Cassandra Chen

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Cassandra Chen is the heroine of the science fiction novel, Morningstar pass the Collapse of the UFO Coverup, where she plays a leading role, as a television news anchorwoman in Washington, D.C., in an effort to destroy the UFO cover-up.

[edit] Biography

Cassandra Chen was born Jian ( short for Jiang "River" ) Cassandra Chen in San Diego California in 1978, as the last of four daughters, to a successful heart surgeon Dr. Richard Chen and his wife June (maiden name Hu) who are Methodists. The Chen family emigrated to the United States in the early 1950's after the Chinese Civil War, where her family had sided with the Nationalist Party. Cassandra traces her roots to the Chan dynasty and hence is of royal Chinese blood. She enjoyed an idyllic and wealthy childhood where she was a homecoming queen and cheerleader at her high school and was an expert surfer. On leaving high school she attended UCLA majoring in economics and she began modeling in Los Angeles, she then "collided with real life" (her own words) in her senior year at UCLA and left school to return home after unspecified difficulties. She went on a trip to New York to draw encouragement from her very successful oldest sister Jennifer, who worked in the World Trade Center as an Investment Banker. However, Cassandra missed an appointment to meet with her sister Jennifer for breakfast, so Jennifer went to work as usual. It is Sept 11 2001. After witnessing the death of her sister because of her missed appointment Cassandra changes the direction of her life to pursue a career in Television Journalism, blaming herself for her sister’s death. Cassandra is continually haunted by this event, and comes to believe she must some day lay down her life to pay for it. She finishes her degree at UCLA with a journalism major , becomes a news-anchor in San Diego then Los Angeles, marries, divorces, and then takes a job with new and brash cable news network Cable News System in Washington D.C. There, she builds CNS and rises to be chief news anchorwoman, it is then she becomes aware of the reality of the UFO cover-up. She then pursues it, knowing full well the danger. In doing so she is embarking on what she believes will be the last big news story of her life.

[edit] Character Analysis

Cassandra Chen is notable as a depiction of an Asian American as a heroine in a mainstream American science fiction novel. She is thoroughly American, beautiful, high-tempered , vain, but also brave, compassionate, and highly intelligent. She is depicted as the product of a rich childhood and a traumatic early adulthood. Like the Cassandra of Troy, her life is haunted with tragedy, and she sees events in the future, and often in vain, warns others of danger. She is motivated in the novel by a sense of immutable fate that will doom her, imagining herself to be a latter-day Joan of Arc. However, she is paired with her friend, Pamela Monroe, upon whom Cassandra depends on to give her hope. It can be interpreted that the pairing of a character named "Cassandra", a doomed figure from ancient legend, with the character named "Pamela", an ever hopeful heroine from the Renaissance- Reformation classic, Arcadia, by Sir Philip Sidney, represents the conflict between hope and despair in modern life.