CHO CHANG'S EIGHTH YEAR
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 the wizarding world that Harry isn't aware of.
Rated: PG-13
Spoilers: Everything
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2. First Steps
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The next morning, Cho was awoken by her mother rapping on her bedroom door.
Inside of a minute she was in her new orange robes and meeting her mother in the parlour. "What's first?"
"Breakfast, of course." Lotus turned to go to the kitchen.
"No, I mean the Chinese magic lessons!"
"So do I."
"Mother!"
"Cho; sit down." Cho sat near the fireplace. "Maybe we should have talked more about this last night, but this isn't like Hogwarts. It isn't a matter of learning a few magic words and wand flourishes. Chinese magic is far deeper, has lasted for centuries, and encompasses more than you can imagine. I promise you we'll start the lessons later today, but I also promise you that you will fail at it for the first few weeks, or maybe longer."
"Then what's the point?!"
"The point, my little Horse, is that you must understand everything that you need to do, because you need every little bit of your body and mind and heart to do it. Chinese magic can do so much because it demands so much."
"So what are we waiting for?"
"As I said, breakfast."
"But why?"
"Cho, if these lessons are to mean anything, I must make one demand. It is this: never ask why. I will tell you what must be done, and you will do it. Either you trust me, or you don't, and, if you don't, the lessons are over. Do you agree?"
Cho dropped her eyes, hoping that her mother couldn't see her cheeks burning. "Yes, mother."
"All right, then. Follow me." Lotus turned and, without a glance back, started down the stairs, leaving Cho to catch up. They went down to the cellar, where Lotus went to a storeroom.
"I prepared it this morning." She opened the door.
The floor was covered with more than a hundred teacups, from wall to wall, made of the most delicate porcelain. They were all inverted, bottoms facing up.
"It's been some time since I did this," Lotus said, as she took a wooden sword from the wall outside the room. She went in and stepped on a cup; it should have broken under her weight, but it didn't. For ten minutes she walked from one cup to another, moving the sword in graceful gestures, never glancing down, never misplacing or breaking a single cup. Finally, she stepped out of the room.
"Try it," she told Cho.
A very nervous Cho stepped onto a cup just over the threshold. It immediately shattered under her weight.
"Reparo," she muttered, blushing again. She tried a second time, and a third. Each time her weight shattered the cup.
"Listen to me, Cho. Chinese magic is divided between men and women. Don't talk to me about equality of the sexes, because I don't want to hear it. To prepare you for what you must learn, we will begin with what is called lightening the body. Your meals will now be prepared with a special mix of herbs to help with this. You will walk on the cups without breaking them; you will even be able to ride the wind. But this will take time. Come to breakfast." Lotus turned and went upstairs, again without a backward glance.
Cho might have thought at first that her mother simply wanted to humiliate her; now she knew better.
The last part of the puzzle was added that evening, as Cho ate dinner with her parents. "Mummy, I know you said not to ask why, but you gave me a flute…"
"We don't expect you to be musical. Use it to settle your mind."
"How?"
"I'll explain after dinner, dear."
"You may as well explain now; I've never touched an instrument before. I'm sure I'm quite harpy-handed at making music."
"This isn't about joining the Philharmonic or anything, dear. You only need play one note at a time."
"I'm trying very hard not to ask it, but…"
"Fine, then." Lotus waved her wand, clearing away the dinner dishes except for small bowls of lime desserts. The family didn't speak a word until the bowls were empty; then, Lotus beckoned Cho to follow her up to Cho's bedroom. Lotus sat on the bed and motioned for Cho to join her.
"You saw me this morning, didn't you? You saw me stepping on the teacups without breaking them." Cho nodded but didn't say anything. "And then you tried it yourself. Did you believe it?"
The question confused Cho. "Well, I saw you do it and all, but I didn't know what was happening."
"You thought it was some sort of trick, then?"
"Only because I didn't understand what you were doing right that I wasn't."
"Part of it involves understanding, and part of it is something deeper. We use music in Chinese magic as a form of meditation. We focus our ears, our breath, our muscles, everything on one small event, one note. We make the note happen, then we let it fade away. In that moment, the note is all that exists; it's all that matters. When the note is gone, so is the rest of reality, and in that moment you are freed from physical limits. In that moment of absolute nothingness, everything is possible. Once you understand that, to invest everything into something so small and transient, you can use that level of concentration to lighten the body, or do anything else. Do you understand?"
"I think so." Lotus looked at Cho and could tell that, this time, she really did understand, at least the general idea.
"Fine. Practice the movements in the daytime and the music at night. Don't neglect either of them, since each can help you with the other."
"Mummy," Cho asked, as Lotus made for the bedroom door. "You aren't just going to leave me to my own devices, are you?"
"I can't play the flute for you, anymore than I can turn my weapons on myself. Ultimately, these are your lessons, and you must practice and practice and practice them. But this is what you wanted, isn't it?"
"Yes, mummy, but…"
"This isn't such a big house. Even if I'm not in the room, I'll probably know your progress, and, if you need my help, I'll be here."
Cho smiled. "That's all I need; thank you."
"Start on the flute now. Don't stay up too late." With that, Lotus left the room as if Cho wasn't still there.
Cho simply looked at the flute for several minutes, not knowing how to hold her fingers or shape her lips. After a while, she realized that nothing would happen—rightly or wrongly—if she didn't try. She raised the flute.
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It took a week before Cho was able to get a note that vaguely sounded like music out of the flute. She hadn't a clue about embouchure or fingering, and couldn't take time to go to any of the other libraries around London to look for a musical text. Anyway, Lotus seemed to trust Cho to figure it all out on her own.
At first that faith seemed misplaced. Cho made what she would later realize were all the classic mistakes of a musical beginner, especially by blowing harder and harder to try to produce a sound. After a couple of sessions in which she nearly hyperventilated and passed out, she went in the other direction and used less and less breath, while also moving the flute and changing her lip positions. Finally, late on the Saturday night, Cho succeeded in sounding a note, surprising herself in the process. Succeeding at getting a sound from the flute was a major achievement for Cho—especially since she continued to break teacups with each step.
The flute lessons eventually led her down the path her mother had mentioned: focusing on the single pure sound to the exclusion of all else, and thus settling her mind. It was easy, because the sound seemed to come from no one place in particular: not from the flute, not from Cho's breath, not from the room itself, but from a combination of all of these and more besides. Admittedly nothing dramatically magical was happening, but it was making Cho wish that Hogwarts had used music to awaken magic in its students.
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The herbs that Lotus added to Cho's diet were subtle; sometimes Cho thought she recognized them, but more often she could not. She asked about them only a couple of times, and was met with silence. This told her not to ask. Lotus never said anything about it, but she was probably afraid that Cho might experiment with herbs on her own. She really needn't have worried: Cho had spent all of her life around these plants and had a more than healthy respect for them, even if that respect was tempered at times with a lively curiosity.
Cho's father never took part in her training, but this didn't really matter. When time permitted, usually after the shop was closed for the day, Chang Xiemin and his wife would spar in the cellar room with the teacups. On these occasions Cho saw them go after each other with all manner of weapons: whips, weighted sashes, lances, daggers disguised as hairpins. They clearly meant to hurt, if not kill, each other, but then never did. This was sparring taken to the limit: keeping their skills alive while not causing any serious damage. Cho noticed, however, that they never used two weapons that were mounted on the walls of the parlour: the wooden sword that her mother sometimes gestured with, and a traditional Chinese musical instrument made of bamboo, called a sheng. Cho knew that the sheng was an instrument, but didn't know if there was anything magical about this one.
About three weeks after coming home from Hogwarts, Cho was taking a bath, in part to keep cool on one of the hottest days of the summer. "Mummy," she called out, "are you there?"
"Do you feel all right, Cho?"
After a moment, the bathroom door opened, and Cho stepped into the hall, naked as the day she was born. "Is this supposed to be part of it?"
"Part of what; the herbal diet?"
Cho nodded. "When I was a kid I so looked forward to turning into a full woman, but now I seem to be going backwards!"
"Do you really think so?"
"I think my bust is shrinking! And I think I'm losing hair down there!"
"I suppose I should have warned you. When I was your age in China, I stayed in a temple and studied these techniques with a dozen other girls my age. We lived together and could always compare notes."
"Compare notes about what?" Cho's father was on his way up the stairs; when he saw his daughter, he blushed, muttered, "Oh, my," and dashed back downstairs.
Lotus looked as if she was trying very, very hard not to laugh. "If you're worried, I can adjust the herbs a bit. Better finish your bath." Lotus started downstairs.
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Although she didn't discuss it with her mother, Cho had a goal. She hoped to master the teacup business by the last day of July: Harry Potter's birthday. Even if he knew nothing about it, Cho wanted to be able to look back to the idyllic days of Dumbledore's Army: when she was one of two dozen renegade students taking private lessons from Harry, defying the small-minded Dolores Umbridge, mastering the Patronus Charm. Then there were the impossibly wonderful weeks when Harry actually loved her as much as she loved him…
By the time the sun set on the last day of July, Cho had trodden on, and broken, more cups than ever. It was getting worse and worse. She didn't even think she could talk to her mother about it. She'd keep her own counsel, for at least one more day.
She ate dinner because it was expected; besides, her mother would demand that the herbs be eaten. So Cho finished off dinner early, then retreated to her room with her flute. She had been experimenting with various notes on the flute, and found that hitting the E in the second octave seemed to make the entire room vibrate. She took a deep breath, and slowly let it out as she played that E. And, for the first time, she found herself completely within the note. She was no longer a listener: it was part of her, although she couldn't have said how.
Nor could she have said that anything was different the next morning, 1 August, as she went down to the cellar and stepped on a teacup.
And it didn't break.
She didn't dare move; she hardly drew breath for five minutes. She was that afraid that something would go wrong, the moment would be lost, and porcelain would begin shattering all over again. But it didn't. At the end of the five minutes Lotus finally showed up, saw Cho standing on the cups, and beamed at her daughter.
That was all Cho needed. She waited a little, and went back later that day. Again, she moved from one teacup to another, with no breakage. She had made it; she was part of this new ancient world of Chinese magic. There was no telling what would be next.
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Friday morning, 2 August, Lotus awoke early, as usual, and went to wake Cho. Her bedroom door, however, was open and she wasn't in her room. Lotus went down to the cellar but found Cho in the parlour, sitting on the sofa, staring blankly ahead like an Inferi. She had one hand on Chairman Miao, and held the Prophet with the other hand.
"What's wrong, Cho?"
For answer, Cho held the newspaper out to her mother. The cover was dominated by the biggest "screamer" headline Lotus had ever seen:
MINISTER ASSASSINATED
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To be continued in part 3, wherein Cho and her parents consider the past and the future…
A/N: This series is based on Chinese magic, as explained in books such as Richard Wilhelm's "The Secret of the Golden Flower" and "The Wandering Taoist" by Deng Ming-Dao. For those who are interested, these resources, among others, are available. The point is that the wire work in movies like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is not just movie magic, but is based on Chinese magic.