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Thread: Jin Yong aka Louis Cha

  1. #46
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    Continued from previous

    I find myself turning to these stories to guide and console myself as we all await a climate catastrophe.
    In 2016, the renowned Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, in a book entitled The Great Derangement, described the collective failure of “serious” literary fiction to grapple with climate catastrophe. Ghosh called for writers and artists to engage with apocalyptic thinking that might be able to delay climate catastrophe by spurring the global culture into action. Ghosh laments that, for the most part, these conversations were relegated to genre writing. The only part of his account that I contest is his dismissal of genre writing as unimportant or unserious. I make no highbrow claims as to what I read in an attempt to forestall the inevitable or seek out consolation; I read kung-fu stories, and Louis Cha’s in particular. This isn’t just a guilty pleasure; it’s an intentional alignment with a certain kind of underground resistance, a riptide wilding the tranquil surface of institutional prose.

    When Mao Zedong rose to power in the 1940s, he developed and enforced a blueprint for a national Chinese literature that featured idealized heroes and formulaic plots. Louis Cha’s stories defy those formulas. The martial arts literary historian John Christopher Hamm describes Cha’s novels as “strategies for responding to the altered world.” Of course, Hamm is referring not to a world altered by climate catastrophe, but rather to one altered by the ascension of the Chinese Communist Party. I’ve discovered that much of his approach is transferable to our 21st-century problems. In his book Paper Swordsman, Hamm points out that because mid-20th-century martial arts fiction did not “hew to overarching ideological dicta” or “serve the immediate needs of particular political campaigns,” it was “relegated to the category of ‘poisonous weeds,’ banned from the gardens of culture.” The way Hamm phrases this judgment makes the reader yearn to be a poisonous weed, to read and champion the minor genres. Where Ghosh grieved the lack of serious works of fiction grappling with the newly altered world, Hamm makes the case that it is the marginalized literary genres that are best suited for exploring the plight of humanity in such newly altered worlds.

    Ghosh is far from the first literary scholar to tell us that the stories we tell ourselves about nature are broken. Back in 1999, American author William Kittredge published a collection titled Taking Care: Thoughts on Storytelling and Belief. In that book, Kittredge mourns what he calls “narrative dysfunction,” describing the ways in which the stories we tell ourselves about nature, both individually and collectively, are broken. In the absence of stories that bind us to nature, holding us accountable to nature and to each other, Kittredge argues, we hasten nature’s destruction and our own.

    But when I read Louis Cha, I feel as if the stories that connect me to my family’s past and to the earth remain alive. “The wind hard-hearted, the moon cruel,” a beautiful but suffering woman sings in the opening pages of The Past Unearthed. These words were penned by the lyrical Song Dynasty historian Ouyang Xiu; Cha’s novel begins by yoking one character’s personal suffering to collective cultural grief. As I read, I imagine my father as a child in a brand-new country, the tatters of one installment of these stories clutched tightly in his fist. I imagine stories as sinuous and armored as a dragon’s flank, and I remember the editor’s introduction to Cha’s first novel, the description of it as “a living dragon appearing in the flesh.” That phrase is a reference to the myth of Zhang Sengyou, who painted realistic dragons but didn’t paint their eyes in order to deny them the realism that would bring them to life. “The living dragon appearing in the flesh” refers to what happens next in the story: Someone paints the eyes onto the dragons, and they come alive — not as a marginalized genre, but as the embodied force of counterculture storytelling.

    Louis Cha’s novels are popular in China, occupying a privileged place in the Chinese imagination that is perhaps similar to the position occupied by the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the English-speaking world. Globally, over 300 million copies of The Legends of the Condor Heroes have been sold, and, in recent years, Cha’s popularity in the United States has surged as well. I’ve chanced upon Cha’s books on other people’s shelves, and my personal consolation is beginning to feel collective.


    Sally Deng/High Country News

    I THINK I’ve come to understand something about the environmental narrative dysfunction that William Kittredge pointed out over 20 years ago. Kittredge and Ghosh both seem to believe that the stories that sustain us emerge out of some sort of elevated literary imagination. They fail to see the tendrils of popular, subversive, “low-brow” stories blooming all around them like weeds, like the good kind of poisonous weeds.

    The tomatoes and peppers my father grows are unruly; they pour out of their garden beds and onto the driveway and porch. They’re members of the belladona family, which is full of poisons. Last night was the first hard frost, and my father didn’t bring the harvest in before it hit. Instead, perhaps deliberately, he left tomatoes and hot peppers on the stem, eggplants purpling the shadows, in defiance of the forecast. He was not thinking about waste, or plant cells rupturing from frost, or about running out of time. From what I can gather, he was imagining that maybe, against the odds, the forecast was wrong. Maybe the plants would magically survive, continuing to ripen.

    In the absence of stories that bind us to nature, holding us accountable to nature and to each other, we hasten nature’s destruction and our own.
    As he explains his reasoning, something in his tone reminds me that he escaped from Communist China, whisked across the grasslands in a basket, and that he survived the hardships of Taiwan, even after his family separated from the Nationalist forces; he survived the solitude of the blood oath his father made him swear — to never contact his cousins, whose parents stayed and fought for Communist China — my father, who lost four of his six younger siblings to untimely deaths. I wonder what the climate crisis feels like from the vantage of an immigrant who has somehow steered himself through what surely felt like the end of the world. Can the kung-fu legends that sustained him through that altered world sustain me and my generation through the age of climate collapse?

    As I ponder, here I am, the gleaner, picking through the destruction of my parents’ garden. My dad searches for the ripest tomatoes abandoned on the vine, thinking he’ll use them in a stir-fry. I’m gathering the green ones by the fistful with no particular recipe in mind. It’s just that I can’t bear to see them go to waste, these stories not done with their telling.

    Jenny Liou is an English professor at Pierce College and a retired professional cage fighter who lives and writes in Covington, Washington. Her debut poetry collection, Muscle Memory, was published by Kaya Press in 2022.
    Interesting take
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
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  2. #47
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    Centenary

    Celebrating Jin Yong's centenary: Over 800 exhibits unveiled in Haining
    chinadaily.com.cn| Updated : Mar 12, 2024


    A large number of visitors take part in the exhibition commemorating the centenary of Jin Yong's birth, which commenced in Haining, a county-level city in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province. [Photo/cyol.com]

    On March 10, an exhibition commemorating the centenary of Jin Yong's birth commenced at the Kangqiao 1924 Chinese Silk Cultural and Creative Park in Haining, a county-level city in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province.

    Louis Cha Leung-yung, better known by his pen name Jin Yong, was born in Yuanhua town, Haining, on March 10, 1924. Renowned for his martial arts novels, he has expressed a deep longing for his hometown, visiting six times between 1992 and 2008.

    The exhibition, part of a series of activities in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Jin's birth, showcases over 800 precious items, including manuscripts, photographs, books, calligraphy, and digital exhibits, making it the most comprehensive collection of Jin's archival materials to date.

    Featured exhibits include the serialized manuscript of The Smiling, Proud Wanderer and the gifted manuscript of Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils. Contributions from Hong Kong Ta Kung Pao Media Group and Ming Pao Group add depth to the exhibition with original articles spanning from 1948 to 2009.

    Notably, Hong Kong artist Lei Chi-ching's creation, the Haining Tidal Viewing Map, captures Jin's creative genesis and his emotional connection to his hometown through the lens of his literary world.

    Preparation for the exhibition received widespread support from schools, archives, media, and individuals across Jiaxing, Hangzhou, Quzhou, Suzhou, and Hong Kong, resulting in the collection of over 1,200 archival materials related to Jin.
    Happy centenary!
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
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  3. #48
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    Jiaxing

    Entering Jin Yong's martial arts world in Jiaxing
    chinadaily.com.cn| Updated : Mar 27, 2024


    The Yanyu Tower in the Nanhu scenic area. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

    Jiaxing in Zhejiang province is the birthplace of Jin Yong, the grandmaster of martial arts novels. In Jiaxing, fiction and reality, as well as the writer and readers, are intertwined.

    The year 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Louis Cha Leung-yung, better known by his pen name Jin Yong. As a martial arts novelist, journalist, and social activist, he is known by one and all for his magnificent martial arts world.

    In honor of Jin Yong, over 50 media members and several experts on Jin Yong took a tour in his hometown of Jiaxing from March 20 to 21.

    "The Nanhu Lake is the starting point of Jin Yong's martial arts world and is also the source of his inspiration," said Yuan Fei, chairman of the Jin Yong Book Club, during the boat tour on the lake.

    The story of The Return of the Condor Heroes begins at the Nanhu Lake, while two of the most important martial arts contests in The Legend of the Condor Heroes are also set at the lake.

    Jin Yong was born in Haining, a county-level city in Jiaxing, which is famous for the tide of the Qiantang River. The main characters and the story of his first martial arts novel, The Book and the Sword, all come from Haining. In this novel, Jin Yong describes the Qiantang tide and the Temple of Sea God in Haixing in vivid detail.

    From 1992 to 2008, Jin Yong came back to his hometown on six different occasions. During each visit, he would go to watch the tide as long as he could. In 1997, he returned for the fourth time specially to watch the tide that had accompanied his growth.


    The former residence of Jin Yong. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

    The former residence of Jin Yong, located in Yuanhua town, Haining, not only marks his birth, but also serves as the root of Jin Studies and the continuation of the Cha family's cultural legacy. Following renovation, it has been open to the public since March 12.

    The renovated site is divided into two parts — residence and exhibition areas. The former focuses on reproducing the living conditions at that time, presenting Jin Yong's growth environment and family background. The exhibition is designed to tell the legend of Jin Yong, with a wealth of precious materials collected from all over the country.

    Jin Yong once said, "If one is away from home for a long time, the longer the time, the deeper the feeling of nostalgia for home." For many years, he instilled his feeling for hometown in his works, and these works lay the coordinates in his martial arts world on the land of Jiaxing.
    This would make a cool pilgrimage for a true fan.
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
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  4. #49
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    The Seven Great Wuxia Sects

    Seven Great Wuxia Sects gather to admire martial arts novelist Jin Yong’s contribution
    By Jiang Li
    Published: Nov 08, 2024 12:15 PM

    Representatives of the Seven Great Wuxia Sects in China gather in Yuanhua, Zhejiang Province, on October 7, 2024, to recall Jin Yong’s contributions to promoting Chinese martial arts. Photo: Courtesy of Chinese Studies of Literature on Martial Heroes


    As this year marks the 100th birthday of renowned wuxia novelist Jin Yong (Louis Cha), representatives of the Seven Great Wuxia Sects in China (Shaolin, Wudang, Emei, Qingcheng, Kunlun, Kongtong, and Mount Hua) gathered on Thursday evening to recall Jin's contributions to promoting Chinese martial arts and discuss the development and future direction of wuxia literature.

    The Fourth Wuxia Literature Golden Sword Award ceremony is also set to be held in Jin's hometown, Yuanhua Town in East China's Zhejiang Province, on Friday.

    Representatives of the Seven Great Wuxia Sects said the popularity of Chinese martial arts culture should be integrated with efforts to bring martial arts back to its roots, achieving a fusion of culture and tourism. Jin's influence spans beyond one or two generations and his legacy continues to endure and inspire.

    "Wuxia culture, as an important part of traditional Chinese culture, not only carries ancient legendary martial arts skills but also contains profound philosophical wisdom, moral values, and humanistic spirit," You Xuande, an inheritor of Zhang Sanfeng tai chi from the Wudang Sect, told the Global Times.

    "Through strategic thinking, wuxia culture can form a unique cultural brand, becoming an important component of national cultural soft power, and thus promote the spread and recognition of Chinese culture on the global stage," he noted.

    Recalling his interactions with Jin Yong, You shared that when the Wudang Sect presented the traditional Wudang Sword to Jin, he later wrote, "If there's a chance, I would like to be an apprentice" to the Wudang Sect. This gesture reflected Jin's deep respect and admiration for Wudang martial arts, as well as his profound understanding and recognition of the martial spirit.

    "Jin Yong's works not only shaped countless classic characters and riveting stories of the jianghu (martial world), but also subtly spread profound Chinese traditional culture to the world," Liu Suibin, the 36th-generation leader of the Qingcheng Sect, told the Global Times.

    "Many people first learned about the Qingcheng Sect through Jin Yong's portrayal of the antagonist Yu Canghai in his wuxia novel The Smiling, Proud Wanderer," Liu explained. "Although I don't sympathize with the character of Yu Canghai, I am deeply grateful for Jin Yong's creative work."

    "Jin Yong brought the Qingcheng Sect's martial arts to the attention of the world. His novels have played a key role in promoting Qingcheng martial arts. His works are not only popular in China but have also spread overseas. The contribution Jin made to Chinese martial arts deserves great respect," Liu added.

    Jin's hometown is currently planning to establish a cultural industry park with a forward-looking vision to drive local tourism through martial arts culture.
    We know Liu Suibin.
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
    Support our forum by getting your gear at MartialArtSmart

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