Santa Course Chi Tat Cheung A thesis submitted to Auckland University of Technology in fulfillment of the requirement of the degree of Master of Creative Writing (MCW) 2011 cohort School of Language and Culture i Table of Content Attestation of Authorship iii Acknowledgment v Exegesis front page vi Synopsis vii Exegesis vii Reference list xxx Creative thesis front page xxxii Thesis 1-204 ii I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another person (except where explicitly defined in the acknowledgments), nor material which to a substantial extent has been submitted for the award of any other degree or diploma of a university or other institution of higher learning. Candidate’s signature Intellectual Property Rights All intellectual property, including copyright, is retained by the candidate in the content of the candidate’s thesis. For the removal of doubt, publication by the candidate of this or any derivative work does not change the intellectual rights of the candidate in relation to the thesis. Confidential material The content of the candidate’s thesis is confidential for commercial reasons, that is, the possible publication of the thesis, or a derivative of it, as a work of creative fiction for sale. iii The creative thesis “Santa Course” was published as printed material and ebook on June 2012 via publisher xlibris, with ISBN: Softcover:978-1-4691-3235-8, and Ebook: 978- 1-4691-3234-1, with my penname: Mykay Bearman. This confidentiality remains after any commercial publication. For the removal of doubt, publication does not change the intellectual property rights of this or any derivative work. iv I hereby acknowledge Mr. James George providing mentorship to the thesis during the course. I also acknowledge Mr. Richard Gyde for editing the grammar of this thesis, which costs $480 consultation fee for the whole project. v Exegesis in part fulfillment of degree of MCW Chi Tat Cheung AUT University 2013 vi 1. Synopsis The fantasy novel Santa Course, begins with the main character, Leslie Florence, content, and living in Auckland. He has a good job as a civil pilot, a lovely wife Laura and a lovely son Jack. One evening, Leslie goes out to clear the rubbish. When he attempts to return to his house, the door is locked and the windows are closed. He eventually breaks into but finds his house empty. A stranger called Trinity appears. Trinity informs Leslie that he was knocked down by a car when he went out to clear the rubbish, and that the only thing that Leslie can do now is fly to the magic island Whantanu. Trinity provides him with tickets for the flight and tells Leslie that on the island he will be trained to be the next Santa Claus. Trinity promises Leslie that once he has become a genuine Santa Claus, a meeting with his beloved ones will be arranged. During his year in Whantanu, Leslie makes friends with Lung, another Santa Claus trainee. Together, they learn the skills necessary to be a Santa Claus. However, overtime it emerges that Santa Claus is in fact a fairy, and that being a fairy involves many rules, regulations and constraints. Flying, for example, involves more energy than swimming. Furthermore, fairies do not enjoy time traveling, they cannot foresee the future, or forecast the results of sports matches for the purposes of gambling. Fairies cannot create bank notes, because this would cause inflation. To complete the course, Leslie and Lung are assigned to an outward bound trip to an island called Nichigetsu where they are unable to practice their magic. They are given a task to find an immortal elixir using only their own ability and strength. In the end, the fairy management board decided to disqualify Lung’s fairyship. Could Leslie complete the task of Santa Claus alone without the help of Lung? 2. Motivations Two primary aims motivated the writing of my first English novel Santa Course. Firstly, being a novelist or a writer has been an ambition of mine since I was six. At that time, the vii financial situation of my family was below average, and so for entertainment, I would go to the Hong Kong public library. Reading books was free, borrowing books was free, participating in activities was free, and the air conditioning in the hot summer was free. Hence, I went to public library a lot. As I regularly visited the library, I started reading a lot of fiction. My literary level in both Chinese and English was limited, so I was unable to read many of the canonical works, which generally required a higher literacy level. As a result, I was limited to reading children’s fiction or young adults’ literature. These are the literary genres which have influenced me most. As I grew older and my literacy levels improved, I started reading adult literature. My favourite writer became Murakami Haruki, a fantasy writer from Japan, who takes magical elements to an extreme. His novels often employed the technique of the parallel narratives. For example, in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), the narrative is split between old-number chapters titled “Hard-Boiled Wonderland”, and even-number chapters titled “The End of the World”. Haruki’s parallel fantasy narratives are independent in the beginning chapters, yet eventually they merge together. As a reader, I enjoyed this narrative structure, however it was his use of fantasy that I was particularly drawn towards. When I was twelth years old, my English as a second language teacher asked us to write an article titled “My Aspiration”. I wrote about my aspiration to be a writer. However, she marked me as failed; her argument being that a writer is not an occupation. “Everybody can write, everybody can be a writer. Hence writing is not a career.” she claimed. Her argument really hurt me, and I thought I should consider another career. A midwife, a psychologist, a teacher perhaps. To some extent, my childhood dream was broken. When I was fifteen, I participated in a creative writing course during the summer vacation. It was a summer course organized by the School of Continuing Education of Hong Kong Baptist University. I was the youngest in the class. My final assignment was a love story. People teased me, “young boy,” they said, “how much do you know about love?” However, when I viii was in the university, I got a part time job as a screenplay writer for a soap opera in a Chinese TV station. This is the first time I had written something for money. Compared with other classmates in my course, my monthly income was at least three times what they were earning. Creative writing brought me a good income. Moneywise it was a good job. This was a good rebuttal to my English teacher’s belief, that being a writer is not a career, not a profession. In summary, Santa Course is a culmination of these motivations; the childhood desire to be a writer, the magical and fantastical worlds of Murakami Haruki and the fantasy literature of my childhood, and a dogged determination to prove my English teacher wrong - to show her that it was possible to carve out a career as a professional writer. Santa Course is also shaped by my screen writing experiences, in particular, creating the screenplays for Chinese TV Soap Operas. 3. The fantasy genre Wadham and Wadham (1999) suggest that fantasy literature can be categorized into several different sub-genres. The most obvious definitions involve the dichotomy between traditional fantasy and contemporary fantasy. Simply speaking traditional fantasy is defined as “a tale that originated in a spoken form and has been handed down orally” (p.5), and “the original author is unknown” (p.5). In contrast, contemporary fantasy has a known author. However, Wadham and Wadham also suggest that there is a category in between traditional and contemporary fantasy, that is contemporary fantasy with traditional elements. My work Santa Course falls in this category. Wadham and Wadham said “contemporary fantasy often makes use of elements from traditional tales” (p.9). They suggest some examples such as Donna Jo Napoli (1995) retelling of “Hansel and Gretel” from the witches point of view, or Vivian Vande Velde’s rewriting of Rapunzel as an advertisement for shampoo. My work rewrites the ix traditional story of Santa Claus, which is originally based on the contemporary belief that on Christmas Eve, Santa Claus rides a sleigh pulled by reindeers to distribute Christmas gifts to good children. However, the main theme of my work is the protagonists Leslie and Lung has to complete a “Santa Course” to be a “Santa Claus”. The novel develops ideas about how the protagonists participate the course, and how they react and respond to the course and their ‘fairyship’. My work, hence, is a retelling the story of the contemporary Santa Claus myth. Canonical Chinese Fantasy Wadham and Wadham (1999) also categorise fantasy into a form called high fantasy. They state that “high fantasy is generally defined as fantasy taking place completely within an invented world, with no reference to the world we know” (p.9). This can be illustrated by Neverland in Peter Pan and the Wonderland in Alice in Wonderland. In Chinese literature there are also many examples of high fantasy. For example, Flowers in the Mirror written by Li Ruzhen (1827). Flowers in the Mirror involves the protagonist Tang Ao’s adventures and travels in the Nation of Girls, the Comity of Nation and other high fantasy worlds.