Born in Lushui on the Salween River of a Lianhua- or Western-She-speaking Lisu mother from the Seu-phá clan and a Na-Yi father from Ningland,
ESL
left her hometown at age twelve to make her way downriver, mostly by wearing out her sandals, sometimes by straddling a mule-cinched pack saddle, past Wan Hsa-la and Pasawng, until, where the Moei enters the Salween, she boarded a fus
ty enisled sampan which took her to the port city of Moulmein where a Malaysian yawl waited to deliver her to places she was only able to reconstruct in retrospect, with the aid of an atlas borrowed from the library of
Ilena Public School 1 (
IPS 1) and her father-in-law’s knowledge of shipping routes: first, the island of Simeuluë, then the island of Lanka, then, skirting the Maldives, onward through the Gulf of Aden and into the Red Sea where she debarked, Shiva knows why, at As Salif,
languish and grow pale for, in her precious brogue, “nigh onto a frame of time surpassing my overseas passage until one fine day” she hitched a camel-lift to Az Zaydiyah whence a lorry took her to Jizan where she caught ship up the Red Sea all the way — at last! — to and through the Suez Canal and thence to Marseille where diurnally at the bar-restaurant-tabac La Wallonie du Mer [sic] in the Vieux Port she washed dishes and waited tables tandis que nocturnally in a sweatshop of that same quartier she sewed faux-suede patches onto the sleeves of faux-tweed jackets jusqu’au jour où
her older sister
Lee See arrived from her chalet on the Walensee and paid for
ESL’s passage on a Texas-bound tramp steamer en route to Owlstain thence acoss the Arathu to la nuestra ciudad at the Porto Vecho of which she debarked as any common pubescent tourist would, the same irresistibly waifish, ever smiling, and suborbitally plumbaceous jeune fille she had been when she left Lushui, despite the repetitive ravishings bought by endless roll calls of
enlisted man’s pay and
seamanly stipends the whole length of the wanton year (anno lasciviensis), and was greeted by her prospective husband’s father Llywelyn O’Wallis, a Welsh seaman from Swansea; her husband’s mother Athena
Yellow Steel, a Siuslaw squaw originally from
Lestelle, Wyo.; and her husband’s sister Little Sly Owl whose first words to See Law were, “Máščiṫaxanxan. Łítīumanł.” (‘We are sisters. Let’s eat.’) She went to live with them in their house in the
Ilena district of her new homeland’s Capital City. She was thirteen years old and the man to whom she was engaged to be married, Wallis
Yellow Steel, said to her on his return from the Twin Isles
where he had been observing the social behavior of the
speedy lamantins that rest and nest and romp there, “Kuminčnx txuṫuháułtxanx ṫamš” (‘Not for nothing are you child-bought [i.e. have you been bought as a child]’), and promptly enrolled her in
IPS 1, from which she would graduate magna cum laude
before receiving a full scholarship to North Texas-Egyptian University at Beulah (NTEU-B), her honor’s thesis at the former institution having delved into the xenophysiological load invasive
alien species burden their endemic congenerics with, and she eventually headed east to receive her doctorate (for which she pioneered the technique of installing artificial symplasts into the ependymas of her subjects, measuring, by means of an ascending amplidyne, the diffusion of adenine in response to noxious stimuli) at the Appalachian Mental Institution (AMI) in Shatsbrook in the lab of the well-known Flouzianian sociophysiologist and translexicalist
Robert Trober (she, in fact, was the first of the latter’s “
nine dampest lays”), thenceward back to her adopted homeland to head her own lab at
IPSI.
In addition,
ESL cyclically sports as a floramorita in Glamporium where she periodically makes her schizomythic entrée and sociophysiological plat de résistance most haptically tangible during the
globershian grapplings and imssocsian hobbledehoedowns on the floor of that establishment’s
Playground of Taboo. Recent appearances include the parts of hoyden and sundry naïad in Galvari and Ravigiallo’s
erautist production of
Lamia, a musical lipogram redistemperated from the poetastic mishmash of the same title by William Butler Keats, choice words of whom
ESL, chaunting soprano to her sisters’ alti and mezzi, put out for with in our chorus (we thank Gloria and Maryam for willfully granting us privilege to share a sampling of said operetta’s coda to be exact):
And so did Lycius moan; and as soon as said,
With a frightful cry that lady, too, into thin air stray’d:
And Lycius’s arms dropp’t, void of joy,
Of light, of living blood’s nocturnal ploy.
On that high couch Lycius lay! — his chums hung round,
Took him up — no throb, or glass-misting sigh was found,
And, in its nuptial shawl, his stiff strong body wound.
When not otherwise patulously
lepastic in a
sprawl of oneiric bliss or investigating psychomachic intrusions in
IPSI, the lithe bare
tan muscled thighs of
ESL may be ogled between supple calfskin boot-top and our
ludict’s standard minijupe of saffron and ash whilst the carmine-tipped digits of this stunning
birkîyam are observed handing out
müstig (misty-glassed) demis of
Ebeyl ale to panting patrons whiling away the buxom Testrastic hours in the dancing oculi of enblossomed linden-leaved shadows on the vernal and estival terraces of Glamporium’s
Agore Bar.