Wolong Sheng and Jade Hairpin Oath

by Hu Zhengqun

On March 23, 1997 at around 9:00 pm I returned home in the dreary, heavy spring rain. Outside the door I heard the telephone ringing and quickly opened the door and picked it up.

“Uncle Hu… Dad left us at 8 o’clock… I don’t know what to do…”

It was Wolong Sheng’s child calling. The call I’d been dreading for years really arrived.

I told this sad news to Wolong Sheng’s good friend and wuxia author Yu Donglou and “Ox Bro” Li Feimeng. (Mr. Li Feimeng also passed away in 1997, Yu Donglou in 2003).

Ox Bro, Wolong Sheng, and I were friends for almost forty years, as close as brothers. When we talked on the phone I was so sad I could barely get the words out, but Li Feimeng understood, and choking back sobs, urged me not to be too sad.

I hung up the phone and sat despondently under the lamplight. It was pitch-black outside my window and utterly silent.

Lost in thought, I asked myself, “Is Wolong (we used to call him that) really gone?”

As far back as 1958 or 1959 I saw Swallow Startles the Dragon in the Great China Evening News and learned the name Wolong Sheng. I was taken by his lucid, elegant writing, his brilliant stories. It was really a coincidence, in early fall of 1959 I received a kind invitation from Director Geng Xiuye to work at Great China and assist Mr. Zhang Ligeng as editor for their supplement.

This was a job I had long dreamed of, and I did it with earnest enthusiasm, carefully proofreading and polishing every manuscript, especially Swallow Startles the Dragon.

About half a month later, Director Geng introduced me to a fresh-faced, strong smiling young man, “Zhengqun, this is Wolong Sheng. You should keep in close touch with each other and get well acquainted…”

We’d had a similar upbringing and became friends as soon as we started talking. In those days he lived in the Guishan area of Taoyuan in a place by the mountains called something like Qingxi. Sometimes he would come to Taipei and stay a while with a friend.

Every few days he would invite me out for a chat. That fellow townsman from Henan was really straightforward, he got straight to the point about why he had come, saying that aside from Great China Evening News’ Swallow Startles the Dragon, publishers and overseas Chinese-language newspapers were asking him to submit manuscripts and said he was very satisfied and thankful for my editing them for him. Anyway we were both bachelors and around the same age, and he was planning to move to Taipei and didn’t want me to act like a stranger, inviting me to move in with him and look after each other.

He was so frank and solicitous, how could I reject his great kindness. And so I politely accepted and agreed on the spot. In high spirits he went to look for a place and got ready to move.

Mr. Zhang Ligeng was not only the chief editor of Great China Evening News’ supplement, he was also the chief editor of the film and art edition of the most prestigious paper at the time, Central Daily News. Mr. Zhang was a judicious, innovative newsman. Wolong Sheng’s debut work, Graceful Beauty Sword Rocks the Jianghu was accepted by the editor-in-chief of Great China, but Chief Editor Zhang also had his eye on the rising young author as well, and again and again urged him to write a new work, and he’d be happy to recommend it to Central Daily News.

During that fermenting period, I often went back and forth between Taipei and Guishan, at times staying at his mountainside log cabin and talking with him all through the night to get his new story.

Jade Hairpin Oath was finally born, and the story won the approval of the Central Daily News. Mr. Ligeng thought that if he could find a master to illustrate it, that would be the icing on the cake.

It was really a case of “without a coincidence there would be no story”. I had a friend—Li Lingjia, who was just then rising within art circles, and his landscapes and character illustrations in particular were held in high regard by Yu Youren, Mo Liu, and Mr. Zhang Daqian. Mr. Ligeng wanted me to get him to help out.

Lingjia was reluctant at first, but I pressed him, saying, “You don’t have to use the name Li Lingjia, you can use a pen name and no one will know who drew it!”

“Picking a pen name” inspired us all and we had the idea to take the “jia” (伽) in Lingjia and split it into Other Person (另人), and as we all loudly celebrated, Lingjia joyfully set to drawing.

To make it convenient to write and draw, we selected a Japanese style wooden building in an alley off Gongyuan Rd. (I recall it was Alley 13) near the Central Daily News and got to work on Jade Hairpin Oath.

On October 1, 1960, Central Daily News groundbreakingly presented to the public this excellent, illustrated wuxia novel and immediately caused an unprecedented sensation. In the cities and in the countryside, it was everywhere a Jade Hairpin Oath whirlwind, and Wolong Sheng a legendary household name on every street and lane.

Some said Wolong Sheng was a Daoist priest; others said he was an old gentleman in his sixties. One person said he had a relative who knew Wolong Sheng, and another described in detail how he had seen him the day before…”

In those days there were a lot of morning soy milk stands on the main road off the alley, and when someone sat down, they didn’t grab a sesame cake or a cup of soy milk, but were busy finding the Central Daily News so they could read Jade Hairpin Oath.

Everyone read Jade Hairpin Oath, everyone talked about Wolong Sheng, he was really famous everywhere, his fame even reaching the government.

When Wolong Sheng was at his peak, not only were publishers in Taiwan and Hong Kong vying for his books, papers all across Southeast Asia were requesting manuscripts one after another. In Taiwan alone he had Jade Hairpin Oath serializing at Central Daily News, Swallow Startles the Dragon at Great China, Heavenly Whirlwind at Public Opinion Daily News, and Heavenly Sword, Paragon Sabre at Independence Evening Post. He also had Red Snow, Black Frost at Sin Chew Daily in Singapore.

Wolong Sheng was certainly a man of talent, writing five different stories every day for five different papers, so that besides praising him as a talent, he was really indescribable.

A man of talent is not a superman, and because he had gotten the notice of high-ranking officials, had beautiful women after him, and had an increased social life, hanging out randomly with the masters Zhuge Qingyun, Sima Ling, and Gu Long at the mahjong table talking shop, it was hard to find time for writing. Which was really hard on “Other Person” and I.

We took manuscript paper, the newspaper, brush and ink and conducted guerrilla warfare, writing and drawing in restaurants, coffee shops, newspaper offices, and at the mahjong table. In order to meet the deadline for sending out the last of them, Red Snow, Black Frost to Sin Chew Daily, it was a common occurrence for us to sit and write and draw at a small table in the Beimen Post Office. A lot of postal workers and customers would crowd around to watch our “live show”.

Wolong Sheng was so busy it was a “matter of life and death”, often cursing himself. I couldn’t stand seeing him like this, so I had to steel myself and “grasp the knife” (i.e. ghostwrite) for him and fill up one or two sheets.

My “filling in” for Wolong Sheng was know by everyone from Central Daily’s Deputy Head Qian and Great China’s Director Geng, down to everyone in the typesetting rooms. Qian and Geng saw me in a new light and encouraged me to “establish myself” and write wuxia.

I was touched by my seniors’ looking out for me because I knew that I could help fill in and ghostwrite for Wolong Sheng. But if I were to “establish myself” then I would surely let the two directors down, not to mention how could I go up against the mighty Wolong Sheng?

Wolong Sheng, original name Niu Heting, was not as well educated or experienced as the others he would come to lead wuxia circles with. He liked listening to Henan clapper opera, and he loved reading popular historical romances like The Court Cases of Judge Peng, Five Little Sworn Brothers, and Everlasting Blessings of Peace, and he liked listening to oral storytellers. He absorbed the essence of former wuxia authors—Zhu Zhenmu, Zheng Zhengyin, Bai Yu, and Wang Dulu and combined their strengths and added his own literary talent. In the end he became a great master with his own style within wuxia literary circles.

His debut novels Graceful Beauty Sword Rocks the Jianghu and Reclusive Xia are tightly plotted and the stories are moving, but they still couldn’t shake off the “oral storyteller” vibe. Swallow Startles the Dragon gave him the pressure to protect his reputation and the ambition to rule over the martial world, tempering himself while getting inspired from his good friends’ enthusiastic encouragement, and with Jade Hairpin Oath he put his forceful skill on display and in one battle pacified the martial world and achieved his ambition.

In Wolong Sheng’s novels, his champions think that the sweeping scope of his stories are the most awe-inspiring, his excellent, detailed love stories the most moving, his depiction of character the most successful, his twisting and turning stories the most fascinating, his characters’ names the most appropriate.

These things of course did not come without effort. The planning of his sweeping stories benefited from traditional novels; the romance came from his own love life; his depiction of character benefited from what he learned from oral storytellers; the complicated stories came from his carefully crafted designs, and the appropriateness of his names all came from phone books and entrance examination candidate lists, from which he carefully selected and pieced together.

Over the last ten years or so, Gu Long (d. 1985), Sima Ling (d. 1989), and Zhuge Qingyun (d. 1996) withered and fell in too early one after another, and wuxia fiction gradually declined along with many other forms of entertainment. Now, Wolong Sheng, only 69 years old, not old by today’s standards, has suddenly passed away due to chronic heart problems. Those days when the swords gleamed over this treasured island, and the martial world was in its golden age will probably never be seen again. Now that Zhuge and Wolong have returned to the soil, the traces of xia in the world has grown even more blurry and indistinct.

Although I’m grieved by the sad death of my good friend of nearly forty years, when I look back at all the hardships he went through in those resplendent days, and the rich, glorious accomplishments he achieved, his life was enough to feel regretful over…

source: https://www.rxgl.net/html/c16/2015-09/3261.htm