Once upon a time there lived a little girl called Chun. Chun came from China where her name meant Springtime. She was a very pretty girl with dark shiny hair and bright brown eyes that shone out from under her fringe. She grew up tall and elegant, the cleverest girl in her class in the village school. So clever that she won a scholarship to an expensive boarding school in a big town over two hours away.
Her parents were so proud of her that they sold their finest cow to pay for her school clothes and proper luggage for her journey. Chun was delighted with herself too. She knew she had done well getting into a good school where she could work towards becoming a doctor or a scientist or a teacher.
Two weeks before she was due to leave, everything changed though. Chun began to wake at first light and jumped at the slightest sound these days. For the first time in her life she felt afraid, the butterflies in her tummy getting the better of her, making it hard to breathe and all sorts of nerves clanging inside of her, making her bones shake. She heard strange noises all the time and didn’t really feel safe anywhere not even in the orchid lined avenue the people of the village called ‘The Sanctuary’.
When she saw him in the end out of the corner of her eye, the origin of the sinister sounds, she couldn’t believe her eyes. A sanzuwu or three-legged crow if she had ever seen one, a symbol of promise and power, a symbol of the sun. What better symbol to leave the village with?
Seeing him reminded her of the fairytale her mother had taught her, the one about the thirsty crow who had to figure out how to draw water from a half empty bottle nearby. He used his head in the end and his beak too by dropping pebbles into the bottle until the water rose and he could drink it.
He cheered her up no end, that crow, let her see that if she continued to use her head and kept on believing in the power of fairytales, she would always live happily ever after no matter where her story took her…..
