Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe and Time Magic
In Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake, a reimagined Chinese folktale, two estranged sisters, shockingly different in their perspectives and lifestyles, are thrown back together—but they’re also really old snakes, in (mostly) human form.
The novel opens in 815, in the Tang Dynasty, inside a willow tree, when Su and Emerald are a krait and a viper.
It opens in the way of fairy tales with a two-sentence paragraph that evokes the deep past and the voice of a storyteller: “Before they had legs, they had tails. This was way back when.”
The first section of the novel is titled “Before,” and is something like a prologue. I want to look at the fascinating magic it creates and how that magic is specifically folkloric in its playfulness with time and language.
Here is the second paragraph:
Before the buzzkill of data and doomscrolling. Before the inception of the steam engine and the stock exchange. This was more than a thousand years ago, under a majestic weeping willow whose hollowed trunk was home to an inseparable pair of snakes who had sworn to be sisters: one pure white, the other jewel green.
The “more than a thousand years ago,” as well as the adjectives, put us firmly in a world of folklore: the “majestic” weeping willow, and the snakes who are distilled to the single vivid details of “pure white” and “jewel green.” (This doesn’t mean that these colors are all these snakes will be, but it’s a memorable way to differentiate them, while strongly evoking the purposeful flatness of the fairy tale form.)
The word “before” is used, but we’re basically being told when this story is not happening: not in the time of data, doomscrolling, steam engines, or stock exchange. This is about clarifying when the moment in question actually occurs and what matters about that moment. We later get a specific year, but the most important part is that this happens long before our modern time.
I’m also very interested in the slangy contemporary feel of words like “buzzkill” and “doomscrolling.” They don’t seem like they should be folktale words, and yet I think they’re perfect. Of course, we can justify that they are describing contemporary times, so it violates no rules of logic. Sure, but there’s a lot more to it.
A certain magic occurs because these concepts exist only to negate themselves, to say “the notion of buzzkill did not exist.” I think that’s a particular kind of magic—we have a voice that knows what “doomscrolling” is, but then says, oh no—no such thing!
I love a voice that negates and the paradox of that. Because vivid words spark a sensory image, a negated phrase can’t help but exist for the reader, even if the narrator insists it doesn’t exist inside the story. And so we’re inspired to hold the impossible in our minds in a way that feels magical.
In addition, when a voice tells what is not happening, that voice asserts itself as an entity that exists beyond the story. We might not learn about the background or experiences of the narrator, but we get the sense of a distinct personality or force. And we get the implication that this narrator exists in a bigger world—maybe even our own.
Another function, of course, in learning this is “not” the time of doomscrolling, is establishing a voice that exists outside of time, or is at least caught up to contemporary times. In technical terms, this is a retrospective voice, capable of looking deep into the past but also zooming right up to present day. In the very next chapter, we’ll see this happen and be ready.
Further down on the first page, we get a different sort of anachronistic detail: a bridge in the distant past is described as a place where “amorous lovers stopped to cop a feel.”
Previously the slangy contemporary language described a more recent time, but this is putting the language of modernity to use in describing the actions of the far past.
Of course, it does some of the same work in terms of preparing us to follow these sisters to their present-day lives in New York and Singapore. Of course, it’s also logical that this can happen. The term “cop a feel” applies whether or not the ancient snakes or ancient people would use it, and we’ve already established a voice that knows the future and is versed in its slang. But it’s still a bit of a shock when the reader reaches the phrase. It’s unexpected. And it might make us think of the past in a new way.
But it’s also more than that. There’s a specific sort of magic created by this playfulness with time. Traditional folktales are often set in a vague sort of past that has castles and princesses and agrarian life, but no phones or cars or computers. It’s often kind of pseudo-medieval. It’s somewhat unusual—and also refreshing—to get a specific year.
With such a penchant for nebulous time periods, I’ve often wondered if the technology, or geopolitical systems, or even the wisdom found within traditional folklore is necessarily consistent to what would be known in whatever specific year a tale is meant to have taken place. Because why should it be? That’s not the point. The storytellers transcend time by telling the story again and again over time. As a story is retold, it might stay more or less the same, but it can’t (and shouldn’t) remain completely intact. Instead, it’s influenced by where (and when) the storytellers take it.
As a storyteller, to include terminology from your own era is a way to claim the story as your story too. It doesn’t only belong to the people in the past, but to the people in the present—to those telling it and also to those listening.
It’s not uncommon to find anachronistic details in folklore, especially (but not exclusively) in modern retellings. Part of that is time magic. Another part is whimsy—it sets a playful tone. But I believe it also serves the critical function of asserting the voice of the storyteller. It’s a way to build the personality and particularity of the narrator, by saying their take is unique, and also by saying “my time matters too.”
Folktales aren’t artifacts but memes, and they accumulate wisdom through retelling. And so, paradoxically, a turn of phrase that might not realistically have been used in the first telling of a folktale or in the time when it actually happens, can still be profoundly authentic, in the way it celebrates how stories are passed from teller to teller and how each voice can—and must—shape it.
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