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Wuxia Fiction and Me—Dongfang Yu

In the January 1, 1978 issue of Taiwan’s 《時報週刊》China Times Weekly, wuxia author Dongfang Yu 東方玉 began serializing his new novel《金笛玉芙蓉》Gold Flute, Jade Lotus. To coincide with this release, Dongfang Yu wrote an autobiographical introduction called “Wuxia Fiction and Me”. I have translated that introduction below. The original article, as it was posted by another wuxia fan online in Chinese, is structured in a few very long paragraphs. I have broken these up somewhat to make it a bit easier to read (though they are still a bit long). Aside from that, I have interpolated a few illustrations that accompanied the weekly installments during the novel’s 47-week run.

Wuxia Fiction and Me

Author Introduction

Dongfang Yu, real name Chen Yu, courtesy name Hanshan, from Yuyao, Zhejiang province. Graduated from Shanghai’s Chengming College of Liberal Arts Department of Chinese, served in the military administration office for a number of years. Skilled in calligraphy, proficient in poetry, wrote several collections of poetry including Hanshan Poetry Anthology, Embracing Splendor, Southern Thunder, Sharp Peak Lodge, and Green Scented Studio Lyric Manuscripts, and he wrote wuxia novels under the pen name Dongfang Yu with such works as Release the Crane, Capture the Dragon, Seven Swords of Lanling, etc., about 30 or so works totaling tens of thousands of words. Now he is a contracted writer for the eight major newspapers inside and outside of the country.

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A Great Opening Chapter—Wolong Sheng’s Heavenly Sword, Supreme Sabre

It’s true for any genre: when writing a novel you need a strong opening, something that piques the reader’s interest and keeps it and makes them want to read the next chapter. Well you won’t a much better example of such a chapter than Wolong Sheng’s 1965 novel Heavenly Sword, Supreme Sabre《天劍絕刀》.

Wolong Sheng 臥龍生 was a master at crafty interesting, intricate plots that kept the reader turning pages. There’s a reason he was called the “Mount Tai and Northern Dipper of Taiwan Wuxia” (台灣武俠泰斗) and was one of the “Three Swordsmen” 三劍客 of the Taiwan wuxia literary circle, along with Sima Ling 司馬翎 and Zhuge Qingyun 諸葛青雲. He is criticized for not taking his work seriously enough and allowing other authors to publish their work under his name, but I feel is strong points are too often overlooked in favor of repeating these same criticisms. It’s true his novels tend to suffer from having the “head of a tiger and the tail of a snake”, starting strong but then petering out by the end. But that’s true of many wuxia novels by many different authors, a product in part of the long serialization process (novels typically ran in newspapers for two to four years), and in Wolong Sheng’s case, also because he often wrote multiples novels for different newspapers at once. During his prime years, at one point he was concurrently writing Flying Swallow Startles the Dragon《飛燕驚龍》for Great China Evening News, Jade Hairpin Oath《玉釵盟》for Central Daily News, Red Snow, Black Frost《絳雪玄霜》for Sin Chew Daily, and Heavenly Whirlwind《天香飆》for Public Opinion Daily. Writing daily installments for all of those novels, it’s easy to see why he might have issues with consistancy. Keep in mind too that unlike Jin Yong 金庸, who spent years revising his entire body of work, Wolong Sheng’s novels that we have today still use the original text he published in the newspapers. He (and this is true for almost all wuxia authors) never revised his work.

Despite all that, Wolong Sheng still managed to produce some good work, great at times, and the first chapter of Heavenly Sword, Supreme Sabre is about a good an opening to a story as one could ask for.

But rather than just vaguely telling you why, I took the liberty of translating the first chapter so you can see for yourself. That chapter follows below. Afterward, I will discuss why I think this chapter is so effective.

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“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.

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Writing Fast and Writing Well

Writing Fast and Writing Well

by Wen Rui’an

Writing is a pleasure. The inverse of that sentence is: if you find writing to be a chore, then please stop writing at once. Forced work will never be a success, and the craft of writing cannot be carried out casually; you have to write your best in order to see results.

I can write 3,500 characters an hour. Among Chinese authors, I’m naturally not the fastest, but I’m already fast enough to be considered a “swift pen”. Some doubt that word count, but actually there’s really no need to:

  1. Writing fast does not mean writing well. If you write fast but slipshod, then fast is not a good thing.
  2. This kind of speed requires focus, plus some practice, and then anyone can do it. When I write I am often unfocused, so much of the time I can’t reach even half of that speed.
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Taiwan Wuxia Fiction Clichés

Taiwan Wuxia Fiction Clichés

by Jin Yong

For the last six months I’ve been reading a lot of wuxia novels. Recently there hasn’t been much wuxia novel output from Hong Kong authors, but on the Taiwan side it’s been surging like a storm, works emerging one after another. I read this kind of fiction exceptionally quickly, reading two books a night, each book between ten and twenty volumes. So the reason i can read these so fast is very simple, it’s because the novels’ plots are all pretty much the same, the stories formulaic, rarely seeing something new when flipping through them.

The following plots can be found in the great majority of Taiwan wuxia novels:

  1. A “dashing” young xia’s parents are killed by an enemy, so he is forced to roam the jianghu and undergo many adventures.
  2. Lots and lots of lady xia love him, among them will definitely be a licentious girl with the nickname of “Peach Blossom Something-or-other”, and there will be a lady xia disguised as a guy. This xia will certainly be drugged with an aphrodisiac and won’t be able to help himself from getting involved with one of the lady xia, “making a serious mistake”.
  3. The backbone of the story will be vying for a secret manual of the martial world or some rare jianghu treasure.
  4. This young xia will definitely obtain a secret martial arts manual left behind by an extraordinary person from a previous generation, and he will train until his martial arts is unmatched under the heavens, and the manual left behind will definitely have the words “left for one who is fated to receive it”.
  5. The young xia will definitely incur the favor of a senior who will help him open up his Conception and Governing vessels, get through a life-or-death training trial that will increase his strength one-, two-, or threefold.
  6. The xia’s antagonist will definitely be a master of a heretical school, some Demon Lord, Divine Lord, Ancestor, or old woman, all written the same, their appearance as grotesque as their martial arts, but with unexceptional personalities.
  7. Masters from prominent schools like Wudang, Shaolin, Kunlun, Kongtong, etc., will, when faced with the young xia, become completely worthless mediocrities.

The plots are mostly the same, and the language used to write them is also clichéd, stuff like “if it’s a blessing it’s not a disaster, if it’s a disaster you can’t avoid it”, “felt like ghosts were everywhere”, “a rare bud of the martial world”, none of them used by Hong Kong wuxia novelists. Wuxia fiction has been all the rage for less than ten years, but on the Taiwan side it seems to be even more popular than in Hong Kong. But in ten years for so many clichés and formulas to have already become so deeply rooted is really astounding.

Ming Pao, April 25, 1963

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Jin Yong—On the Critical Standards of Wuxia Fiction

On the Critical Standards of Wuxia Fiction

by Jin Yong

This article by Mr. Jin Yong was published in 1957 in Hong Kong’s New Evening Post and was later lost. In 2015, Jin Yong Jianghu Forum1 poster “Emulating Lei Feng” found and copied the text of the article so that it could once again see the light of day. As everyone knows, although Mr. Jin Yong is a grandmaster of wuxia, he rarely wrote about his theories of wuxia literature. This article may be called a rare find and is extremely precious.

Recently someone published and article in the paper that was critical of wuxia fiction which led to a lot of debate. For the seventh anniversary of The New Evening Post, the editor asked me to write an article about wuxia fiction, so I am going to express my views on the subject.

If you take wuxia fiction as unadulterated entertainment to pass the time, then there is only one standard that has to be met: “does it interest the reader or not?” But clearly, the recent discussions have been treating wuxia fiction as a part of the national literature. For my part, I too hope wuxia fiction can be qualified to be considered “literature” and have been striving to write wuxia with that in mind, though I have not been successful at it so far.

When it comes to critiquing the good and bad of wuxia fiction, I think there are four main standards:

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So You Want to Write Wuxia

Whether you want to write a wuxia novel, historical fiction set in premodern China, or a fantasy novel based on traditional China in some way, there’s a lot of stuff you need to know if you want your work to be as authentic as it can be. When it comes to wuxia, unfortunately there’s not a lot of information available in English, but there is some. I have a list of resources to get you started below, and then another list of books that wil come in handy when researching traditional China in general.

This post is the first in a series in which I will discuss different aspects of Chinese history and culture. Some will be of general use such as how did people address each other, what what were city walls like, etc. Other posts will be specific to wuxia, such as a discussion of the jianghu, martial arts schools, a comparison of different authors’ fight scenes, etc. Just topics I think are good to know when writing wuxia or any other Chinese period piece. I will take requests if anyone has a specific question they want answered. I’ll answer it if I can, or try to point you in the right direction if I can’t.

The dearth of wuxia novels translated into English makes it difficult for those who can’t read Chinese to learn more about the genre. I mean, if you’re going to write wuxia novels then you need to read wuxia novels. That’s just common sense. There are some you can read. I have a list of them on my site you can check out. Only a few authors have been translated, though, mainly Jin Yong and Gu Long. Their writing styles were unique, and though they did influence other writers, still the field of wuxia fiction as a whole was a bit different than these two authors might make it seem. I’m talking about the tropes and conventions used, often overused, the recycled plots, and so forth. This series of posts will address some of that stuff that isn’t available in English currently.

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Martial Arts Manuals — A Discussion of Wuxia Fiction Tropes

The jianghu world in wuxia novels is a “martial” world. Martial arts is not only what heroes and lady xia rely on (for protection) as they roam the jianghu, the requirement for chivalrous deeds (acting as a xia), is the final standard for settling disputes and getting satisfaction through seeking vengeance. In fact, the “wu” in wuxia, referring to martial arts, supports the entire framework. Liang Yusheng once said, “‘Xia’ is the soul, ‘wu’ is the body; ‘xia’ is the goal, and ‘wu’ is the means.”1 Even so, as for the characteristics of the wuxia genre, “wu” is the key therein.2 It’s hard for us to imagine a major character in a wuxia novel with little or no martial arts ability, even though Jin Yong wrote a character in The Deer and the Cauldron, Wei Xiaobao, who relied entirely on his eloquence, quick wit, and ability to adapt to circumstances in order to freely navigate the imperial court and the jianghu, “creating a marvelous, unprecedented wuxia novel”.3 However, we’ll leave aside discussions of the desire to “subvert”,4 as that is not a conventional practice in wuxia fiction. And Jin Yong still could not escape conferring a modicum of martial arts on Wei Xiaobao, from the “Art of the Hundred Flights” and “Art of Escape” to his dagger and precious vest, all are aimed at keeping this distinguishing wuxia quality in mind. It could be said that Jin Yong is acknowledging martial arts.

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Mistakes

Daughter has been practicing English on her own after school since she started first grade. She had a listening test the other day where Mom said a sentence and she had to write it. She didn’t do very well, which makes sense cause she’s just starting out. But she was disappointed that she got so much wrong.

I told her making mistakes was normal, that if she didn’t it meant it was too easy to begin with. It takes time to get better, but if she continued practicing she’d improve. I pointed out how she was not very good writing Chinese when she started either, but she’s much better now. Every adult would agree with that, that it takes time to improve.

And yet, I totally get her. Whenever I mess up or do something wrong or am corrected I feel bad, feel ashamed, embarrassed, etc. Same way my daughter felt. Why is it so hard to take one’s own advice? Fear of experiencing those feelings has led me to abandoned projects, or not starting them at all. You really do get in your own way sometimes.

So here’s to learning from the younger. Here’s to listening to one’s own advice.