Recently I’ve been kinda burnt out on wuxia and have given it a rest and gone back to my first love: westerns.
Ever since I was a little kid with my cap gun revolvers watching Rustlers’ Rhapsody I have been into westerns; I take after my dad that way. Like most people, I know westerns for the most part from film and TV, but I have been exploring more of the literary side of westerns, which like wuxia, is where the genre started.
The parallels between the two genres do not end there. A long time ago I noticed the similarities between the two genres—I suspect that it was these similarities that unconsciously drew me to wuxia in the first place—and for years now I have wanted to write about them in detail. I have begun working on such a book. I think this wil be my formal introduction of wuxia to the Western public. Everyone knows about westerns, so comparing the similaritites and differences between it and wuxia ought to be a good way to illustrate wuxia as a genre.
It’s interesting how to genres half a world apart, from very different cultures, can yet have so many things in common. People writing in English usually lump wuxia in with fantasy—a tell-tale sign that they haven’t actually read much wuxia—but even though Chinese as well tend to lump wuxia with fantasy, actually if you really look at the themes and tropes of the various genres out there, you will see, rather glaringly I might add, that wuxia has much more in common with the American western.
I read Shane recently, the novel from which the eponymous classic film was based, and it was really striking just how much the protagonist, Shane, resembled the historical Chinese xia. Altruism, reciprocity, independence—all traits shared both by the Chinese xia and the American western protagonist.
In wuxia characters meet at inns to drink and gossip about the goings-on in the jianghu. And get in fights. It’s the same in the western as well, only it’s a saloon. The stagecoach, a real transportation and shipping industry in the American west, sees it’s counterpart in in wuxia in the armed escort agencies, based on a real industry in Ming/Qing China, and Chinese postal-relay stations. In America, Wells Fargo delivered passengers, freight, and mail all over the west, with a shotgun messenger on board for protection, changing horses at each 12-15 mile swing station. In China, we see similar services split between the armed escort agencies 鏢局 and postal relay stations that dotted the empire.
There’s way more similarities, both thematically and with regard to literary tropes, but I will save that for the book, though I do hope to also write a much shorter version for my site here at some point. There are some key differences between the two genres, and I will discuss those as well.
So at the moment I am just reading and watching westerns, as well as reading up on American history at the time (history being another of my favorite pasttimes, initially sparked by a great AP US History class I had in high school). I’m reading Lonesome Dove, which I had started years ago and got sidetracked on, as well as various Louis L’Amour novels. I’ve got a bunch more on deck, including stories from the pulp magazines. I recently watched the miniseries 1883 and the movie Old Henry starring Tim Blake Nelson, who previously starred in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. And I’ve been back playing more Red Dead Redemption II. Imagine a game like that but in a wuxia setting! Closest I’ve seen is Fate Seeker II, which is a great game, but it’s not as detailed (and didn’t have the budget and resources) as Red Dead.
I also recently made a nice secondhand find here (Taiwan): The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 by Richard White. I wanted to read up on the period after the Civil War, the periods of Reconstruction and The Gilded Age, and I’ve always liked the Oxford History of the United States series, so on a whim I went searching on online secondhand sites here and got lucky to find a hardcover edition of the book with dust jacket and everything, like new condition. What are the odds of finding something like that here? I was planning on just going the ebook route and reading it on my Kindle, but I do prefer hard copies when I can get them. So that was a nice find. Found some Louis L’Amour paperbacks as well.
There is some news on the wuxia front. Later this month we have a new book on wuxia history coming out, this one called《香港武俠名家名作大展》(A Grand Pageant of Classic Hong Kong Wuxia Works) by Chen Mo 陳墨. Chen Mo is one of my favorite wuxia scholars to read, so I am looking forward to it. It’s a big two-volume affair like Lin Baochun’s Taiwan history back in April. Judging by the title and the table of contents, it looks like the book will be focused on short reviews of a bunch of novels by a bunch of Hong Kong authors, 39 authors by my count. So this seems not to be so much a history of wuxia in Hong Kong as a survey of the novels of the most prominent Hong Kong wuxia authors. Aside from Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng, there’s also Wen Rui’an, Ni Kuang, Long Chengfeng, Huang Yi, Huang Ying, Ximen Ding, Ti Feng, Zheng Menghuan, etc. 1216 pages total.
I will definitely have more on Chen Mo’s book when it comes out. Until then, I plan to keep reading and watching westerns and working on my “Wuxia and the Western” book.