Ever since I settled in Richmond BC about two decades ago, I have often wondered what other Hong Kong emigrants regard as a common Hong Kong culture. For me, whenever that question pops up, the Jin Yong wuxia (武俠) novels of my childhood would always bubble up in my mind.
This year, 10 March was the birth centenary of Jin Yong (1924-2018), whose real name was Louis Cha. It is the perfect time for us to revisit his oeuvre while looking forward to the future of the wuxia genre.
During my primary school summer holidays, usually spent at my uncle’s place, my cousins and I used to borrow Jin Yong’s novels from a nearby street hawker for a pittance. The lending period was just a few days and we had to take turns reading the same book.
When we engaged in our favourite game of role-playing, I would always insist on acting out the otherworldly Xiaolongnu (小龍女) in Return of the Condor Heroes. We would use wooden rulers as swords to duel and would leap from chair to chair, trying to imitate martial art experts’ qinggong (輕功) skill, a superhuman parkour technique that literally lifts up the practitioners so they could fly in midair, skim on water, perch atop trees and scale high walls. If you have watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, no doubt you would remember the bamboo forest fighting scene where qinggong was beautifully choreographed.
In the first year of secondary school, my first English novel, Little Women, was the prelude to my falling in love with English Literature in subsequent years. At the same time, given my enthrallment with Jin Yong’s novels, which were all steeped in history, my affinity for Chinese History also blossomed as I studied the subject in class, and that passion would last throughout my life.
One day in Form Four, my English Literature teacher picked out a composition of mine and read it aloud to the whole class, praising it as a remarkable example of storytelling. That act foreshadowed my dream of becoming a fiction writer in English, which, as it transpired, did not get fulfilled until after my retirement from the corporate world.
If you are a native Hong Konger like me, you would no doubt have a good appreciation of Jin Yong’s works, or at least of the television and film adaptations of those works. He was as illustrious a writer in the Chinese wuxia genre as JRR Tolkien was in western fantasy. In his youth he was a voracious reader of Chinese history and classic literature, which left an unmistakable imprint on his fiction.
A wuxia story typically has a thrilling plot and tells of attempts by martial art heroes or vigilantes to redress wrongs while adhering to codes of benevolence, righteousness, loyalty and courage. In my humble view, what really makes Jin Yong’s works classic and timeless is his ability to weave fantasy around historical events and characters – reminding us that history can repeat itself as human nature does not change – and his astute exploration of conflicts between cultural values in Chinese civilisation.
Between 1955 and 1972, this wuxia fiction grandmaster wrote 15 novels under the pen name Jin Yong. The first few were initially serialised in newspapers, but all have, over the years, been adapted into numerous TV shows, films and web dramas, and translated into many Southeast Asian languages. Before his passing in 2018, more than 100 million copies of his novels had been sold worldwide.
As renowned as he was in the sinosphere, his brilliant works were largely unknown in the anglosphere. Between 1996 and 2005, university presses published English translations of three of his novels – Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain, The Book and the Sword and The Deer and the Cauldron – but the books did not find commercial success.
However, with the English translation and phased publishing of his most popular Condor Heroes trilogy by MacLehose Press, a mainstream publisher, at long last the prospect of his works reaching the western audience took nascent form. In 2018, volume one of an English edition of Legend of the Condor Heroes, titled A Hero Born, was released. The remaining three volumes, namely A Bond Undone, A Snake Lies in Waiting and A Heart Divided, were published between 2019 and 2021.
Two years ago I started a writing project of a wuxia-xianxia (武俠仙俠) duology that followed his classic style but was spiced up with Chinese mythology. The first part, titled The Heavenly Sword, was released in January last year, while the concluding sequel, named The Earthly Blaze, is due to come out next month. The purpose of the project is to promote the wuxia genre and the Jin Yong legacy in the anglosphere, while attempting to use elements of Chinese folklore to give the narrative a refreshing tilt.
In the duology, the story is set in the early Ming dynasty of an alternative China, thus following Jin Yong’s tradition of weaving fantasy around historical events and characters. It also emulates his style of exploring themes of justice and conflict between karmic fate and vengeance. In creating certain characters and martial art techniques, I could feel his stories coming alive to awaken their author, my muse. Just as they used to come to life for a child playing the ethereal Xiaolongnu.
