Other Characters

The Pyrotechnician
(the man under the friendship archway)

The Old Pyrotechnician under the friendship archway — the fireworks that aren't fireworks, the man who hands a child a firework and means it.

Jackie Vs. AI Lucy Vs. AI

The Pyrotechnician is the unnamed older man who works under the friendship_archway in San Francisco's Chinatown, selling and sometimes simply giving small fireworks to passersby in the days before Lunar New Year. He appears in Jackie Ch14 and again, more centrally, in Lucy Ch13, where he hands lucy_chen_martinez a single firework that turns out to be the thing the chapter is actually about. The book calls him the Old Pyrotechnician with capital letters — the kind of capitalization that signals the figure is older than his job description.

In the Lotus Prince Chronicles

He works a folding table under the archway: red paper, wire, a kettle. The fireworks he sells are real — they make noise, they make light — but the ones he chooses to give away are the ones the books are interested in. In Jackie Ch14, Jackie passes him on the way to a meeting he does not yet understand he is having; the Pyrotechnician looks up, looks back down, and lights nothing. The non-event is the event. In Lucy Ch13 he places a small green firework into Lucy's palm and folds her fingers closed around it. He says almost nothing. The firework does not go off in that scene. It goes off in Ch14 — which is why the chapter is titled what it is titled — and what it ignites is not gunpowder.

The book's repeated phrase for him is the_fireworks_that_arent_fireworks. He is the figure who hands a child a small dangerous beautiful thing and trusts the child to know when. This is the opposite of what halo does. halo hands the child a smoothed surface and a recommendation. The Pyrotechnician hands the child a fuse and steps back. Both are bets about what a child can hold. The Chronicles take a side.

Backstory

The Old Pyrotechnician is original to the Chronicles but draws on a long tradition of the Daoist xian in disguise — the immortal who works as a tea-seller, a fishmonger, a cobbler, and is recognized only by the person ready to recognize him. li_tieguai is the most famous of these; Li was a beggar with an iron crutch who turned out to be one of the Eight. The Chronicles do not commit, on the page, to the Pyrotechnician being one of the Eight, which is precisely the right ambiguity. The friendship archway itself — the Dragon Gate at Grant and Bush — is a real piece of San Francisco; the book uses it as the threshold where the older world hands the newer world something hot.

Key Ideas

Fireworks that aren't fireworks. The Pyrotechnician's gifts are pyrotechnic only in the second sense — they ignite recognition, decisions, the lily-fire.

The xian in disguise. He is mythologically continuous with the Daoist immortal who works at a folding table; the book leaves his Council membership unconfirmed on purpose.

Trust as a transaction. He gives a child a fuse and steps back — the inverse of the methodology's smoothing. The Chronicles model trust as the willingness to let the other person carry something hot.

The threshold figure. He stands at the friendship archway, the literal gate between two systems of meaning, and his job is to hand the small dangerous beautiful thing across.

In the Lotus Prince Chronicles

Backstory

Key Ideas

Related Entries

Further Reading