Su Yao's Dazzling Counterattack Chapter 20
The volcanic soil of New Zealand's North Island smelled of sulfur and possibility as Su Yao stepped onto a windswept marae, where Maori elders waited beneath a carved meeting house. Their korowai—cloaks woven from flax and dog hair—swung heavily as they stood, their expressions unreadable. Tama, the tribe's master weaver, pressed a taonga (treasure) into her hands: a stone pendant etched with spiral patterns. "This is koru," he said, his voice like gravel. "It means new life. But new life must respect the old ways."
Their collaboration was ambitious: merging Maori tāniko weaving with seaweed-metal fabric to create ceremonial cloaks for a UNESCO cultural preservation project. But on the first morning, tension crackled like static. When Lin laid out digital design mock-ups, Tama's wife, Mere, swept them off the table. "We don't weave from screens," she said, her lips pressed thin. "We weave from whakapapa—genealogy. Every stitch holds our ancestors' stories."
Su Yao's team had brought 3D scanners to digitize traditional patterns, a tool that had streamlined projects in Greenland and Arizona. Now it lay abandoned in the corner as Mere demonstrated tāniko on a flax loom, her fingers moving in rhythms that seemed to follow a silent drumbeat. "See?" she said, pointing to a zigzag pattern. "This is poutama—the stairway to knowledge. You can't scan that. You have to feel it."
Cultural collision turned practical when they tackled materials. The Maori insisted on using flax harvested from the Waikato River delta, where their ancestors had gathered it for centuries. But Su Yao's seaweed-metal blend, treated with chemical stabilizers in Shanghai, reacted poorly to the flax's natural oils—turning brittle and discoloring within days. "Your metal is greedy," Tama said, examining a frayed swatch. "It eats our flax. Like a stranger taking more than their share."
To make matters worse, Mount Ruapehu rumbled to life halfway through the second week, spewing ash that coated the flax fields. The tribe refused to harvest the contaminated plants, Drawing on Tapu'u's (a kind of spiritual taboo) perspective, which states that it is forbidden to exploit the "injured gifts" of nature. With their deadline for the UNESCO showcase looming, panic rippled through the team. "We can source flax from a farm in Hawke's Bay," Elena suggested, but Mere shook her head. "That flax has no mauri—life force. Our cloaks would be empty."
Su Yao retreated to the marae's wharekai (dining hall) that night, staring at the koru pendant. Its spiral seemed to twist and turn, as if urging her to let go of rigid plans. She found Tama sitting by the fire, carving a flax beater, and sat beside him. "Tell me about the mauri," she said.
He paused, his knife hovering over the wood. "It's the breath in the flax. The memory of the river. When you take it without gratitude, you kill it. But when you honor it…" He tossed a handful of flax flowers into the fire, where they crackled and released a sweet scent. "It gives back."
The next morning, Su Yao made a decision: they'd abandon the chemical stabilizers. Instead, they'd treat the metal fibers with manuka honey, a traditional Maori remedy for healing. "It's antibacterial," she explained to the team, "and the sugars might form a protective layer." Tama watched skeptically as Lin dipped the metal threads in honey, but when they wove them with flax that afternoon, the fibers remained supple. "The honey speaks Maori," he said, surprised.
To solve the ash crisis, Su Yao proposed a ritual. The team joined the Maori in a karakia (prayer) at dawn, offering woven flax baskets filled with seaweed from Shanghai as a gesture of reciprocity. "We ask not for more," Tama chanted, "but to share what remains." By midday, a tribe elder arrived with a bundle of flax—harvested from a hidden valley untouched by ash, saved for "those who listen."
The breakthrough came when Fiona, struggling to adapt Fair Isle techniques to tāniko, accidentally dropped a spool of wool dyed with rangiora leaves. The vibrant green stained the metal threads, creating a marbled effect that mirrored the patterns in the meeting house carvings. "It's kaitiakitanga—guardianship," Mere said, running her hand over the fabric. "Your wool, our dye, the metal from across the sea. All watching over each other."
On the final day, they unveiled the cloaks: flax panels interwoven with honey-treated metal, tāniko patterns bleeding into Fair Isle knots, rangiora dye pooling like shadow. When Tama draped one over Su Yao's shoulders, the weight felt like a benediction. "The ancestors approve," he said, as a shaft of sunlight pierced the marae roof, catching the metal threads.
As they boarded the plane back to Marrakech, Su Yao found a koru carved from volcanic rock in her bag—a gift from Tama. The note attached read: "Conflict is just the river shaping the stone." She thought of the flax and metal, the rituals and 3D scanners, the ash and honey—all contradictions that had become beauty.
Somewhere over the Pacific, her phone buzzed. A message from the Navajo weavers: "The drought broke. Weaving rain patterns now. Come back soon."
Su Yao smiled. The threads kept calling. And she would always answer.