Guest Post: The Magic in Bitter Medicine by Mia Tsai

Hi dear friends! Today, we’re here with a guest post from Mia Tsai, author of Bitter Medicine!

As a descendant of the Chinese god of medicine, ignored middle child Elle was destined to be a doctor. Instead, she is underemployed as a mediocre magical calligrapher at the fairy temp agency, paranoid that her murderous younger brother will find her and their elder brother.

Using her full abilities will expose Elle’s location. Nevertheless, she challenges herself by covertly outfitting Luc, her client and crush, with high-powered glyphs.

Half-elf Luc, the agency’s top security expert, has his own secret: he’s responsible for a curse laid on two children from an old assignment. To heal them, he’ll need to perform his job duties with unrelenting excellence and earn time off from his tyrannical boss.

When Elle saves Luc’s life on a mission, he brings her a gift and a request for stronger magic to ensure success on the next job—except the next job is hunting down Elle’s younger brother.

As Luc and Elle collaborate, their chemistry blooms. Happiness, for once, is an option for them both. But Elle is loyal to her family, and Luc is bound by his true name. To win freedom from duty, they must make unexpected sacrifices.

It feels like every Chinese and Taiwanese kid grew up with Journey to the West. Despite being born and raised in America, I still knew, if vaguely, about Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, and his trickster deeds as he thumbed his nose at the gods and flew around on a cloud, wielding a magic staff. There were cartoons, movies, and music about the Monkey King. There were puppets and puppet shows. Sun Wukong is quite possibly the most recognized and most beloved figure in Chinese mythology.

I had access to very little of that while I was a kid except for what my mother told me and what I gleaned from watching TV shows with my family during the summers I visited Taiwan. Still, that magic was different from what I had been absorbing in the US: spells cast by witches and wizards, who could be good or bad; grimoires full of incantations and potion ingredient lists; strange ponds distributing swords; magic that always took a toll on the user. I watched Sun Wukong cartoons, marveling at how magic was present but not the focus. I watched puppet dramas where puissant warrior-monks flew around, their long hair streaming behind them, and clashed with swords and fists, the fights always ending with one party standing and the other party defeated, blood leaking from their mouth.

The magic in these stories was always woven into the world the way superstition is woven into our world. The Taiwanese, I’ve been told by other Taiwanese, are an incredibly superstitious people. (I don’t think I’m superstitious, but the truth of the matter is that I am.) Spirits are always around, for example, and luck can be cultivated and grown through the correct alignment of things in your house. If you’re having a problem, you can visit a curse breaker or a diviner to figure out what’s wrong. All of this is magic to me—and that isn’t a negative statement. It’s a statement of wonder aimed at the simple magics of everyday life and extending to the high magic of long study, hard work, and expertise.

Expertise is, for many, magic. A jazz musician improvising seamlessly is magic. A dancer creating shapes with their body and eliciting emotion from an audience is magic. An artist putting an image formed in their brain onto paper is magic. And the magic in wuxia and xianxia is derived from the same idea: deepen your practice, never stop reaching for something higher, become the foremost expert in a specific set of techniques. Why not, I thought, allow this sort of magic to be present in the world of BITTER MEDICINE? Why not take this a step further and allow the world I created to have room for all magics, great and small?

It seemed like a no-brainer to start with Elle, a Chinese immortal with an affinity for calligraphy and fulu, and grant her the ability to paint a character and have it become whatever she wants. No spells, no incantations, no sacrifice. Just a brush, ink, qi, and the intense willpower it takes to wish something into existence. And from there, I expanded her skill set and gave her a background that’s less common in Western stories.

Elle is descended from the Chinese god of medicine, Shennong, whose godhood was attained by eating a poisonous plant before he could drink the antidote (but not before discovering tea, agriculture, moxibustion, and acupuncture, and writing an extensive handbook of plant remedies), then getting fast-tracked to the heavenly deification committee. Elle’s facility with calligraphy makes her somewhat of an outlier in her family, but she’s pyrokinetic and has studied Chinese medicine for most of her life. She’s also a magical pharmacologist who creates and mixes restoratives for her clients. She, of course, drinks a lot of tea. In true wuxia and xianxia fashion, Elle uses pulse diagnosis to tailor her formulations to her clients. This is as much taken from wuxia and xianxia as it is personal experience since Chinese doctors will check you out before custom-making your medicine.

Other common tropes taken from wuxia and xianxia are characters flying and using specialized martial arts techniques, as well as Chinese medicine to fix just about everything—although no one in BITTER MEDICINE makes magic pills. That’s where the inspiration ends. I’ve taken great care to describe BITTER MEDICINE as xianxia-inspired and not xianxia. BITTER MEDICINE is a modern mix of cultures and influences, though the East Asian influences are probably the most prevalent. Regardless, I hope readers enjoy it and have fun picking out all the mythologies I’ve put into the book, plus a reference or two to my favorite C-drama, Nirvana in Fire.

Links for Bitter Medicine: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop | IndieBound