by xuefengzisui (雪峰資水)
Nanjing University 小百合站, May 16, 2003
Seeing people talk about Jin Yong every day moved me to write this essay. Every wuxia star is like a perilous peak among a towering range of mountains. Although they all stand firmly, tall and straight among the clouds and mist, each has its own distance and height. Everyone has their favorite author, and readers are perhaps the most partial. Reading wuxia, if a reader likes one writer and regards others as a pair of old shoes, then it’s a lot like visiting a famous mountain yet not appreciating or delighting in it. Wuxia, despite being fiction that narrates stories of made-up characters, every writer has his own method of fabrication, and from these methods we can see where current trends spring up. Regarding wuxia authors from Hong Kong and Taiwan, I believe there are several whose accomplishments are underrated. Whenever I see people loudly declaim at forum discussions that everyone other than Jin Yong is trash, or everyone except X is trash, I can’t help but sigh at their juvenile attitude. The ancients said, “A leaf blocks the eye and you can’t see Mt. Tai”. For a lot of wuxia readers, Jin Yong has become the standard, and Jin Yong’s jianghu has become a model, and wuxia should be written this way.
But although everyone knows that Jin Yong is excellent, he is still not capable of overshadowing others’ literary grace. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, aside from the greats: Jin Yong, Gu Long, Liang Yusheng, Wen Rui’an, and Huang Yi, there are three other authors whose achievements have been underrated, and those three are: Sima Ling, Sima Ziyan, and Yun Zhongyue (雲中岳). It’s too bad that, despite the fact that these three authors’ novels have their own unique characteristics, people still rate them as second-rate wuxia authors, along with Zhuge Qingyun and his generation. The special traits of Sima Ling and Sima Ziyan’s novels will be discussed in other essays. Here I want to talk about Yun Zhongyue.
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