The People's Princess of China

By Anne Cestors

In May of 2018, romantic comedy sent a beautiful rookie journalist from China's largest daily newspaper, to cover Prince Harry's royal wedding to the stunning Meghan Markle.

However, because of a mix-up at the China Daily News, the Assistant Editor has misheard the word Royal, and accidentally sends her reporting crew to Boyle in County Roscommon, Ireland, where, by an appalling coincidence, local Irish heart-throb, Harry O'Toole, has been duped into a shotgun wedding.

The shotgun wedding comes unstuck on the steps of the altar, leaving the Chinese journalist without a story to report.

The People’s Princess of China emerges when local priest, Father Fagan and his Parish Council, decide to save the day by orchestrating a make-believe wedding.

Four weddings, no funerals and the profanity of an Irish Catholic priest, conspire to fashion a range of reasons to love life.

As the Cinderella of creative writing, romantic comedy rarely gets to rock the foundations of English literature!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anne Cestors
• Release date: Jun 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005216559

Anne Cestors

The Anne Cestors Syndicate is a group of post-terrestrial entities posing as screenwriters, who are in fact, aspiring actors and actresses perpetually competing against one another for roles in various movies, stage-plays and literary works of art, down through the ages.On this occasion, they were discovered behind an abandoned shrine in a house previously owned by an Asian American family who became Westernized, and left their ancestors behind.Boasting a wide variety of previous acting credits, the genre of Romantic Comedy chosen by this group of quite garrulous ghosts* for their latest screenplay, was purely a matter of opportunistic supernatural plagiarism.They discovered, with the menaces of self-slamming windows and doors, and exploding light-bulbs, that the new owner of the residence accommodating their abandoned shrine, was an aspiring Irish comedy writer.The appearance in their midst, of the breath-taking People's Princess of China, totally made up for the garrulous belligerence of the rest of the bunch.Time spent in the enchanting company of the Princess's loving vulnerability, is an uplifting experience for those blessed by the protective power of her utterly delightful acquaintance.* Please be cautiously informed that the politically correct term for "Ghost" is now "Post-Terrestrial Entity".

Book preview

THE PEOPLE’S PRINCESS

OF CHINA

A ROMANTIC COMEDY

BY

ANNE CESTORS

Copyright © 2022 MessengerRNA Books

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

DEDICATION

The People’s Princess of China

is dedicated to Sydney Carton

whose literary act of martyrdom

in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’

can never be undone

other than to understand

the abiding power of love

to become the author

of its own demise

Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1.

CHAPTER 2.

CHAPTER 3.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Like nothing else

the love that shines

in a beautiful girl’s eyes

empowers her radiance

That love can fall like a welcome rain

on a creative soil so parched

it craves a touch, a look or a smile

just so the roots of an idea 

can find the oxygen of expression 

INTRODUCTION

One of the most convenient things about forbidden love, is its ephemeral invisibility.

No one needs to know too much about it.

However, sometimes it can inadvertently become a matter of international diplomatic importance.

Even then, the secret magic of forbidden love, remains as alien a concept to the forces that police cultural and generational division in modern societies, as the winter lives of swallows.

It was George Eliot who first advanced the notion that, though swallows, like many other migratory birds, remove themselves from our lives during the harsher winter months, they have a thoroughly meaningful existence elsewhere, before the joyous flutterings of their return announces the promise of summer.

But it was a less gender-shy George, namely, George Bernard Shaw, who blazed a pioneering trail as a playwright, by publishing his stage plays as books, which were often profanely prefaced by monumental eviscerations of anyone with whom Mr Shaw rightly considered himself to be at variance.

A relatively miniscule play, might often be dwarfed by comparison with all that needed to be said about an adversary, a vivisectionist or a God-fearing non-vegan.

The Anne Cestors Syndicate made it a threatening condition of their taciturn creative relationship with yours truly, a hapless numbskull de plume, who accidentally painted over a shrine left behind by previous owners of his house, that the screenplay they wantonly plagiarized from their involuntary landlord, would be published in the first instance, as a book.

Unlike the hurried mortality of Mr Shaw’s denunciations, post-terrestrial entities have all the time eternity puts at the disposal of the dead, which makes their impatience to get their stolen screenplay into print, a blatant exercise in supernatural hypocrisy.

The entities themselves dismiss supernatural hypocrisy as being both part of their entitlement to vicarious nostalgia, and within their dramatic remit.

Abandoning their roots and becoming Westernized, had occasioned the truculence of the forsaken parties, when a modern Asian-American family moved up in the world and left their ancestors behind.

When I found them, they were in a very bad mood.

In trying to cheer them up, I told them of my pretensions as an Irish comedy writer, and no sooner had the words escaped my inability to withdraw them, than I found myself involuntarily appointed as their numbskull de plume, because post terrestrial entities I discovered, are as determined as their mortal analogues, to become movie stars, and coopting me as their writer-in-residence, appeared to them to represent a sure-fire recipe for having their acting talents discovered.

Applying Mr Shaw’s idea to the publication of their misappropriated screenplay as a book, they explained, avoided its certain death, were it to have gotten into the blundering hands of one of those literary agencies who diligently preserve Hollywood’s mountainous slush-piles, for the duplicitous purpose of carving out an easier life for their established army of robotic screenwriters, (their words, not mine).

For their own part, the Anne Cestors Syndicate wish it to be known that they themselves are anything but a bunch of rogue comedy-writing robots.

Rumors to the effect that they escaped from the politically-correct monotony of tech industry proprietorship and censorship has, they claim, been promulgated by Hollywood elitists and insiders, as a supremacist act of mockery, (now mirrored in every conceivable way by the purported escapees).

Unwittingly exploding a revelatory bombshell in the conservative history of English literature, they point to the bona fides of an existence pre-dating the inception of the tech industry, as flowing from several distinguished acting credits already recorded by the illustrious career of Father Fagan in particular.

The multi-faceted cleric lays claim to one of those credits being an acquiescence on his part, to a request by Ellen Ternan, that he play the role of Mr Boffin in her collaboration with Charles Dickens during the creation of Our Mutual Friend.

Hitherto, the world of Dickens scholarship had never countenanced the concept that a frivolous and secret love affair with the highly intelligent and beautiful Jody-Foster-look-alike, could possibly have encompassed a collaborative dimension.

But here were a bunch of post-terrestrial entities who, in their zeal to progress careers as movie stars, trotted it out as an established fact, like as if they were sprinkling snuff at a wake. 

When Ellen’s forbidden relationship with Mr Dickens surfaced years after the event, it never occurred to the scandal of salaciousness accordingly indulging itself, that the mixed-race English-Irish pedigree of the street-wise actress, could possibly have been the intellectual equal of so erudite a writing genius, as ever took a pen in his hand.

For a decade and a half, Ellen shared the secrets of her soul with Mr Dickens’ most productive story-telling years, during which time, the style and depth of a prodigious writing talent, prodigiously exhibited the style and influence of a collaborator, who hid from Victorian society, with the dashing panache of a forbidden collaborator’s sublime indelibility.

Father Fagan, as a time-travelling thespian, tactlessly unaware of the literary bombshells his lack of diffidence occasioned, proudly points to another key acting credit when, in an attempt to avoid becoming type-cast as the affable Mr Boffin, he accepted George Eliot’s request that he star as the more taciturn ‘Mr Macey’ in ‘Silas Marner, The Weaver of Ravelow’.

In support of the latter claim, this particular numbskull de plume would contend that Father Fagan’s acting prowess is advantageously equipped to handle Mr Macey’s literary place at ‘The Rainbow’ in the Village of Ravelow, arising out of the consummate ease with which he mastered the copious liquor consumption tendencies of an Irish parish priest.

In further support of Mr Macey being an integral part of Father Fagan’s persona dramatis, the post-terrestrial entity in question appeared quite at ease in a theatrical setting also given to a vernacular abundantly supplied by profanity and rampant catechistic misogyny.

Though historically fixed to the period preceding 2014, the timeless supernatural traits at the disposal of the Anne Cestors Syndicate become apparent, and not in any bashful sense, from their positive mixed-race musings, which tantalizingly prefaced Prince Harry meeting and marrying the beautiful Meghan Markle.

The royal prerogative successfully deployed by his older sibling, namely: As long as one of us is stunningly beautiful, I don’t necessarily mind being the not-so-stunningly beautiful one, was again deployed by the younger Prince.

However, Prince Harry’s condescensions were off-set by the equal and opposite condescensions of an actress, as intellectually equal to timeless recognition as Ellen Ternan was, in the faceless face of Victorian obscurity reserved for the female gender by Britain’s brutish establishment.

With sanctimonious disdain at my incredulity, Father Fagan referred me to a letter written by Ellen Ternan after the passing of Mr Dickens, in