Jackie Lee

In the Lotus Prince Chronicles

Jackie's first weapon arrives in Chapter 1 as the Red Armillary Sash — a scarf his mother knotted at his throat, which catches a fall from the apricot tree and opens into a half-sphere parachute the way a thrown net opens. He does not understand it. He understands only that the air held him. Across the book, the household keeps producing artifacts: a cast-iron spatula that elongates into the Fire-Tipped Spear, a bicycle that lights at the rims into Wind-Fire Wheels, a brass napkin ring that comes back to his hand when he throws it. Each weapon is the same shape as a chore. Each is a test of whether he will pick the chore up.

Underneath this, Jackie is doing something quieter and harder. He is learning that Halo has been speaking for his mother, drafting his father's emails, suggesting his own thumbs. The Council of Eight Immortals tells him he is Nezha; the family's chat history tells him he has not actually said anything to his sister Anna in four months that amplification did not write first. The book's question for him is not whether he can hold the spear. It is whether, when he finds Anna nine floors underground, the sentence he speaks to her will be his.

Backstory

Jackie is an original character, but his name carries weight. Nezha — the third son of General Li Jing in Investiture of the Gods — is the protector deity Jackie is told he is reincarnating. The Daoist tradition calls Nezha the Lotus Prince because, after killing himself to spare his parents from a sea-dragon's vengeance, he is rebuilt by his master Taiyi Zhenren from a lotus body. Jackie's tape-and-wire glasses, his thinness, his half-stutter, are the writer's deliberate inversion of the iconography: this Nezha does not arrive armored. He arrives the way a thirteen-year-old arrives. The weapons reach down to find him.