Yesterday I took in a bit of Chinese culture at the Botanical Gardens, being that it was Chinese Culture Days. First up: opera--not a three-hour affair with a cast of dozens and all the musicians and face paint that takes two hours to put on. This was maybe a half hour long, with two performers, and they only spent 45 minutes on their face paint. The story involved the Monkey King stealing peaches from the Emperor's palace in the sky whilst the Emperor's Warrior tried to thwart him in this pursuit. The detail with the greatest personal resonance was that the Monkey King's weapon was a magic staff that shrank to the size of a needle when not needed. As some of you may know, one of the characters in my fantasy stories has a sword that shares this size-altering trait. This little bit of personal mythology has always posed a problem for me when I write the stories, because it's difficult to describe a sword becoming toothpick-length without it sounding hokey. I would just as soon have dispensed with this detail altogether. But now it has been legitimized by Chinese opera.
It's possible the most incongruous details are the ones you'd better not leave out.