What's Making Me Happy: "if At First You Don't Succeed, try, try Again" by Zen Cho
In one light, Zen Cho's If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again is precisely what it says on the tin: A hapless imugi is determined to attain the form of a full-fledged dragon and enter the gates of heaven. For a long time, things don't go well. Then, it meets a girl.
But it's so much more than that. The protag's sense of humor is biting and self-depricating at once. Its view of humans, slowly shifting from disdain to confusion to love for a few precious few is spectacular. And that it's only when it opens itself to the full beauty and terror of the world that it stands even a chance of success is the perfect capstone. Not to mention there's gorgeous writing and a queer love-story as its beating heart. And the numerous little details that flesh out the world of the imugi are magnificently hilarious; my stand-out fav has to be the self-help/braggadocio memoirs some of the already-ascended dragons deign to publish for their imugi brethren. If that's wetted your appetite, have an If you wanted to be a dragon, dumb perseverance wasn’t enough. You had to have a strategy.
Humans had proliferated, so Byam retreated to the ocean. It was harder to get texts in the sea, but technically you didn’t need texts to study the Way, since it was inherent in the order of all things. (Anyway, sometimes you could steal scriptures off a turtle on a pilgrimage, or go onshore to ransack a monastery.)
But you had to get out of the water in order to ascend. It was impossible to exclude the possibility of being seen by humans, even in the middle of the ocean. It didn’t seem to bother them that they couldn’t breathe underwater; they still launched themselves onto the waves on rickety assemblages of dismembered trees. It was as if they couldn’t wait to get on to their next lives.
That was fine. If Byam couldn’t depend on the absence of humans, it would use their presence to its advantage.
It was heaven’s will that Byam should have failed the last time; if heaven wasn’t ready to accept Byam, nothing could change that, no matter how diligently it studied or how much it longed to ascend.
As in all things, however, when it came to ascending, how you were seen mattered just as much as what you did. It hadn’t helped back then that the lake humans had named Byam for what it was: no dragon, but an imugi, a degraded being no better than the crawling beasts of the earth.
But if, as Byam flashed across the sky, a witness saw a dragon… that was another matter. Heaven wasn’t immune to the pressures of public perception. It would have to recognise Byam then.
The spirits of the wind and water were too hard to bluff; fish were too self-absorbed; and there was no hope of hoodwinking the sea dragons. But humans had bad eyesight, and a tendency to see things that weren’t there. Their capacity for self-deception was Byam’s best bet.
But it's so much more than that. The protag's sense of humor is biting and self-depricating at once. Its view of humans, slowly shifting from disdain to confusion to love for a few precious few is spectacular. And that it's only when it opens itself to the full beauty and terror of the world that it stands even a chance of success is the perfect capstone. Not to mention there's gorgeous writing and a queer love-story as its beating heart. And the numerous little details that flesh out the world of the imugi are magnificently hilarious; my stand-out fav has to be the self-help/braggadocio memoirs some of the already-ascended dragons deign to publish for their imugi brethren. If that's wetted your appetite, have an If you wanted to be a dragon, dumb perseverance wasn’t enough. You had to have a strategy.
Humans had proliferated, so Byam retreated to the ocean. It was harder to get texts in the sea, but technically you didn’t need texts to study the Way, since it was inherent in the order of all things. (Anyway, sometimes you could steal scriptures off a turtle on a pilgrimage, or go onshore to ransack a monastery.)
But you had to get out of the water in order to ascend. It was impossible to exclude the possibility of being seen by humans, even in the middle of the ocean. It didn’t seem to bother them that they couldn’t breathe underwater; they still launched themselves onto the waves on rickety assemblages of dismembered trees. It was as if they couldn’t wait to get on to their next lives.
That was fine. If Byam couldn’t depend on the absence of humans, it would use their presence to its advantage.
It was heaven’s will that Byam should have failed the last time; if heaven wasn’t ready to accept Byam, nothing could change that, no matter how diligently it studied or how much it longed to ascend.
As in all things, however, when it came to ascending, how you were seen mattered just as much as what you did. It hadn’t helped back then that the lake humans had named Byam for what it was: no dragon, but an imugi, a degraded being no better than the crawling beasts of the earth.
But if, as Byam flashed across the sky, a witness saw a dragon… that was another matter. Heaven wasn’t immune to the pressures of public perception. It would have to recognise Byam then.
The spirits of the wind and water were too hard to bluff; fish were too self-absorbed; and there was no hope of hoodwinking the sea dragons. But humans had bad eyesight, and a tendency to see things that weren’t there. Their capacity for self-deception was Byam’s best bet.