Moon Girl Chapter One: Aleesha's Home life and How she came to study Kung Fu.

Aleesha Lum's childhood was different than many of the other girls in the Ghetto.
First of all her mother was black and her father was Chinese. Her father gambled, drank, and whored, but that took place outside the home and so made no etching on Aleesha's young mind. Only the absence of that extra income made a difference which she didn't know about. After all, with her mother's crappy administrative job and her father's income, perhaps the family could move up in the world, buying a house, moving to the suburbs, private school, etc.
But instead Aleesha and her mother stayed in the projects, the father, Ah-Kuen, dropping in and out travelling around, engaging in various criminal activity.
Aleesha's childhood, though poor in money, was rich in her exposure to cultures, literature, and science.
Aleesha's mother, Kara, was a bit of a Mystic of the ecletic type. She dabbled in Sufi Islam as her religion, but practiced various Indian and Tibetan Yogas, Japanese Meditations, and Soft Chinese Martial Arts. She had all sorts of statues, musical instruments, books, and some drugs around the house. Which she used but did not become an addict right away. every morning, she would wake Aleesha up and they would meditate and practice Chi Gung. The type of Chi Gung that would leave mother and daughter (when she learned it properly) drenched in sweat. The moves were simple, but Aleesha and her mother were much stronger than people would expect, the chi flowed strong through head, body, fingers and toes, and Aleesha could certainly throw a punch or a kick and do some damage, but her mother didn't focus on these things. Besides, real fights were about knives and guns. Not a gun fight or a knife fight, but ganging up and shooting or stabbing someone unarmed is how it seemed to happen more often than not in her neighborhood. Mother and daughter practiced what they practiced as a religious and spiritual escape from that reality and not a preparation for it.

Kara had books on religion, chemistry, science, and art all throughout the house and grew various plants and herbs (some of them illegal narcotics in small quantities)
Allesha took an interest to this and at a very young age was able to do complex mathematics, knew the periodic table, and mixing various chemicals that were easy to comeby to produce a drug or an explosion was not foreign to her at all. Some of these more explosive experiments her father, Ah Kuen, and his brother Harold were present for s she wouldn't get hurt. After a while her father got bored of going with her to a parking lot or some obscure run down park, and though he found it entertaining, he didn't think it was important fro a girl to learn. Actually he did really seem to theink Aleesha and her mother were really that important at all. But his brother Harold did. And though Aleesha was not his child, it was he that helped to expand her knowledge in these areas.

Aleesha's mother also introduced her to several languages, Arabic, Mandarin, and even Japanese. Kara had learned these through classes at various educational centers religious and otherwise, through books, and through CDs. These were Aleesha's videogames, and she played them well. It turned out that she was a very smart child, much smarter than her mother or father. As she grew older, she did well in most of her classes at school, but she didn't like it. She didn't hate it either though. She didn't learn much there, the teachers seemed more interested in lecturing them about stuff that didn't matter, and many of her fellow students were mean. She was smart and eductated in spite of her school more than because of it.