Beatdown Cudgel was published in 1974 and at only one volume, 262 pgs., it is one of Liu Canyang’s shorter novels, characteristic of his later period work. But it has everything Liu Canyang is known for: brutal violence; focus on the “dark path”, the underworld of society rather than a goody-two-shoes idealistic hero of the “light path”; a seasoned protagonist who is already a martial arts adept, who doesn’t need to find a master or esoteric martial arts manual to get strong and defeat his enemy. He can already defeat his enemy. Yet still with his own moral code he follows. Though elsewhere I have characterized Liu Canyang’s work as “grimdark before grimdark”, that’s not really accurate because morality in his novels is not grey, it’s just not idealistic. There is still a “good” and a “bad” guy, even though the good guy might, by society’s standards, be a “bad” guy. But he’s not a monster nor a completely selfish asshole. More Blondie (The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly) and less Caul Shivers (Best Served Cold). Liu Canyang has been placed alongside Yun Zhongyue in the subset of wuxia authors who write more “realistically”.
The protagonist of Beatdown Cudgel is Meng Changqing. His weapon is the Beatdown Staff, a black wooden cudgel, a little over four-feet long, with a dark red sheen to it, and scratch marks on the upper half part of it where sharp weapons seemed to have cut into it over and over over the years. Though I translated it as “beatdown” cudgel, the original Chinese, 煞威棒, refers to a real, historical rod used to beat suspects into submission after they have been arrested.
Meng Changqing is bald, dressed in soft leather with a black cloak, and a long red scar that extends from his his right ear down to the corner of his mouth, a knife scar that seems to glow red when he gets a hot temper. He frequently touches the scar when he is contemplating.
The story opens with a woman fleeing from a scallion pancake peddler who is chasing after her with a rolling pin. He chases her down to a secluded alley and she falls and he is about to bring the rolling pin down and beat her when it is intercepted by Meng Changqing’s cudgel. The woman, Xu Jiang Zhaoxia, has stolen the pancakes. Meng Changqing offers to pay the man, Scoundrel Ma, for the pancakes. They go back and forth, Scoundrel Ma getting more and more greedy with his asking price, until finally they agree. They go to another secluded area to make the money exchange. There is a weathered grindstone nearby and Meng Changqing flips it up on its end easily with his cudgel, then fits the end into the hole in the stone and begins tossing it up and down, catching it easily with the cudgel. Then he rolls the grindstone down his cudgel from one end to the other. Then he flings the stone into the air once more and smashes it to pieces with his left hand. He’s just showing Scoundrel Ma his strength and ability. Scoundrel Ma grovels and finds an excuse to leave.
Afterward, Xu Jiang Zhaoxia thanks Meng Changqing for saving her and then she suddenly asks him to teach her martial arts. Meng Changqing can’t quite believe what he’s hearing, but once he learns she is serious he refuses, saying he has other things to do and anyway, learning martial arts takes a long time and he doesn’t have that kind of time, etc. Then he goes on his way.
Xu Jiang Zhaoxia follows him into the woods where he stops and they argue some more. Xu Jiang Zhaoxia threatens to kill herself if he doesn’t agree to help her, but Meng Changqing just turns and walks away again after refusing. She breaks down on her knees, crying. Her wails soften Meng Changqing and he turns back and agrees to help her.
He learns that she is 48 years old, then asks her why she wants to learn martial arts. She explains that she wants to avenge the rape and murder of her nineteen-year-old daughter. It was five men who broke into their house, tied Xu Jiang Zhaoxia up, and forced her to watch as they had their way with her daughter before disemboweling her with a trident (tri-pointed double-edged blade)1. This is Meng Changqing’s reaction:
Meng Changqing sighed and shook his head gravely. Rape-and-murder were common among those who walk the dark path. He had heard of it happening and seen it happen many times, but whenever he encountered something like that it always shook him and infuriated him. He couldn’t help but hate and curse it, he couldn’t hide the intense loathing he felt for that kind of behavior and would never treat anyone else so cruelly. If able, he would not hesitate to flay those people alive and rip out their tendons and crush their bones to dust!
So Meng Changqing, though he’s a bandit himself, does have his limits. And because of this he agrees to help Xu Jiang Zhaoxia learn enough martial arts to be able to have a chance at getting revenge. Xu Jiang Zhaoxia is adamant that she get revenge herself; she doesn’t want anyone killing those five for her. But though Meng Changqing has agreed to help her, he warns her that even if she learns some martial arts she still might not be able to get revenge:
Firstly, you still don’t know how skilled those five lechers are. If you insist on getting revenge yourself, since you don’t know how strong they are, how will you know if you have trained enough to be able to defeat them? Secondly, everyone is different. Some people are ruthless by nature and kill and commit arson like they’re eating cabbage, bloody violence is nothing to them. But others are softhearted and simply can’t be ruthless. There’s a lot of people like that, they genuinely cannot be violent. They hesitate, tremble, they’re nervous and afraid. Even if they’re up against an absolutely irreconcilable mortal enemy, they still cannot harden their heart—
This turns out to be something she does struggle with later on when it’s time to do the deed. I like that she doesn’t become a coldblooded killer, but is always uneasy and hesitant to kill. And I like that Meng Changqing points out that martial arts takes a long time to develop. Though they do only train for three months before setting out to find the five murderers, she only learns three moves that Meng Changqing teaches her, three of his killing strokes. She just knows those three moves and has trained three months to build up her strength. The training session goes like this:
The training methods that Meng Changqing designed for Xu Jiang Zhaoxia were old methods, but very effective.
On the day they began training, he gathered over a hundred stone bricks and piled them up at one end of the training grounds, then had Xu Jiang Zhaoxia grasp a brick tightly in each hand an carry them over to the other end of the training grounds. He had her do this three times a day.
Other than that, he made Xu Jiang Zhaoxia go up the ridge and cut firewood. Each trip she had to bring back no less than 50 catties of firewood, morning and evening, then forced her to alternate hands and hold level a stick as big around as a fist and hold it level for an hour before she could rest.
At night when they went inside the room she was staying in, Meng Changqing would light an oil lamp as bright as it would light, to train Xu Jiang Zhaoxia’s eye concentration, gradually reducing the wick and dimming the light, hoping that when the flame was down to sliver no thicker than a wild onion, she would still be able to see things in the dark, that way during the witching out when it is not quite dark but not light, her vision would be stable and she would be able to see clearly.
Every day, Meng Changqing made Xu Jiang Zhaoxia face a kitchen knife dangling from a rope off a tree branch, swaying back and forth—swaying before Xu Jiang Zhaoxia’s face. The purpose was simple, to train her to get used to not panic and flinch if she were hit with a surprise attack.
The three moves Meng Changqing taught her were modified from staff skills, but he specially added bladed weapon techniques to the moves because a staff required the use of a relatively large amount of force to hurt someone, but a blade could get the same results using much less force.
He calculated that it would take a month to teach each move in order for Xu Jiang Zhaoxia to establish muscle memory and get fluent enough with the move so that she responded naturally and would be able to instinctively strike and react. He wanted Xu Jiang Zhaoxia to be able to use the move at the right time, at the right angle, with the right amount of force, all linked up and flowing smoothly.
After three months of training, Meng Changqing presents her with a sword he had specially made for her:
…the handle was especially long, able to be held with two hands, and the blade was narrower and longer than usual. A discerning person could tell that it could be used as a sword or a as a staff!
Meng Changqing explains further that:
…it’s also lighter than normal. I picked out a top-grade piece of refined blue steel to forge it out of, so the sword is light without affecting its sharpness. It’s narrower and longer so that it can be used as a staff as well. The three moves I taught you were modified from staff moves, but you’re not strong enough to use a staff, so I gave you this weapon that can be used as either a sword or a staff to match your strength. It can wound someone from either side, and you only need to put a little bit of power into your strike in order to draw blood, much easier than using a staff. These past three months you trained using a bamboo pole filled with ironsand which has already increased your arm and wrist strength. Using this long sword now will be much easier…”
From here they begin the process of finding the killers. Xu Jiang Zhaoxia remembers what they looked like and where one of them hangs out. Meng Changqing finds the first one based on that information. He provides protection for Xu Jiang Zhaoxia from the other thug buddies that come out to get in the way so that she can focus on fighting the killer she wants vengeance on. Her advantage here is twofold: 1) the killers are not high-level martial artists like Meng Changqing but just average hoodlums with a bit of clout in their local area. 2) No one expects a middle-aged woman to be able to do anything with a sword. So her first thrust hits the mark, surprising her victim. Problem is, she forgot to draw the sword from its scabbard, so she only hit her opponent in the chest with the end of the scabbard instead of stabbing him. Meng Changqing has to remind her twice to draw the sword, by which time she has already hit her opponent twice, once in the head, putting him in a daze so that he cannot even stand up.
At this point, Xu Jiang Zhaoxia hesitates. She asks how to kill him and Meng Changqing tells her to go for the throat or the chest or the belly. She still hesitates, not being used to ruthless violence, so that Meng Changqing has to remind her why she is out for revenge, he reminds her what happened to her daughter. With that reminder, she steels herself and slashes her enemy from the shoulder to the chest, but he’s not dead yet.
Xu Jiang Zhaoxia thinks maybe he will bleed out and she won’t have to strike again, but Meng Changqing urges her to stab him again or else her enemy will still attack her, that “if you don’t kill him, he’ll kill you”. He tells her to stab again and again and don’t stop till he’s dead. The man gets up to lunge at her and she stabs once more, running him through the chest, the blade poking out his back, and he falls. Meng Changqing tells her to pull the sword out and stab again, but she is in a daze, stunned from what she’s just done. The man makes one final strike at her but Meng Changqing knocks him back with his cudgel and the man is finally dead. As for Xu Jiang Zhaoxia:
After a moment of blanking out, staring off in a daze, Xu Jiang Zhaoxia suddenly burst out sobbing. Stirred by fear and emotion, she began vomiting over and over and knelt on the ground, exhausted.
It seemed she was not able to handle such bloody, brutal carnage.
She throws up each time after she kills one of the murderers. Throughout the whole novel she never gets used to it. The final fight, at the end of the novel, is the same:
Xu Jiang Zhaoxia’s sword quivered and a blue glint of light shot straight forward, the blade running through Xiang Zhongliang’s chest and poking out his back. Xiang Zhongliang howled and his teeth clamped down, biting off his own tongue. He crumpled heavily to the ground.
There was a moment of suffocating silence before Xu Jiang Zhaoxia jerked her hand like trying to throw off a snake wrapped around her hand, fearfully pitching the bloody, reeking sword away, and she was unable to keep from retching.
Shaking his head, Meng Changqing sighed. “Like I said, some people can never harden their heart no matter how long they live, they just can’t get used to slaughter…”
So in the end, Xu Jiang Zhaoxia gets her revenge, though she never gets used to the violent life that Meng Changqing leads. At the end, he tells her he has a friend couple who have a small child and they could use help around the house, so he says he can take her and she can settle down there. She has no other family and originally left her hometown for fear of the killers coming back for her. Now with no one, this is her best chance to have a place to stay without being all alone. The novel ends with her thanking Meng Changqing and he shrugging it off, saying if you’re going to do something, you have to take it all the way.
It’s a simple story and you know where it’s going and what’s going to happen, but there’s no plot holes or loose ends, and it does a few things differently than the average, generic wuxia novel:
- The main character is in his thirties, not a teenager or early twenty-something, and he already knows martial arts, a common characteristic in Liu Canyang’s work. As he once said, “Having the main character appear already knowing martial arts I feel is more straightforward, better for depicting revenge or something like that. Throwing a punch or two or kicking someone in the butt is not very interesting, is it? You need a more decisive slash with a sword.”
- The female lead is middle-aged, not a young jade beauty. And she is the one getting revenge, not the protagonist.
- Instead of a young man avenging the murder of his father, it’s a middle-aged woman avenging the murder of her daughter. Not only genders reversed, but the age hierarchy is as well, this time an older person avenging the murder of a younger person.
- The scope is small. Neither main character has to fight the best martial artist in the world, there is no struggling over ruling the martial world, just a woman seeking vengeance on a five average, local thugs.
The novel could have used a bit more introspection from Xu Jiang Zhaoxia. It’s still stuck with narrating from a male perspective, the main character being Meng Changqing. It would have been more interesting if it had been narrated from her point of view instead. And the plot is too predictable and neither character ever has to struggle that much or face any major setbacks. They fight, Meng Changqing protects her from interference, and she kills her target. Both receive a flesh wound over the course of the novel, but that’s it. So there’s not really any suspense.
Still, it’s a nice, light, quick read. It would have made a great Shaw Bros. film; a few fights interspersed with some moments of philosophizing and introspection. It’s a solid novel for representing Liu Canyang’s characteristic “blood and steel” style, and it takes a fresher angle at the ubiquitous revenge tale in having an average, common woman being the one training to get better and personally get revenge. Though it’s a minor work in Liu Canyang’s oeuvre, it’s a solid little book that is worth a read.
