Wei

(韋)

In the Lotus Prince Chronicles

Wei does not run the Council meeting; Lü Dongbin does that. Wei adjusts it. He is the member who, when the conversation has gone too long in one register, asks the question that brings it back — and the question is almost always small, almost always practical, almost always the question the room had been about to skip. In Chapter 6 he is the one who asks Jackie what Jackie has had for lunch, and the question, which sounds like a deflection, is in fact the test: a Lotus Prince who can answer the lunch question without performing a Lotus Prince has passed the part of the meeting Wei is grading.

Wei's presence in the book is mostly tonal. He does not deliver the recognition (Ms. Bai does that) and he does not deliver the operational (Lü Dongbin). Wei delivers the room's permission to be ordinary in front of the older world — the permission that Jackie, taped glasses and rabbit and all, very badly needs.

Backstory

Cao Guojiu (曹國舅) is the courtier-immortal of the canonical Eight, traditionally depicted with a jade tablet or a pair of clappers — the figure who came to the Daoist immortal life from the imperial court, and who carries the manners of a room in which the wrong word has consequences. The Chronicles re-renders him as Wei for the modern Council, with the surname 韋 chosen specifically to distinguish him from the salle-keeper Ms. Wei of the Lucy volume. The two characters are visually similar in some scripts and conceptually unrelated; the canon's care on this point is one of its small kindnesses to the reader.