so, I FINALLY got around to finding out the name of a song that once provided me with some inspiration. All I had was one line from the chorus and the name of the performer – the incomparable Faye Wong, whose voice I identified the instant I heard the song.
The line which got me ticking reads 一百年前你不是你我不是我, or one hundred years ago you were not me and I was not you. I remembered it incorrectly as a thousand, not a hundred, and I tacked on an equally incorrect follow-up line reading one hundred years later you will not be me and I will not be you (the actual lyrics translate to one hundred years later there will be no me and no you).
Out of that one line, I managed to spin an entire mythology – the tricks played by the bored mind are incredible. The details blur at a distance, but it involved a man-made underworld, known as the House of the Dead, where people whose bodies died could go to be reincarnated, sans memories of their last life unless they could afford an extra fee. It was rather influenced by Tanith Lee’s two-in-one novel, Biting the Sun, and due to the constraints of my own (limited) ability, it was never resolved.
歌名: 百年孤寂
(Title: Century of Loneliness/Lonely Century)
演唱: 王菲
(Artiste: Faye Wong)
专辑: 只爱陌生人
(Album: Only Loving Strangers (I think))
曲: c. y. kong adrian chan
(Composed by: c. y. kong adrian chan)
词: 林夕
(Lyrics: Lin Xi)
编: c. y. kong
Later, it grew tentacles. The background became the aftermath of World War IV, inventively renamed the Second Aquarian War. A mysterious body called the Heredity Council developed. Something strange and quasi-superhuman spawned and became known as the Mirrereo sub-race. A weird frontier city called Alterstar sprang up (in itself the evolution of something else entirely which I’d been working on even longer than the House of the Dead storyline).
And in the midst of all this steroid-charged growth, the original story which sprang up from the seeds of Lin Xi’s lyrics was largely lost. For a good reason. It was a love story. Well, it’s a love song.
To date, the only thing I have produced in relation to the original idea is a single picture of mediocre quality, which is now sitting below and probably distorting the alignment of the whole page.
The couple in the picture are, as far as the term is appropriate, star-crossed lovers. Although the stars referred to are man-made, not acts of God, and the crossing wasn’t entirely without a basis. The woman’s name is Sekea. She started out human, spent a while as a virtual reality construct, and is currently…something hybrid. The man’s name is Trey, and as far as I can tell, he’s completely human, but relationally annoyed.
As to why I took so long to figure out the actual name and lyrics of the song which started it all – back in 2002, or whenever it was I actually heard Bai Nian Gu Ji (which was a really old song even then), the worlds growing in my head seemed more important.
In fact, they were.
My apologies to Akanbar players. I was out of imagination in 2006 (a side-effect of recovering from a decade-long psychological disorder, otherwise known as adolescence), and not above recycling the names and personas of characters from my private literary pretensions. It was easier than making up something new!
Quack relational literary analysis: some time ago, all the scenarios, settings and characters boiling around in the underside of my mind were most certainly not what they are today. And a hundred years later, they most certainly won’t exist, unless I turn out to be immortal. (Highly unlikely.)
