OR DIE TRYING: THE STORY OF CHO CHANG
By monkeymouse
NB: JKRowling built the Potterverse; I'm just redecorating one of the rooms. And one of the great things about JKR telling the story from Harry's point of view is that stuff could be happening all over Hogwarts that Harry isn't aware of.
Rated: PG
Spoilers: Everything
xxx
35. How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Cho was in Diagon Alley for only the first and last weeks of the summer vacation. She was so busy preparing to go to China, and then when she returned she was so busy preparing for her Fourth Year at Hogwarts, that she hardly noticed what went on in her parents' apothecary shoppe.
"There was something exciting happened last week," reported Mo Tan, a neighbor who watched the shoppe while they were gone. "Young boy comes in for school supplies. I see his green eyes, and the scar on his head; it's Ha Li Po Te! He was right here!"
"Of course," Cho nodded. "We both go to Hogwarts."
"I wish I'd been here to meet him," said Cho's mother.
So do I, thought Cho, for an entirely different reason.
xxx
The weather started out bad on 1 September, 1993, with a cold gray sky over London. It would get worse and worse as the train traveled north to the Scottish border, with rain settling in and becoming a torrent. Before that, though, the students who filled the compartments of the Hogwarts Express turned on the lights, shared the refreshments and kept a last little bit of summer alive.
One of these compartments was taken over by students from Ravenclaw House. They had managed to squeeze ten into a compartment that barely held six; they were standing by the window and sitting on the floor and lingering in the corridor by the open door as one student after another told how they spent their summer vacation.
Fifth-Year Annabella Smoot was holding the floor just now. She was telling a story similar to others that had been told that day: of glorious sunlit beaches (in her case, in the south of France), of handsome young wizards in extremely tight swimsuits, and the all-important First Kiss. She was just at the part where she was gasping for breath and on the point of fainting from her romantic encounter when Penelope Clearwater spoke up: "I've lost count, Anna; is that your third First Kiss or your fourth?"
The others laughed, but Annabella simply grinned like a Cheshire cat.
"Every kiss can be a First Kiss if you work it right."
This brought even more laughter from her listeners, who included Sixth-Year Quidditch Captain Roger Davies and Seventh Year Penelope Clearwater. They'd brought their own snacks especially for gatherings like this: bottles of butterbeer bought in Diagon Alley. Among the youngest students there was Cho. She sat nursing a butterbeer, with an open book in her lap, next to Penelope.
Penelope had just finished telling the group about the weekend her family spent in Penzance on the Cornish coast, and how, when they went to see a Muggle theater piece called "The Pirates of Penzance", it was announced from the stage during the interval that one of the minor-role actresses had taken ill. "So I went round and knocked on the stage door," she explained; "I thought maybe I could look at her and cure her on the sly. Well, as soon as they see me, they drag me to a dressing room and start pulling my clothes off!"
Eyebrows went up all around the compartment.
"It was nothing like that," she laughed, "because then they started pulling this costume onto me. They'd thought I was the sick girl's replacement!" Everyone laughed. "I shouldn't have straightened it out; I could have been a star."
"What did Percy say about that?" asked Smoot.
"You can imagine. He got all hot and bothered about it for five minutes; then, when he saw it was nothing, we had a good laugh about it." She shook her head. "But he does jump into things feet first sometimes."
Penelope looked at Cho as if to say, "Your turn". Cho took another pull on her butterbeer and looked around the other Ravenclaws.
"The Northern Plain," she began; "the land north of the Yangtze River. That's where my family's from. I was born in London shortly after they got here, so I never saw China. Until this summer."
Almost everyone leaned forward. They could tell that Cho had something special to tell.
"I went with my parents and we stayed with my mother's mother; we all just call her Granny Li. She was originally from a small village on the Northern Plain; a shamaness from a long line of them. But when she was young she wanted to go to the Big City and get away from the country, so she packed up and went to Zhangzhou, and let her younger sister worry about the village magic.
"We took our time; took a cruise ship around Africa and India and made port in Singapore. From there on, it had to be a matter of evading border guards and whatnot, so we unpacked our brooms and headed north."
"Long trip by broom, isn't it?" Davies asked.
"About the same as from Hogwarts to London."
"But what about passports and things? And the Muggles who are running China now, the what-do-ye-call-em, the Clam-u-nists?"
"When we got off the ship, my father said that we'd be in Singapore on business for four weeks, so they didn't bother to look for us. And we didn't have to worry once we got to the village. Mainly because it's such a small place, and so far out of the way, that the government Muggles simply never come there. The villagers told us it's been ages since they needed to use a disguising charm.
"Well, the instant we touch down in the village, Granny Li takes over. A dozen little old ladies run out of their houses to meet her, and she introduces my parents and me. I know the Mandarin dialect, but they're speaking some Chinese I'd never heard before, and they're speaking it so fast that I had no idea what was going on half of the time.
"But within an hour I found out what was happening. These little old ladies dragged me away from my parents, took me to one of their houses, served up a great pot of tea, and started bringing in young men I'm supposed to think about marrying!"
"They're not too bashful, are they?" Terry Boot, lingering at the open doorway, chuckled. He was a Third Year.
"I think they were a bit desperate. I mean, being all alone in the countryside is good in some ways, but they were running out of people to marry. They were anxious for some new blood, and I think they were hoping to send someone back to England with me."
"But you're only fourteen!" Davies interrupted.
"Oh, parents in China arrange for their children to be betrothed even younger than that! Not that anyone does anything about it; it's just an understanding for the most part. But the old witches made sure I also met village girls who were my age, all of whom were married and some of whom had already had a child or two. Just to be sure I got the message."
"Excuse me for saying it, Cho, but that's bloody barbaric," Annabella Smoot said.
"You're excused," Cho smiled sweetly at Annabella, even though most of the others, which knew her better than Annabella, realized that Cho was containing her anger at the insult.
One of the Ravenclaw Chasers, Erasmus Skiddle, seemed very nervous as he asked, "Well, if they're that concerned about getting in new blood, does that mean there may be something wrong with the old blood? I mean, did they say anything about having a problem with, er, consanguinity?"
"Not the way you mean it," Cho replied, "but it made life a bit awkward in some respects. I mean, as it turned out, I was related to just about everyone in the village, one way or another, so most of the time marriage was right out. The old man we rented rooms from turned out to be the cousin of a cousin on my mother's side. We stayed just across the road from a little grocery shoppe, and the woman who ran the shoppe--let me be sure I've got this bit right--was the daughter of the uncle of my granny's sister's husband's youngest son."
Everyone laughed as they gave up trying to straighten out the family tree. "So what did that mean in the real world?" Davies asked.
"Well, among other things, it meant that I could cross the road to the shoppe, take anything off the shelves and not have to pay for it." Everyone laughed again. "Don't get me wrong; we settled accounts at the end of the visit. To tell the truth, they were desperately poor by our standards; then again, if they'd had the money, there still weren't many places to spend it. They'd have had to travel miles to a big city."
"And what about books?" Penelope asked.
"Of course there were books. Every house had its own copy of what they call the Five Great Classics; Confucius swore by them centuries ago. About the only one that still gets read a lot is the I Ching."
Eyes rolled toward the ceiling. The I Ching was one of the divination texts taught by Madam Trelawny, although not until Sixth Year. All agreed that she didn't teach it particularly well.
"Any other interesting discoveries?" Davies asked.
"Well, they say Chinese wizards never took to brooms because they used to ride about on clouds. That's changing these days, and most of the really old people of the village-the ones who still know how to ride clouds-didn't want to tell me how to do it. I think they considered me a foreigner.
"Oh, and there was one more thing." Cho looked around the group before she said one word: "Fireballs."
"Fireballs!" Terry Boot exclaimed. "You mean, you mean..."
"Some of the villagers took us out into the wild, about seventy miles northwest of the village. They stopped at the head of a pass and pointed out a mountain. You don't see anything like Chinese mountains in the British Isles. It's as if some gigantic child dripped wet sand through its fingers, and these tall, thin solitary mountains are the result. Anyway, even though we were far away, we could see three dragons roaming up and down this one mountain. Magnificent."
"Did you bring one back, then?" Roger Davies joked.
"In a manner of speaking; thanks for reminding me." Cho opened her trunk, got out a bundle wrapped in red paper and handed it to Roger. "You did request it, and you shouldn't have to wait until Christmas."
Roger tore open the paper, and pulled out a large white pullover shirt, with Chinese writing on both sides and a large red serpentine dragon with gold-trimmed scales embroidered all the way around it.
"Chinese wizards are just starting to play Quidditch, believe it or not. They've been cut off from the rest of the world for centuries. But this is a jersey for the Fukien Fireballs. It's an exhibition team; they're not yet sanctioned by the International Association.
"Apart from that, I met a niece in the village who's actually older than I am, and she had a child, which made me a great-aunt, and I STILL don't know how that works!"
Penelope raised her butterbeer for one last toast; "Here's to a year with no hidden basilisks, no bathroom trolls and-once again--the Quidditch Cup to Ravenclaw!"
Penelope clinked her bottle against Cho's, and all around the compartment drank and cheered.
"No pressure, though, right?" Davies touched Cho on the shoulder.
"Don't worry, Roger," Cho smiled. "I'm no Madam Trelawny, but I have a feeling this will be a special year."
Penelope stood up and stretched, almost falling over as she did so when the train took a sharp turn. "I have to stretch my legs a bit. Can you come with me, Cho?"
They walked down the corridor toward the baggage van, passing other compartments with other students-laughing, talking, even reading. Cho couldn't tell if Harry Potter was in any of the compartments they passed.
"How is Percy?" Cho asked.
"He's been riding clouds himself ever since he found out he was Best Boy. I have to work to get his attention." They'd reached the van; Penelope opened the door and motioned for Cho to step inside. They entered a car full of trunks, suitcases, and the sounds and smells of hundreds of animals.
"What's this all about?" Cho asked.
"You tell me," Penelope replied. "I could tell, all the while you talked about China, that there was something wrong. What is it?"
Cho sat down on someone's trunk with a sigh. "You're very good, you know."
"I just know what to look for," Penelope smiled.
Cho started drumming her fingers on the trunk. "When my mum and grandmother started in on marriage, and I'd only been there an hour, well, it made my blood boil! Who did they think they were? Who did they think I was?"
"They didn't make any arrangements, did they?"
"Not that I know of. But it would be just like my mum to arrange for my engagement, and then spring it on me this Christmas." Cho sat in silence for a minute. "You once said that finding out how you felt about Percy wasn't a big all-at-once feeling, but grew over time."
Penelope nodded. "But it doesn't always have to happen that way. I spent a little time with Percy's parents this summer. THEY have some stories to tell!" she chuckled. "I guess there's no right or wrong; it happens the way it happens."
"Well, I don't want some sort of Chinese arrangement to happen!" Cho said as she stood up. "Can't I make my own choice?"
"You may think you're making the choice, Cho, but believe me, sometimes the choice makes you." Cho must have looked completely bewildered, because Penelope just laughed. "Never mind. We can talk more about this later."
Together they walked back to their compartment.
xxx
to be continued in part 36, when the lights go out on the Hogwarts Express
By monkeymouse
NB: JKRowling built the Potterverse; I'm just redecorating one of the rooms. And one of the great things about JKR telling the story from Harry's point of view is that stuff could be happening all over Hogwarts that Harry isn't aware of.
Rated: PG
Spoilers: Everything
xxx
35. How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Cho was in Diagon Alley for only the first and last weeks of the summer vacation. She was so busy preparing to go to China, and then when she returned she was so busy preparing for her Fourth Year at Hogwarts, that she hardly noticed what went on in her parents' apothecary shoppe.
"There was something exciting happened last week," reported Mo Tan, a neighbor who watched the shoppe while they were gone. "Young boy comes in for school supplies. I see his green eyes, and the scar on his head; it's Ha Li Po Te! He was right here!"
"Of course," Cho nodded. "We both go to Hogwarts."
"I wish I'd been here to meet him," said Cho's mother.
So do I, thought Cho, for an entirely different reason.
xxx
The weather started out bad on 1 September, 1993, with a cold gray sky over London. It would get worse and worse as the train traveled north to the Scottish border, with rain settling in and becoming a torrent. Before that, though, the students who filled the compartments of the Hogwarts Express turned on the lights, shared the refreshments and kept a last little bit of summer alive.
One of these compartments was taken over by students from Ravenclaw House. They had managed to squeeze ten into a compartment that barely held six; they were standing by the window and sitting on the floor and lingering in the corridor by the open door as one student after another told how they spent their summer vacation.
Fifth-Year Annabella Smoot was holding the floor just now. She was telling a story similar to others that had been told that day: of glorious sunlit beaches (in her case, in the south of France), of handsome young wizards in extremely tight swimsuits, and the all-important First Kiss. She was just at the part where she was gasping for breath and on the point of fainting from her romantic encounter when Penelope Clearwater spoke up: "I've lost count, Anna; is that your third First Kiss or your fourth?"
The others laughed, but Annabella simply grinned like a Cheshire cat.
"Every kiss can be a First Kiss if you work it right."
This brought even more laughter from her listeners, who included Sixth-Year Quidditch Captain Roger Davies and Seventh Year Penelope Clearwater. They'd brought their own snacks especially for gatherings like this: bottles of butterbeer bought in Diagon Alley. Among the youngest students there was Cho. She sat nursing a butterbeer, with an open book in her lap, next to Penelope.
Penelope had just finished telling the group about the weekend her family spent in Penzance on the Cornish coast, and how, when they went to see a Muggle theater piece called "The Pirates of Penzance", it was announced from the stage during the interval that one of the minor-role actresses had taken ill. "So I went round and knocked on the stage door," she explained; "I thought maybe I could look at her and cure her on the sly. Well, as soon as they see me, they drag me to a dressing room and start pulling my clothes off!"
Eyebrows went up all around the compartment.
"It was nothing like that," she laughed, "because then they started pulling this costume onto me. They'd thought I was the sick girl's replacement!" Everyone laughed. "I shouldn't have straightened it out; I could have been a star."
"What did Percy say about that?" asked Smoot.
"You can imagine. He got all hot and bothered about it for five minutes; then, when he saw it was nothing, we had a good laugh about it." She shook her head. "But he does jump into things feet first sometimes."
Penelope looked at Cho as if to say, "Your turn". Cho took another pull on her butterbeer and looked around the other Ravenclaws.
"The Northern Plain," she began; "the land north of the Yangtze River. That's where my family's from. I was born in London shortly after they got here, so I never saw China. Until this summer."
Almost everyone leaned forward. They could tell that Cho had something special to tell.
"I went with my parents and we stayed with my mother's mother; we all just call her Granny Li. She was originally from a small village on the Northern Plain; a shamaness from a long line of them. But when she was young she wanted to go to the Big City and get away from the country, so she packed up and went to Zhangzhou, and let her younger sister worry about the village magic.
"We took our time; took a cruise ship around Africa and India and made port in Singapore. From there on, it had to be a matter of evading border guards and whatnot, so we unpacked our brooms and headed north."
"Long trip by broom, isn't it?" Davies asked.
"About the same as from Hogwarts to London."
"But what about passports and things? And the Muggles who are running China now, the what-do-ye-call-em, the Clam-u-nists?"
"When we got off the ship, my father said that we'd be in Singapore on business for four weeks, so they didn't bother to look for us. And we didn't have to worry once we got to the village. Mainly because it's such a small place, and so far out of the way, that the government Muggles simply never come there. The villagers told us it's been ages since they needed to use a disguising charm.
"Well, the instant we touch down in the village, Granny Li takes over. A dozen little old ladies run out of their houses to meet her, and she introduces my parents and me. I know the Mandarin dialect, but they're speaking some Chinese I'd never heard before, and they're speaking it so fast that I had no idea what was going on half of the time.
"But within an hour I found out what was happening. These little old ladies dragged me away from my parents, took me to one of their houses, served up a great pot of tea, and started bringing in young men I'm supposed to think about marrying!"
"They're not too bashful, are they?" Terry Boot, lingering at the open doorway, chuckled. He was a Third Year.
"I think they were a bit desperate. I mean, being all alone in the countryside is good in some ways, but they were running out of people to marry. They were anxious for some new blood, and I think they were hoping to send someone back to England with me."
"But you're only fourteen!" Davies interrupted.
"Oh, parents in China arrange for their children to be betrothed even younger than that! Not that anyone does anything about it; it's just an understanding for the most part. But the old witches made sure I also met village girls who were my age, all of whom were married and some of whom had already had a child or two. Just to be sure I got the message."
"Excuse me for saying it, Cho, but that's bloody barbaric," Annabella Smoot said.
"You're excused," Cho smiled sweetly at Annabella, even though most of the others, which knew her better than Annabella, realized that Cho was containing her anger at the insult.
One of the Ravenclaw Chasers, Erasmus Skiddle, seemed very nervous as he asked, "Well, if they're that concerned about getting in new blood, does that mean there may be something wrong with the old blood? I mean, did they say anything about having a problem with, er, consanguinity?"
"Not the way you mean it," Cho replied, "but it made life a bit awkward in some respects. I mean, as it turned out, I was related to just about everyone in the village, one way or another, so most of the time marriage was right out. The old man we rented rooms from turned out to be the cousin of a cousin on my mother's side. We stayed just across the road from a little grocery shoppe, and the woman who ran the shoppe--let me be sure I've got this bit right--was the daughter of the uncle of my granny's sister's husband's youngest son."
Everyone laughed as they gave up trying to straighten out the family tree. "So what did that mean in the real world?" Davies asked.
"Well, among other things, it meant that I could cross the road to the shoppe, take anything off the shelves and not have to pay for it." Everyone laughed again. "Don't get me wrong; we settled accounts at the end of the visit. To tell the truth, they were desperately poor by our standards; then again, if they'd had the money, there still weren't many places to spend it. They'd have had to travel miles to a big city."
"And what about books?" Penelope asked.
"Of course there were books. Every house had its own copy of what they call the Five Great Classics; Confucius swore by them centuries ago. About the only one that still gets read a lot is the I Ching."
Eyes rolled toward the ceiling. The I Ching was one of the divination texts taught by Madam Trelawny, although not until Sixth Year. All agreed that she didn't teach it particularly well.
"Any other interesting discoveries?" Davies asked.
"Well, they say Chinese wizards never took to brooms because they used to ride about on clouds. That's changing these days, and most of the really old people of the village-the ones who still know how to ride clouds-didn't want to tell me how to do it. I think they considered me a foreigner.
"Oh, and there was one more thing." Cho looked around the group before she said one word: "Fireballs."
"Fireballs!" Terry Boot exclaimed. "You mean, you mean..."
"Some of the villagers took us out into the wild, about seventy miles northwest of the village. They stopped at the head of a pass and pointed out a mountain. You don't see anything like Chinese mountains in the British Isles. It's as if some gigantic child dripped wet sand through its fingers, and these tall, thin solitary mountains are the result. Anyway, even though we were far away, we could see three dragons roaming up and down this one mountain. Magnificent."
"Did you bring one back, then?" Roger Davies joked.
"In a manner of speaking; thanks for reminding me." Cho opened her trunk, got out a bundle wrapped in red paper and handed it to Roger. "You did request it, and you shouldn't have to wait until Christmas."
Roger tore open the paper, and pulled out a large white pullover shirt, with Chinese writing on both sides and a large red serpentine dragon with gold-trimmed scales embroidered all the way around it.
"Chinese wizards are just starting to play Quidditch, believe it or not. They've been cut off from the rest of the world for centuries. But this is a jersey for the Fukien Fireballs. It's an exhibition team; they're not yet sanctioned by the International Association.
"Apart from that, I met a niece in the village who's actually older than I am, and she had a child, which made me a great-aunt, and I STILL don't know how that works!"
Penelope raised her butterbeer for one last toast; "Here's to a year with no hidden basilisks, no bathroom trolls and-once again--the Quidditch Cup to Ravenclaw!"
Penelope clinked her bottle against Cho's, and all around the compartment drank and cheered.
"No pressure, though, right?" Davies touched Cho on the shoulder.
"Don't worry, Roger," Cho smiled. "I'm no Madam Trelawny, but I have a feeling this will be a special year."
Penelope stood up and stretched, almost falling over as she did so when the train took a sharp turn. "I have to stretch my legs a bit. Can you come with me, Cho?"
They walked down the corridor toward the baggage van, passing other compartments with other students-laughing, talking, even reading. Cho couldn't tell if Harry Potter was in any of the compartments they passed.
"How is Percy?" Cho asked.
"He's been riding clouds himself ever since he found out he was Best Boy. I have to work to get his attention." They'd reached the van; Penelope opened the door and motioned for Cho to step inside. They entered a car full of trunks, suitcases, and the sounds and smells of hundreds of animals.
"What's this all about?" Cho asked.
"You tell me," Penelope replied. "I could tell, all the while you talked about China, that there was something wrong. What is it?"
Cho sat down on someone's trunk with a sigh. "You're very good, you know."
"I just know what to look for," Penelope smiled.
Cho started drumming her fingers on the trunk. "When my mum and grandmother started in on marriage, and I'd only been there an hour, well, it made my blood boil! Who did they think they were? Who did they think I was?"
"They didn't make any arrangements, did they?"
"Not that I know of. But it would be just like my mum to arrange for my engagement, and then spring it on me this Christmas." Cho sat in silence for a minute. "You once said that finding out how you felt about Percy wasn't a big all-at-once feeling, but grew over time."
Penelope nodded. "But it doesn't always have to happen that way. I spent a little time with Percy's parents this summer. THEY have some stories to tell!" she chuckled. "I guess there's no right or wrong; it happens the way it happens."
"Well, I don't want some sort of Chinese arrangement to happen!" Cho said as she stood up. "Can't I make my own choice?"
"You may think you're making the choice, Cho, but believe me, sometimes the choice makes you." Cho must have looked completely bewildered, because Penelope just laughed. "Never mind. We can talk more about this later."
Together they walked back to their compartment.
xxx
to be continued in part 36, when the lights go out on the Hogwarts Express
