interview Archives - Wuxia Wanderings

Posted on October 24, 2022June 11, 2023 by Lone Crane

An Interview with Cang Yue and Jiangnan

About a decade or so ago, when I was still new to translating, I ran a short-lived wuxia forum called Among Rivers and Lakes. I translated several short stories for that forum, a few of which I have posted here as well (check the translation list). I also translated an interview from 2006 that I found online with wuxia/fantasy authors Cang Yue 沧月 and Jiangnan 江南.

Jiangnan, the man in the pic above, is most well known for his fantasy series Novoland《九州縹緲錄》which was adapted in 2019 as a cdrama titled Novoland: Eagle Flag starring Liu Haoran and Song Zu’er. Cang Yue started out writing such wuxia novels as Listening Snow Tower series《聽雪樓》 and Seven Nights of Snow. Her wuxia novella Turbulent Times is translated on this site. She later switched to writing fantasy and is now most well known for her Mirror series. Her work has been adaped to cdramas several times, including Listening Snow Tower, Mirror: A Tale of Twin Cities, and coming soon, The Longest Promise starring Ren Min, Xiao Zhan, and Wang Churan and adapted from her Mirror novel Zhu Yan《朱顏》. Both of thes authors are from China and are part of what is now termed the “Neo Wuxia” 新武俠 school of wuxia, a term denoted the new mainland China writers who began writing wuxia after the ban was lifted in China around 1980. It includes words written mainly in the late 90s and early 2000s, along with the rise of web novels.

The below translation is the same as when I translated it a decade or so ago, except for some spellchecking for typos.

Posted on September 7, 2022August 9, 2023 by Lone Crane

“Wuxia Flavor” — Ximen Ding on What it Takes to Write Wuxia

During the 1980s, wuxia fiction was on the decline, but it still had a large audience in the Hong Kong pulp magazines, particularly《武俠世界》 Wuxia World, and Ximen Ding 西門丁 was one of its most important authors. He was Wuxia World’s in-house author, having signed a contract in 1980 to furnish the magazine a piece of fiction each issue (it was a weekly) totaling 25,000 to 30,000 words. He soon began writing much more, including his own novel series, the best known of which is the《雙鷹神捕》Amazing Twin Hawk Constables series, which spanned 30 novels from 1980 to 1982. Yeah, 30 novels in two years! Plus all the other stories he wrote during that time.

He also wrote Republican era martial arts stories, stoies set during contemporary times, and horror stories. Later, Ximen Ding had a popular assassin series that spanned more than 20 novels. He also wrote under many different pen names; often more than one of his works appeared at the same time in Wuxia World magazine.

Together with Huang Ying and Long Chengfeng, Ximen Ding was known as the Three Swordsmen. These three, along with Wen Rui’an, dominated wuxia fiction in the 1980s. Wen Rui’am had his Four Constable series and was experimenting with new styles and forms of writing, Long Chengfeng had his Snowblade Vagabond series, his style imitating Gu Long, and Huang Ying, after taking over for Gu Long with his horror wuxia series, began his own series featuring assassin-turned-xia Shen Shengyi.

Posted on February 1, 2021June 11, 2023 by Lone Crane

A Q&A with Jin Yong

There are spoilers for Jin Yong’s novels in this Q&A.

Cha Leung-yung was born on March 10, 1924 in Haining.

On February 8, 1955 in Hong Kong, The Book and the Sword began serializing in the “Arabian Nights” supplement of the The New Evening Post under the author name “Jin Yong”. Jin Yong was “born”.

Since then, people around the world have often only known Jin Yong, but did not know Cha Leung-yung.

In October of 1994, Jin Yong sat for an interview at Peking University, where he was also awarded the title of honorary professor. Jin Yong has had a close relationship with Peking University since then. In Huang Ziping’s edited collection of half a century of Jin Yong’s prose writings titled Searching for Him a Thousand Times there is included this transcript of the lecture on wuxia novels Jin Yong gave at Peking University on October 27, 1994, which was recorded by Lin Cuifen.

To mark the 60th anniversary of Jin Yong and his wuxia novels, The Paper has excerpted the Q&A session between Jin Yong and Peking University students from that transcript.

Q: The protagonists in your work all value righteousness. Do you think righteousness is the most important thing in life?

A: Morality is comprised of many aspects of one’s conduct. “Righteousness”¹ is one part of that. Mencius described righteousness as doing what is reasonable and appropriate. Chivalric novels emphasized righteousness because people who roamed the jianghu had no family support and no fixed source of income. There’s that saying, “At home, rely on your parents, away from home rely on your friends”. Their principal support was their friends. In dealing with abuse from other cliques or oppression from corrupt officials, you needed to rally your friends to resist. If you want to unite, you have to value righteousness and support each other, working hard toward a common goal, even to the point of sacrificing your life. So in chivalric novels, “righteousness” was elevated to a very important position. In traditional Chinese morality, “righteousness” has always been important. It’s been an important force that has allowed us Chinese to continuously grow and develop.