Writing stories about people changing race, culture, nationality or gender is all well and good, but how do you get around the “willing suspension of disbelief” of such a thing to make the story, no matter how fantastic, at least seem believable enough in the context of the tale?
There are a lot of ways.
Here is one I created to make the transformation of Westerners into people of the Philippines.
If you want to use it to make a story, be my guest, but if you do, as with all such things, please treat others with respect.
If you have a story where someone is becoming a member of another group of people, learn about that people.
Dr. Valarao's Filipino Spirit-Essence Clinic:
There is an unusual form of alternative healing known as "psychic surgery" the advocates of which claim they can, using only their bare hands, and the help of God, or their psychic abilities, or spirits, or variations and combinations of those three, perform surgery using only their hands opening up bodies and doing such things as pulling out tumors, cleaning internal organs and removing blockages to arteries, and then closing the opening leaving no mark.
The practitioners of this always, at least as far as I know, turn out to be either a con artist, or sincere but deluded
However on a planet of over six billion people the percentage chance of the “impossible” happening with a random roll of the DNA dice becomes more likely.
Paolo Valarao it seems is the one out of 6 billion who has rolled all sevens and is the world’s only genuine, working, “holy mackerel do you see what I see!” for real psychic surgeon, and not just like the fakers, but to the point that he can go as far as reach into bodies and mold bones as if they were clay, give serious tugs to chromosomes so as to erase years of age and restore color to gray hair, or even change it’s to a new one it never had, and do things that no normal surgeon could ever hope to do.
However “Doctor” Valarao, it seems, also has an agenda, born from real irritation, and just barely suppressed rage, about the exploiting that he feels foreigners have been besieging the Philippians with for centuries, as well as the millions who have been found they have to leave the Islands just to make a living, he expresses his feelings though his wild talent.
When a Filipino comes to him for help he performs what healing he can, however when a person from America, Japan, or Europe is able to find him, he heals them as well, while at the same time, in ways no one, not even Dr. Valarao, can explain how it’s done, reshapes their bodies so that anyone seeing them after he is finished recognizes them as a young Filipino person, and if that were not remarkable enough, when he’s in the mood, and the visitor to the islands proves to be a certain type of loud and pushy type of male tourist, he makes them into Filipina women.
Whichever change he performs on the unconscious foreigners, and to a person who can remold every bone in a person’s face to make them seem to be someone new, altering blood pressure to keep them out as long as he needs while doing so is a mere afterthought, their IDs are removed, and in the case of his more radical changes, dressed appropriately for their new form, his followers deposit the visitors miles from his clinic, another island altogether if they have the time, where they are left to make do as best they can as a new citizen of the Islands.
While they are 100% who they were before, with only their bodies altered into seeming to be someone else, those who go to the authorities, or their county of origin embassy are regarded as simple hysterics or outright mad.
After that it's up to them to adjust as best they can to Doc Paolo’s radical form of full emersion cultural assimilation.
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