In Memoriam

Her name was Asunta Basterra Porto.

She was born under the name Fong Wang in Yongzhou, in the Hunan province of China, on September 30, 2000 - but, as she was raised in Santiago d Compostela since she was little more than 18 months old, she would likely have thought of herself as Asunta.

She died September 21, 2013 in Teo, in the Spanish province of La Coruña, killed by her adoptive mother, with the likely complicity of her adoptive (and most likely, sexually abusive - in an anodyne, do-not-leave-proofs and especially coward way) father.

From all records, she was a bright girl though, - possibly - a bit of that brilliance may have been forced on her.

Beyond school hours, she studied four languages - among whom, Chinese- as well as ballet and violin.

In other words, seen from a cynical but all to often accurate point of view, the usual way many well-off  parents have of getting rid of children that they do not really like to have around, since time untold.

By filling their kids' time with extracurricular activities, usually handled by external aid -  ancient Greeks had slaves for the job, the Pedagogues.

While she was intelligent, good looking and a nice kid all around, they never really wanted her but for appearances sake and to satisfy the wife's parent's desires-  of her two killers, I shall speak no more. 

She wrote a couple of entries in her Wordpress blog, about ghost hunters in Santiago de Compostela, in a naïve English with some slight fault here and there. Not a bad effort for an 111/2 year old Spanish kid, I shall say.

She used a photo with this legend in her blog - I added the man, but couldn't manage to draw her as a ghost. 

To illustrate the story, she had a friend take her two photos, that are "the source" of  these drawings.

She didn't leave much else behind... well, neither will I, but for this blog and an awful lot of dreadful, sexually charged drawings.

Even while living a mere thirty miles away, I do it immersed in an informative bubble - all my information comes from at least two thousand km away.

I like it better this way, free of the constant propaganda from asses trying to sell me their crap that passes as local information in our era.

But this made me one of the few - in a hundred km radius - to be unaware who the girl in the photo was, when I came across the image in a G...le search for "Asian Girl".

All I saw was a pretty girl, in one of the dismantled houses above  the Belvis Park.

I like the short, steep uphill that climb from the park to the ancient complex of Iglesia do Nostra Señora del Portal, with the ancient  popular houses on its right side tore down and reduced to a set of walled terraces.

It is eerily beautiful, but I somehow never manage to have a camera with me when I pass through the place - and there there was a picture of a beautiful girl in the very same spot I'd chose.

Probably, she felt much the same, deciding to use it for the little ghost story she had started.

In my ignorance, I stored the picture for future use...  something I often do.

So, I took the girl image, sized it up and slightly elongated the body while keeping the head the original size - heads famously variate less with body sizes than any other part of the visible anatomy - and hands, added generous boobs and drawn a new, older face.

In the end, you need to know what was there, to see the Chinese girl in the Viking in Chains in the final drawing - not that you'll ever see that drawing, ever - but I know she is down there.

Unfortunately, some time after finishing that I discovered - only a little time after... but one never discovers this things before doing the crap, the Universe being the sarcastic bitch that it is - who she was.

And I felt deeply, deeply ashamed of myself.

And then, I felt  a bit worse, and today I feel still a bit worse, while I write this.

She died nine days before turning 13.

She was born only a week apart from my nephew and they could have hit off, if she'd been around by the time he started athletics in Santiago.

She may have been a storyteller, some day, or avoided the dreadful curse of that call.

Almost certainly, she would have been someone worth knowing, once she survived what ought to have been a monumental phase of adolescent rebellion.



My apologies, Asunta.