One day I was on a TV production set in Taiwan watching a rehearsal. Most of the people rehearsing were friends of mine, most of them excellent actors.
One of them was not only an excellent actor, he was also an outstanding screenwriter and director who had directed an incredible, unconventional and moving film that had won accolades at many film festivals.
Someone like that is without a doubt an intelligent person, a literary master. He suddenly said to me, “I’ve never read a wuxia novel. You should lend me one you think is the best so I can see what wuxia novels, after all, are all about.”
I laughed.
All I could do was laugh, because I knew what he meant.
He thought that wuxia novels were not worth reading, and that he only wanted to read one now because he was my friend and was a bit curious.
He thought people who read wuxia novels were not on the same level as people like him, definitely not high-level intellectuals with an eye on the new and original.
Thouigh he said he wanted to read one, his mind was already made up that wuxia novels were not worth anything.
Yet he had never read a wuxia novel, and didn’t even know what wuxia novels wrote about.
I didn’t blame him. Not because he was my friend, but because wuxia novels really do give people a deeply-rooted preconception so that they think they know what wuxia novels are like without even having to know what’s in them.
It was not just he who had such a notion, many people had told me the same thing. The way they said it and their attitude about it was pretty much the same every time.
Because wuxia novels really have falled into a formulaic pattern.
Wuxia novels can pretty much be summed up thusly:
An ambitious young man with “extraordinary natural talent” undergoes arduous martial arts training, then feeling proud and all full of himself, stands out head and shoulders above his peers.
Along the way, of course he will encounter many fairy-tale-like adventures and coincidences, and of course there will be conflicts, some romance, and finally he will have his revenge and get the girl.
A righteous xia will use his intelligence and martial arts to defeat the evildoers of the jianghu. Under large, mounting pressure, this xia is not only a “handsome young man versed in both military and literary matters”, he will also be really lucky, sometimes even using the “art of disguise” to become all sorts of other characters that not even his close friends and relatives, not even his parents or wife and children can recognize.
There’s nothing wrong with writing this way, writing about heroic figures and otherworldly personages or virtuous women, as well as ambitious tyrants and despots, scoundrels, or loose women.
So these kinds of stories will certainly be complex and fantastic, tense and exciting, anbd even alluring.
There’s nothing wrong with these formulas, they’re just unforuntately overused and have become cliché, formulaic. All someone need do is write a little bit off the beaten path and it will be considered “innovative”, just change the story up a bit and it will be considered “diverse”, when really the story has failed to break through the formulaic.
This is not what “innovation” and “diversity” means.
The Red and the Black is about the psychological journey of a young man who seduces another man’s wife. Airport1 is about a man rediscovering himself in the midst of extreme danger. Little Women is about youth and happiness. The Old Man and the Sea is about the cost of courage and the value of life. Of Mice and Men is about human pride and degradation…
These mighty authors used their keen insight and rich imaginations to write powerful depictions of human nature and to convey their themes and move readers through the trials and triumphs of their characters, as well as take a deeper, further look into the world and its inhabitants.
The ways in which they pull this off makes one slap the table and cheer.
Stories like these, writing styles like these, can be used in wuxia novels as well, so why has no one done it?
Who said wuxia novels had to be written a certain way in order to be considered genuine wuxia?
Wuxia novels are the same as other novels; you need only fascinate the reader, move the reader with your story’s characters, and you will be a success.
~*~
One day I ran into a girl I really liked. She was not a heavy reader, but she was not stupid.
Once she learned I was a “writer” her eyes suddenly lit up and she immediately asked me, “What kind of novels do you write?”
I wanted to lie, but I never liked lying to someone I liked, because even though there’s no one in the world who could always remember what lies he’s told, and if I liked her of course I would want to be around her a lot, but if I was around her a lot then my lie would surely be exposed.
So I said, “I write wuxia novels.”
Once she heard that, the excited, beautiful glimmer in her eyes was snuffed out at once.
I didn’t even have the nerve to look at her because I guessed what her reaction would be.
There was a long pause, and then she told me, rather apologetically, “I never read wuxia novels.”
Only after I had gotten to know her better did I venture to ask, “Why don’t you read them?”
Her answer took me by surprise.
She said, “I don’t understand them.”
Wuxia novels are the easiest to understand, how could someone not understand them?
It took me a while before I figured it out.
She couldn’t understand the “unique” style of dialogue in wuxia novels, the complicated, abstruse martial arts move names, and the terse, “archaic” sentence structure.
She felt it strange, why couldn’t wuxia novels be written with more clear, concise language? Why couldn’t dialogue be written more lively and realistically?
I could only explain, “Because we’re writing about ancient times and ancient characters.”
She shot back, “How do you know how ancient people talked? Have you ever heard them speak?”
I was speechless. I couldn’t answer!
Then she said, “You really think the style of dialogue in Beijing operas and classical novels are the way people used to talk in the old days? Even if it was, you all don’t have to write it that way, because the main goal of writing novels is for people to read them. If people can’t understand them they won’t read them, and if they don’t read them, then what are you writing for?”
She wasn’t the most skilled speaker, but she got right to the point.
What she had said was not necessarily completely correct, but she did have a point.
People write novels for others to read, and the more readers the better.
Wuxia novels certainly have readers, but wuxia readers are like the novels themselves, very small in scope. There are way more people who don’t read wuxia novels than people who do.
If we wish to strive for more readers, we must think of ways to get people who don’t read wuxia novels to read them, and come up with ways to change their preconceived notions about wuxia novels.
So we need innovation and diversity!
~*~
We need innovation, we need diversity, we need to experiment, we need to assimilate.
Many people feel that nowadays the best novels are coming out of not America or Europe, but Japan.
Because Japanese novels not only preserve their own age-old traditions, they also assimilate
They assimilate classical Chinese literature, as well as many kinds of Western ideologies.
Japanese writers can infuse the best of foreign literature to create a new national style of literature, so why can’t wuxia novelists?
Some people say, “China has had wuxia novels ever since Sima Qian’s Biography of Knights-Errant.”
Since wuxia novels have their own long-standing tradition, if we can do our best to assimilate the best of other literary works, then one day we will be able to create a new style of wuxia novel, an independent style! That will grant wuxia novels a place in the world of literature, that will make it impossible for people to deny the genre’s value.
And entice those who don’t read wuxia novels to read them!
That is our greatest desire.
Right now of course our ability is not sufficient, but we at least ought to head down that path, cast off all fetters and head down that road.
At present we are just beginning, and even though we’re starting late, it’s still not too late!
This is my translation of the preface to Gu Long’s novel Big Shots (aka The Celebrity)《大人物》, which first appeared in the Hong Kong wuxia magazine Wuxia Annals《武俠春秋》on March 17, 1971 in issue #50.