The Role of Etiquette in Chinese culture (3)- Ceremonial Rites 

There used to be more ceremonial rites in ancient China but many have grown out of fashion. For example, the coming of age ceremony for the high born where males aged 20 are capped and given a courtesy name while girls’ hair is styled into a bun and given a hairpin at the age of 15 have unsurprisingly mostly ceased to be practised. Instead, the modern definition for adulthood being 18 years old is used and mostly there is no ceremony other than the standard birthday party or family dinner. 

In terms of modern ceremonies, marriage still remains one of the most important ones and some of the associated rituals like the tea ceremony (the newly wed kneel down and hand a cup of tea to parents on both sides) and gate crushing (groom and best men having to complete a series of tests before the bridesmaids would let them see the bride) are still intact. But marriage in ancient times involved the Six Etiquette, a six step process involving: 1) a proposal of marriage by the male family; 2) asking for the bride’s name and birth details; 3) placing the would-be bride’s details at the family altar to confirm compatibility; 4) sending betrothal gifts from the male to the female family; 5) selection of a wedding date and 6) the wedding ceremony itself. 

There were also a set of extensive rites for new borns but only the one-hundred day feast has really survived to modern times across regions. For example, the rite of ‘Pick the anniversary’ celebrated on the first birthday of the child where he/she is presented with a number of objects and is supposed to pick one that resembles their future is not practiced anymore in Hong Kong. 

Funeral rites were also governed by etiquette going back before the founding of the first dynasty that unified all of ancient China. In particular, different social classes were entitled to different treatments for their funerals. I am currently reading a Chinese online novel set in the Warring State period and it recounts how Confucius is considered a noble class but has not gained a certain level to be buried according to the top tier of formality. Nowadays, this is no longer the case and funeral rites pretty much depend on the region you are living in and the preference of the family and deceased. 

Moonlake’s Book Discoveries- December 2025

Fantasy

The Crack at the Heart of Everything by Fiona Fenn

I like it okay as a redemption story but it hasn’t really struck any deep seated chord with me. The ending is somewhat interesting but I’m not sure what it does for the story exactly. 

An exchange of Gifts by Anne McCaffrey

Okay for a fantasy novella aimed towards the younger ages (the foreword just said this is for her grand daughter and it felt fairly YA), I was really trying to read the Pern series but too popular so I just browsed some of her other titles and came up with this.

Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake 

I think this is urban fantasy but is really a sibling drama type of book. I had thoughts of giving it up to be honest except that there is a question underlying the story that ‘hooks’ me into continuing. And then work overflooded me for two days and that forced break made me lose interest in it and so I abandoned it. 

The Hills have Spies by Mercedes Lackey 

Somehow I’m in a fantasy mode and the name Mercedes Lackey popped up in my mind. I don’t think I have read any of her novels and I have enjoyed my first foray into the Valdemar setting. I was expecting somewhere else for the ending but I can’t say I’m actually disappointed. 

Eye Spy by Mercedes Lackey 

This is again a good YA fantasy set in Valdemar, not as exciting as the first of the trilogy but good enough in its own right. Not many complaints and I think I will go onto the last of the trilogy. 

Spy, spy again by Mercedes Lackey 

The structure of this trilogy reminds me of a bridge with a sagging middle in that the premise of this novel has become exciting again compared to the middle novel. The narrative has also gone back to being a divergent one because there are two perspectives that make up this story (this also happened with book 1) and I enjoy the way that it’s not always alternating between the two perspectives but that it flows more organically depending on events. 

Overall, a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy. 

The Last Herald-Mage trilogy by Mercedes Lackey 

This is an omnibus version that my local library stocks in ebook form. Going from the Family Spies to this, I was much taken aback by the starting story for the legendary Vanyel. I also somehow had the expectation that this would perhaps be a tight-knit trilogy as opposed to standalone due to a recurring element described in book 1 (and book 3 somehow did tie back in with book 1 due to this precise element in an oblique way but it still wasn’t a tight-knit trilogy where the three tells a single story as opposed to three different stories) but I’m not too disappointed by this. Overall, a satisfying read. 

Moonalake’s Writing Updates- December 2025

I have officially moved onto draft 0.84, which is somewhat of a milestone since I’ve been stuck at draft 0.83 for three years and a little bit over now. 

One of the main takeaways (well, I’ve always known this but the Excel exercise gave me a much clearer idea of the difference between my male and female protagonist in terms of my progress on them. I’ve got Act 1 pretty much down pat for my female protagonist but not so for my male protagonist) is that I really need to work on the plotline for my male protagonist. And this is what I’m doing right now. 

Not much to report on the WIP but this is one of the biggest achievements I’ve attained for a while now. So hurray!

You can’t have it all but there is this…

The opening line is from You Can’t Have it All by Barbara Ras. It wasn’t a prompt that I took well but I did manage to move into it after the first two paragraphs. I wrote this about one year or two years back. I had been moving away from Wild Writing because to be honest, it was just serving the function of content provision for my blog and now my travelogue is taking the lion’s share of what I consider Personal Showcase alongside my newfound identity as a Game Master etc. 

You can’t have it all but there is this. There is the PC that you can use to do so many things: to write, to read and to play. The PC is so much the centre of your life right now. 

You can’t have it all but there is this. There is your bed that you’ve slept in such that it is a little softer on your side. Last night it was so cold that Mum said that cold was keeping her awake so she said she will throw on an extra blanket and then the two of you slept so well that you felt you could lie in bed forever. 

You can’t have it all but there is this. You can have a best friend that you never intended to keep as a best friend but has nevertheless blossomed into a relationship that lasted over 20 years. In fact, it was almost two-thirds of your life. That’s something. 

You can’t have it all but you can be born as an alternate version of your mother. I swear I was not nurtured to be that way but that it was a fluke of nature, mostly. 

You can’t have it all but there are always little chance discoveries that seem so fortuitous, once in a while. 

You can’t have it all but there is always the day to day progress that moves regardless of whether you move or not. 

You can’t have it all but there is this: if you stick to what makes you happy, you will be happy. Trust yourself. 

Remarkable Women in Ancient China (26)- Liang Hong Yu 

Who is She? 

One of the known female generals in ancient China and potentially the only one that had spent some time in a humble situation

Notable Life Events

  • It is not really known what is her actual birth name but it has been passed down since Ming literature that her name is Hong Yu which is probably made up. She was born in 1102 in the late Song dynasty. Multiple sources suggest that she was born to a family of military officials and was trained to fight alongside her elder brother but became a prostitute presumably due to a crime committed by his father. She first became the concubine to the general Han Shi Zong and then got promoted to the wife position after his original wife died 
  • In March 1129, Madame Liang and her son were first held hostage during a rebellion but she was later sent as an emissary to her husband to persuade him to not attack. Instead, she went to him to discuss tactics together and the rebellion was successfully quelled. For this, she became the first wife of an official who had her own separate wages.
  • In March 1130, she and her husband were stationed at the mouth of a river when the Jing (a nomadic group) invaded in force. She directed forces via drumbeats by climbing up to a tall building despite the threat of arrows and managed to blockade the Jing general for 48 days before he had to make his escape. For this, both her and her husband received promotions in their titles.
  • In March 1135, the two of them were assigned to move to a much war-ravaged Chu Zhou. She died about 5 months after arrival. 

Why is She Remarkable?

I didn’t actually know she was the one who started a trend of wives of officials earning a separate wage. I didn’t even know that this was a thing that existed in ancient China. And I think that clearly sets her apart. 

Moonlake’s Thoughts on her: 

Not sure what I think about her actually since her notable life events focused on battles. 

22 days train trip in Spain and Portugal- Portugal part 3

The final leg of the trip overall is at Lisbon. Since we travelled there via train, the first day was dedicated to visiting the Alfama neighbourhood. We lived in a hotel in the Rossio neighbourhood very close to the Rossio train station and Alfama neighbourhood is actually just the next neighbourhood over so we caught a bus there. We didn’t do much except take a photo of the Arco de Rua Augusta (we tried to look for the Arco de Jesus but couldn’t find it, we just kept getting turned around following Google maps instructions so we gave up). For dinner, we ordered oysters, razor clams and octopus. I think it’s here that we finally caught on that the trick for consuming Spanish/Portugese oysters is to squirt heaps of lemon juice on it to neutralise that high sea content. Razor clams was the chef’s special that day and the octopus was the restaurant special. The octopus was cooked excellently, being soft in texture rather than hard and stringy. The razor clam was good too. 

Day 2 was spent at the Belem neighbourhood. We gave the popular tourist tram a miss for fear of pickpockets and caught the bus instead to Jeronimos Monastery (since we bought Navegente cards on the first day and topped up 20 Euros each which ended up being too much due to us often taking taxis).  We had lunch at  Manteigaria –Fábrica de Pastéis, that very famous shop for pastel de nata (actually I think I already saw it multiple times in Porto but we had always given it a miss because with Mum and my small appetites, we don’t have much quotas for afternoon tea) because it was very close by. Except we had it at the wrong Manteigaria, the place that didn’t do table service with only limited sittings so we had to wait around a bit for two seats outside (the one that does do table service is further down the street but actually lucky that we went to the wrong one, we would have probably bypassed the table service one, that one has an insane queue outside). To be honest, we didn’t think it was special from the other pastel de natas- it just felt like a sweeter version of it. 

After lunch, we tried to find the Church of Saint Mary of Bethlehem, and as a direction blind person what I often do on trips is to follow where the crowds go. In this case, it obviously didn’t take me to the Church like I thought but rather to the Coaches Museum. So we turned back and that’s when I found out that we had already done the Church- as far as we can see, the Jeronimos Monastery and the Church are the different ends of the same building. We didn’t bother going inside the Church even though I know it has free entry. There was a parade of cavalry on the square near the Monastery that day (not sure if it was a daily event) and we snapped a lot of photos with the cavalry like everyone else (we did that twice actually when we passed by). We tried to find Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Discovery monument) without success and almost got a taxi there except that the taxi driver pointed out that it was down the road. In the process we also went past the Praça do Império Garden and we rested for a bit there but didn’t find it of much interest. We shot some photos of the monument across the road but couldn’t get closer since it was across a whole railroad track. I had booked a place for goose barnacles and razor clams for dinner and we almost couldn’t find it- we had to ask for directions three times before finding the correct street that it was on. I almost ordered crab there but changed my mind after seeing the picture which tells me that it’s going to be boiled which essentially leaves seafood tasteless. So we ordered goose barnacles as I originally planned but switched out crab for razor clams. The barnacles were bigger at this place and overall, we had enjoyed the food. 

Day 3 was the day trip to Sintra. We have two big destinations for that day: the Monserrate Palace and the Penal Palace. Since I booked the afternoon slot for the Penal Palace, we went to the Monserrate Palace in the morning. The first glitch of the day: the 435 bus took forever to arrive compared to the 434 (it was supposed to be a 435 bus every 20 minutes or something but reality is that there will be 3 or 4 434 bus all lined up for you to get on whereas you have to stand at the 435 bus stop for at least 40 minutes to see one appearing. And yes, there is a separate bus stop for the 434 versus the 435 bus which is by means clear). But we did get onto a 435 and made our way to the Monserrate Palace without problem. Overall, the Monserrate Palace is nice if you like nature and a place without a cluttered crowd but it is mostly walking (we bypassed the garden because it was the path going down but heard that it’s actually nice, especially the lotuses) and the signs are often wrong: especially when it tells you to turn right, you are actually supposed to walk straight. We grabbed a quick bite for lunch at the Palace cafe with a very short menu and when we tried to catch the 435 bus back, well, we basically gave up when someone came along asking whether anyone needs a ride back to Sintra for 10 Euro per person so we jumped up for that. To be honest, I got a bit iffy when I got on (thinking it might be a black cab) but actually it was a local who I think is a taxi driver of some sort (although he doesn’t drive an actual taxi and well, the Monserrate Palace does ban taxis from parking in the vicinity) since he has a sticker at the back of his seat that has a number to call for complaints. But anyway, it wasn’t a black cab and we got back to Sintra train station safe and sound to get on to the 434 bus to the Penal Palace. I had originally wanted to only get the garden tickets because we are not interested in history but when I booked the tickets, the official website told me the gardens were closed for renovation so I ended up buying the combo gardens+palace tickets instead. This turned out to be lucky because apparently the gardens are mostly trees as far as we can see and are on this steep path up/downhill depending on whether you visit before or after the actual Penal Palace. I wasn’t much enthused with the Penal Palace exhibitions (in fact, some rooms are so boring to me that I focused most of my photographic attention on the rooftops which are actually different in every single room). The courtyard is definitely much more photographic in comparison but of course, you most likely have to deal with snapping a photo of the crowd if you want to insert a person or persons into it (this is one top frustration with taking photos on overseas trips in Europe but can’t get around it). I could have avoided this if I booked a morning spot for the Penal Palace but I read online that Sintra most likely has a gray morning so I booked the 2pm slot for the palace visit- we got to the entrance around 1pm or a little after (and the courtyard etc can be accessed early, the slot booked was just for seeing the inside the palace). After the Palace, we tried to include the Sintra Villa as an extra stop but we basically just had ice-cream and then lost our way so after finding the bus stop, we just hopped on the bus back to the train station and called it a day. For dinner, we just walked to the closest street that had lots of restaurants and randomly chose the one that we saw had lots of seafood. We ordered oysters and razor clams and short of anything else to order, the truffle oil & mushroom pasta. The seafood was okay (the razor clams the biggest we’ve had but it’s a bit pebbly, not sure if it’s due to the size or the cleaning wasn’t thorough enough), the pasta so-so. 

Day 4 was mostly Chiado plus Baixa. We didn’t spend much time at the Chiado neighbourhood but basically just visited the Pink Street (R. Nova do Carvalho). It wasn’t much to look at, to be honest, just a bunch of colourful umbrellas above a street where the ground was coloured pink (but it’s really more black now due to the number of feet that have trod on it). I originally planned to try out the Bifana for lunch on this day but then I forgot about it and we had seafood pizza instead and it wasn’t a very good pizza at all. In the afternoon, we asked our way back to the Commercial Square where we shot more of the Arco da Rua Augusta since the first time we only had a joint photo there. Then we went on back to cover the areas near our hotel. We mainly did Praça Dom Pedro IV and Rossio train station and then called it a day. Dinner was again by random cruising of nearby restaurants. We ended up having dinner at a place that is just right next to where we had dinner the previous night. We ordered clams as well as an octopus mixture with clams, mussels and prawns. The clams were tiny and the mussels and prawns didn’t taste fresh at all. The only okay thing was the octopus but just okay. This was basically the most horrible dinner we had across the entire trip. 

Day 5 was really the flight back to Melbourne and originally I told Mum we will leave the exploration of the Rossio neighbourhood to this day but Mum just wanted to get the sightseeing done and leave the day free for the trip to the airport (the flight is at 2pm but we are getting picked up in the morning, we asked our hotel to book a taxi for us which was very easy because the taxi driver just came in and the hotel staff introduced us to him and we already paid for the taxi fare at the hotel). 

And that concludes our Spanish and Portuguese trip. Overall, we had a great time and in particular, we were pretty satisfied with the food here. 

Gaming Approach to Character and Utilisation in Fiction 

I mentioned previously that I took “some time off” from the WIP by converting all my main characters into FATE character sheets. What I didn’t explicitly mention was that I had a second go at this recently after I understood FATE myself better after watching a long Youtube video from FATE SRD in conjunction with a careful re-reading of the FATE Core rulebook. As a result, I put my two protagonist’s FATE aspects to the limit test as suggested by the rulebook and found that I’m better off collapsing two of my male protagonist’s aspects into one because they are actually very closely related, making way for another aspect that I generated via a random dice roll but was actually there all along in the current decimal draft I have. I also refined one of my female protagonist’s aspects but it was a task much more minor in scope. 

A parallel exercise that I did was to study the interaction of my character’s aspects (not just my protagonists but all the key characters) with a particular plot or a particular scene. In general, it works better on a larger plot level rather than the scene level. This is because I took the approach from FATE which is geared towards a general plot as opposed to a very targeted event. But I think I did manage to track down the main conflict for the female protagonist in one scene, that between part of her core identity, the current event in the scene and the implications for her changing relationship with a girl who is a sidecast for the novel. I don’t think it’s directly useful for me to peg down the details of the scene enough to write it but it’s still advancing the scene forwards a little bit. 

Mini Reading Challenge 2025

Overall, I’m quite pleased that I had undertaken the themed mini reading challenge this year. It took me to different types of books outside my usual reading habits and I had some quite pleasant surprises. 

I think my favourite out of the 4 books for the Constellation theme would be Defy the Stars which hooked me and got me to read the whole trilogy. The Same Stuff as Stars would be the second for being a heartwarming story that I’ve always had a fondness for. 

I also feel like I will be replacing Craft and Curiousity Reads with themed Mini Reading Challenges from now on. To be honest, I had totally stalled on going through that trilogy from last year that wasn’t really omniscient but felt somewhat useful for omniscient and I don’t intend to pick it up again. 

22 days train trip in Spain and Portugal- Portugal part 2

We chose to fly from Faro to Porto instead of taking the train because the trip would have been 6 hours. Unfortunately, the hotel I booked cancelled on me the last minute because apparently it actually tests my bank card for its remaining balance and found it not enough to cover the total payment even though it accepts cash (at least it said so on Booking.com but actually the hotel at Barcelona also said it accepts cash but apparently because we booked 4 nights it was over the threshold for accepting cash and I had to use my card to pay instead) and we basically intended to pay with cash when we arrived at the hotel. So I ended up booking an apartment instead and it was actually an apartment with a bunk bed. Mum and I had climbed onto the upper level of a bunk bed before and we figured we were not going to start trying now when she was approaching 80 and I’m in my 40s. So we ended up squeezing together on the same bed on the lower level. To be honest, we didn’t sleep well at all. The first night, when I was sleeping on the inside, I felt like I couldn’t breathe and Mum had to swap position with me. Then because I’m a sound sleeper, Mum couldn’t go to the toilet at night because I was obviously blocking her. Sound penetration was also quite bad. We were on the first floor and there is another floor up above us and every night there would be some stomping that we could hear from the apartment directly above us. But other than that, the apartment was fine. I especially like that the hot water from the shower comes quickly, unlike some of the other hotels we had lived in. And the upside is that the cost for 4 nights is about ⅓ of the cost for the original hotel I booked. Anyway, in terms of sightseeing, we only did the Clérigos Church and Chapel of Souls. We also tried to look for Sao Bento train station but got turned around a lot and then figured that we might as well look for it for real tomorrow since we are taking the train to Braga from it tomorrow. For dinner, I quickly booked the only decent restaurant that I could find through Google, which was the restaurant for a 4 star hotel that is at one end of the same street as our apartment. It had a small menu so we ordered garlic shrimps and sea bass with sweet potato puree. The food was decent but not great. 

After snapping enough photos of Sao Bento train station, Day 2 was spent at Braga. We took the bus to Bom Jesus do Monte as soon as we arrived and we almost didn’t go up via the funicular due to my fear of heights but it seemed such a waste of time in terms of phototaking if we didn’t so we took the plunge. And actually, it wasn’t that scary, it had a cable that pulled the car up that ran parallel to the track and it wasn’t that steep an incline (at least when I was sitting inside). So it took us all the way to the up and we walked a several set of short steps down to the take the obligatory picture with the cascading blocks of stairs (I don’t quite know how to describe it properly, see pic above) but being slackers, we didn’t go all the way down to the big oval place, just a vantage that would allow us to snap it. Then we walked back up to take the funicular down again. Then we took the bus back to the city and quickly snapped photos of Congregadors Basilica, Chafariz da Praca da Republica and Theatro Circo before stopping at Largo Sao Jao do Souto for lunch. Mum ordered a crepe and I ordered the banana split for lunch. It was quite tasty. In the afternoon, we visited Santa Barbara Garden, Largo do Paco and Arco da Porta Nova. Then we made our way back to Porto where we had dinner at the place I booked where we ordered 4 codfish cakes (very big, a little too much for our appetite, but not bad as they go) and an octopus dish. 

Day 3 was a day trip to Aveiro, the Portuguese Venice. We stopped a bit to take pictures at the Largo da Eastacao with more tile paintings before heading down Avenida Lourenco Peixinho on a straight path towards Moliceiros pier to make the obligatory boat tour. Actually, the boats here were more colourful than the Venice gondolas and I quite easily took a photo of an empty boat that passed by us but taking a photo of the boat we were on was tricky since we were allocated to sit at the back portion of the boat (the Aveiro boat fit way more people than the Venice gondolas). It was a 45 minute tour and after it, we had the local specialty pastry of Ovos Moles for lunch. It’s a pastry with egg yolks inside and it’s actually salty as opposed to sweet. After that, we took the line 36 Costa Nova bus to the end stop to snap pictures of the colourful striped houses. Actually, it was a pretty narrow strip of houses and not much to see. But we still took a long time. With a long gap between the 4ish and 6ish buses, we were basically stuck at Costa Nova and couldn’t even spot taxis. Eventually, we caught the earliest 6pm line 36 bus back and got back to Porto at around 8pm. It was very hard to find a restaurant without booking around such peak dining hours so we ended up ordering a Pepperoni pizza which was the only place that had ample sittings inside. 

The last day at Porto originally had breakfasting at the Majestic Cafe as an item but we scratched it because it wasn’t an experience we are actually interested in so it’s basically a church visiting day in the morning covering Church of Saint Ildefonso (which looks exactly like the Chapel of Souls except that it has two crosses instead of one in the middle and you can hardly see that it has two crosses unless you specifically looked for them), Igreja de Santa Clara, Porto Cathedral and Igreja de Sao Lourenco. During lunch, I ordered the francesinha and Mum ordered the biscuit pie. She really liked her pastry lunch but mine was so-so- I only ordered it to try the local specialty but didn’t really expect to like it. It basically tastes like a cheesy pizza with three types of different meat in it- the steak was a bit tough and the bacon tasted much better in comparison and there was a 3rd type of meat in it that I forgot was what. In the afternoon, we walked along the Duoro River. For dinner, I prebooked a place the day before in order to cheer Mum up with oysters. We also moved from the apartment to the 4-stars Mercure hotel up the street (where we had dinner the first day at Porto) in the morning (with the help of someone from the apartment who helped us carry our checked luggages down a short flight of somewhat narrow stairs and up the very narrow street to our new hotel) and with phone booking, the total cost of our Porto accommodation still came out cheaper than that of the original 3-star hotel I booked. Due to the late booking, the only slot available for dinner was 8:15pm. But it was worth it- we had oysters, barnacles (small portion that came with the oysters) and clams. It was the first time we had barnacles and it was the only live seafood that interested us because the prawns and crab all didn’t look too fresh. We were going to order razor clams but it was all sold out so we had clams instead. But back to the barnacles, we were shown how to eat the barnacles by the waiter- you had to pull really hard on the triangular bit at the bottom in order for the ‘covering’ to be pulled off, leaving the meat behind which tasted a lot like crab legs. It was always touch and go for me whether I could manage it but eventually Mum taught me that I could squeeze out the meat from the broken off tube/covering if I accidentally snapped it off with the meat inside instead. It left us more expectant of the next time we would have barnacles (I encountered them on the menu of a Lisbon restaurant during my detailed trip planning back in Melbourne and decided we would try them, knowing that Mum’s forever curious about new food and I personally have a fondness for what I call shell-like food: well, mainly clams, a lot of shells are hard to suck out so I tend to avoid those since I’m lazy). Overall, a great dining experience.

Broadening Horizon Reads 2025

Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter 

This was to be my first foray into the heist thriller, a subgenre of mystery that I have never delved into before. But the novel itself had too much of a literary fiction bend and the pace was just too slow for me so I DNF’ed it. 

Withered Hill by David Barnett

The plan was originally to read the Little Stranger by Sarah Waters but then laziness took over and I couldn’t be bothered ordering a physical book from my local library that I then had to go in to borrow. So instead, I stumbled upon this particular novel, self advertised as “A dark and unsettling British folk horror novel”. 

To be honest, this book rather fell short for me in terms of being a horror novel. It felt more like a thriller to me, with folk horror elements. I agree that it can be dark and unsettling for some people, just not for me. Having said that, this is not a bad novel. Why I likened it to a thriller is because it’s a sense of tension and curiosity over what bad things are going to happen to the main character that kept me reading. So that’s good. It just probably wouldn’t stay with me that much compared to the case where I am truly unsettled by the ending.