The Butterfly's Wing

My name is Chin Lo, I learned to write my name at the age of five. My mother taught me, she said, "you must be strong, the road before you will be long, only you can decide the path you will take."After this day, the first day I wrote my name, and said it aloud, my mother smacked me across the face and said, "never forget". From that day forward my mother would call me "Yoshi," but rarely was I referred to as such, as it is the custom to refer to a person by what they do, their profession. I therefore, was more often referred to as the Butterfly Catchers Daughter.But on this day, this very first day of my transformation, I didn't question my mother's words, nor that with one stroke of a brush, my whole life had changed.At the age of eight, my father requested I go with him to Nagasaki where he'd been commissioned by the great Shogun Harsamo to apply his trade. My father was to be paid a great deal of money for his services and had been provided his own house, this was a great honor and so I agreed to go.My parents were unlucky to have three sons, two would have been a blessing but a third son would draw attention and would be taken by the military by the age of two, to be trained as a soldier. They naturally had hoped for a daughter but this was not to be their karma. A daughter they could sell, a daughter might have saved the family from debt. And so it was, that I became the daughter required to save face in this highly traditional world I knew nothing about.