FOREWORD

THE TREE WITHIN THE FOREST: THE WONDERFUL CULTURE OF RIVERS AND LAKES

“What comes to mind when you think of China?” When a professor asks students this question on the fi rst day of a Chinese culture class, the answers may point to China’s economic boom, its vast market, the arts and painting, Daoism, Buddhism, Mao, or China’s burgeoning population. Increasingly, however, students speak of Kung fu or the martial arts. This answer reveals that some students might be in the habit of staying up late watching rented Kung fu movies in which Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li fl ash their martial prow-ess, kicking, fi ghting, and fl ying with superhuman skills. There is something liberating and transcendent about these Kung fu fl icks that is irresistible, almost inspirational, particularly for young people recently freed from parental control and about to step on the aca-demic treadmill. Hollywood has also been infl uenced by fi lms such as Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou’s Hero , creating, in turn, movies like The Matrix , where digital tech-nology and corporeal martial skills are blended to create a wonderful, if curious, cinematographic extravaganza. The marvels of the human

x

body proliferate and its muscular agility defi es god-given limits. The hyperphysical power, the dazzling tactics and gesticulations, the retro, antiquated settings of imperial palaces, the darkened groves, the rivers and lakes, and the virtues of loyalty and integrity—all these invoke a simpler and purer world, more enticing than the crisis ridden, anxious postmodern culture of today.

The image of the unfettered, soaring body may be what gives the martial arts pride of place in the Chinese imagination. Audiences nour-ished by a Hollywood Kung fu diet may also feel that the martial arts make China quintessentially “Chinese.” But the Hollywood image of Kung fu, as Ann Huss and Jianmei Liu suggest in the introduction to this collection, is inauthentic and distorting to the seasoned reader of martial arts fi ction. For instance, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon , when shown in China, put many a Shanghai audience to sleep.

So what is the difference between media packaged Kung fu and an authentic martial arts tradition? What are the “real” tigers and drag-ons of the wuxia , or knight-errant, world, and the characters that people the pages of a martial arts novel? These questions are points of departure for this wonderful volume. The authors of this collection of essays - renowned professors and critics in China and the United States - are well versed with the martial arts genre. More importantly, they know how to situate the martial arts in its cultural and political terrain. They focus on the work of the most prominent writer of mar-tial arts fi ction, Jin Yong, as the symbol of the knight-errant tradition. Jin Yong has written a series of martial arts novels, immortalizing the spirit of the wandering warrior. His work has gained widespread pop-ularity in Chinese communities around the world. He writes in what has been referred to by readers and critics as the common language of Chinese everywhere. Overall, the global circulation of his novels and their fi lm, television, and video game formats has, as the title of this book suggests, created a “Jin Yong phenomenon.”

Students who name Kung fu as a distinguishing mark of Chinese cul-ture may simply be observers unable to separate the forest for the trees. By contrast, professors of Chinese literature, knowing better, are often content to blame the media or the observer for being shortsighted and

Foreword

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leave it at that. In light of this, the observer is short changed of the opportunity to see the tree within the forest. Put simply, many a scholar have argued that if Kung fu is just cheap popular entertainment, why bother? If, however, the critic or professor does not dismiss the Kung fu tradition, but tries instead to fi t the pieces of the puzzle together, a surprisingly rich ensemble of histories, ancient and modern, that explains the phenomenal rise of the martial arts might emerge. This is what the editors and writers of this volume have done—each entry is a piece in the puzzle, a tree that fi ts into the larger forest that is the martial arts tradition.

The editors’ fi rst great service is to bring the tree back to the for-est. In this volume, Jin Yong is not simply presented in contrast to the media image of Kung fu. Through the study of Jin Yongs work, the reader also becomes privy to the evolution of the martial arts tradition. Moreover, the martial arts are also situated within the multilayered tra-ditions of Chinese literature and social life, revealing its interplay and exchange with other literary forms within a larger cultural environ-ment. More signifi cantly, the contributors portray the martial arts tradi-tion with an eye to the changing political landscape from the 1950s to the present in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and other Chinese com-munities around the world.

The reader may be surprised to fi nd that in the traditional or modern literary establishment, martial arts fi ction was not always respected. One task of this book is to challenge the May Fourth view of the martial arts genre and its constituents. May Fourth culture embraced modern, Western ideas, values, and literary forms, and discounted the martial arts form as obsolete, backward, and antimodern. From this literary lineage, Jin Yong’s work arose as a challenge to this lopsided view that China could only become modern by discarding traditional culture. This tension between the traditional and modern provoked a debate over the very texture and syntax of language. May Fourth writers preferred to shed their traditional vocabulary in favor of a Europeanized language, as if changing one’s linguistic garb would serve as a mode of liberation. Jin Yong’s writing, indebted to an entrenched yet submerged mélange of storytelling, classical

Foreword

xii

essays, vernacular stories, and chivalric novels, has recreated a literary language that looks both familiar and strange. It is familiar in its invocation of the cultural memory of a marginalized martial arts tradition and Confucian morality. It looks strange in its freshness and plebian aura. In fact, the language of a Jin Yong novel comes as a fresh breeze that blows against the stuffy Europeanized version of the Chinese language that was canonized by mainstream literature and discourse throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, this Euro-peanized Chinese, in its unquestioned embrace of Western modernity, fostered a tunnel vision of Chinese modernity in isolation of Chinese culture. Such a take on modernity without an inner soul has undercut itself and has impoverished the Chinese language and culture. This lack of cultural substance marks the radical revolutionary language that tried over and again to cleanse the “feudal remnants” ( fengjian canyu )— remainders of traditional culture denigrated by advocates of modernity and revolution. Thus from a broad modernist perspec-tive, the Jin Yong phenomenon marks an effort to proclaim that there is a Chinese modern culture that keeps its valuable tradition alive.

Jin Yong’s attraction lies not only in his power to challenge the established language and literary forms, but also in the fact that his work becomes a force of resistance in relation to colonialism and Western hegemony. The editors and writers of this volume, however, do not want to harp on the tired themes of resistance and domina-tion. In the age of clashes between cultures, cultural imperialism may fi nd its mirror image in chauvinistic nationalism. Jin Yong therefore emerges in this geopolitical landscape as an adroit player capable of taking on multiple and changeable identities. For the contributors of this volume, Jin Yong suggests a way to freedom by acting as a wandering warrior traveling through the rivers and lakes. By taking on different identities as the political situation calls for, the warrior manages to thread his or her way through power blocks of domination or victimhood, without being in league with the powers that be. This is the ancient “existentialism” of the martial arts spirit, wuxia . I believe this is a reason why students and the western audience in a liberal society are drawn to this free-fl oating ethos. One can be a chameleon,

Foreword

xiii

able to defend friends and kin with superb skills, and strategically put up an identity in the market place or political arena, without pledg-ing allegiance to a party, a discourse, or a nation. Thus, the essence of Chinese culture may also be a self-critical spirit that disavows the rigid, offi cial defi nition of Chineseness. This cosmopolitan diversity in unity appeals greatly to those in China and the West who yearn for a common culture as it was envisioned and practiced by the wander-ing knight-errant, without being tied to Chinese soil or identity.

The authors in this volume examine the martial arts tradition from many vantage points, and are able to situate the tree within the forest of culture, history, and politics. These collected essays make a great contribution to a historically nuanced image of China. These days, many students and readers are introduced to Chinese culture, not by studying the Chinese language or classics, but by way of the martial arts. The martial arts may or may not serve as an appetizer leading to the main course. This volume will shepherd intrigued guests directly to the main course and into the temple of Chinese history and culture.

Ban Wang Rutgers University

Foreword

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been on our minds for a very long time. Earlier versions of several of the articles included here were fi rst presented at a confer-ence entitled “Jin Yong and Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature,” held at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1998. While Jin Yong, his novels, and his newspaper empire are well known to Chinese speakers around the globe, few in the English-speaking world have heard of the author or read his works. Bringing this collection to pub-lication in English has thus been an uphill battle. We therefore owe our fi rst debt of gratitude to Cambria Press, especially Toni Tan for her foresight.

Professor Liu Zaifu has been our mentor and guide for many years. When he fi rst suggested this book project to us, we had no idea it would take so long to complete. We thank him for his patient guid-ance. We also thank our former PhD advisor, David Der-wei Wang, for his long-standing support. There are many others who also deserve our thanks. We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the contribu-tors to this volume for their patience and hard work. We thank Chris Hamm, Carlos Rojas, Mengjiao Jiang, Aijun Zhu, and Kristof Van den Troost for their excellent translations. Translators are often the

xvi

unsung heroes of the literary world. This project would have been impossible without them. Kristof Van den Troost deserves an extra note of thanks for his painstaking work on the bibliography and the index. We are also grateful to Professor Hugh Baker and the Centre for East Asian Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, as well as the University of Maryland, College Park, for providing the time and resources necessary to complete this project.

Jin Yong was kind enough to allow us to use the cover image. We hope he will be pleased to see such detailed interpretations and critiques of his work in print. As the editors, we are ultimately responsible for the content of this book. It is always a challenge to ensure that translations of scholarly works are both readable, and that the solemnity of the original is not lost along the way. We hope that we have done justice to the authors who have been translated here. As always, we would appreciate comments and suggestions from readers.

Lastly, we thank each other, for the strength of our friendship and our shared love of Chinese literature.

Ann Huss and Jianmei Liu Hong Kong and Potomac, Maryland

Acknowledgements

THE JIN YONG PHENOMENON

INTRODUCTION : JIN YONG

AND MARTIAL ARTS FICTION

In the 2000 fi lm Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon , director Ang Lee tapped the very “essence,” or “ qi ,” of Chinese culture as represented in the martial arts novel, synthesized it, distilled it, and created what to many seemed a watered down, feminist, anti-martial arts, breathtaking Hollywood extravaganza. Touted as deeper and more lyrical than the classic Yuen Wo-Ping choreographed fi lms, 1 Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon envelops Master Li Mubai and his heart, Yu Xiulian, as they slip across the screen with a majesty that only the cello of Yo-Yo Ma and the deeply haunting tones of composer Tan Dun can accompany. As one newspaper critic wrote, “Now that Lee has shown us this new realm, kickfests in the back alleys of Hong Kong are never going to seem the same.” This jianghu is not the place that seasoned wuxia read-ers remember. It is a jianghu foreign to Chinese eyes, a forest that gives domicile to characters only marginally recognizable to diehard martial arts fans.

2 THE JIN YONG PHENOMENON

Oddly enough, and probably news to many Western ears, the martial arts novel has always been considered a marginal member of the Chinese literary tradition. That such a marginal, yet indelibly crucial element of Chinese culture could impress Hollywood as it did required a story centuries old to be retold. We learn of a master once satisfi ed with the power of detachment succumbing to his love for a woman. The xiaqi , the very essence of the xiake , the knight-errant, is obscured by a glance, the touch of a calloused hand, a fi nal kiss. Then again, the argument might be made that the true essence of the knight-errant, of Li Mubai, lies in his willingness to remain true to one woman, above all else. Such an argument and ending criti-cized as “Hollywood-style” and simplistic, has raised the ire of many a seasoned wuxia reader. Why did this version of the centuries-old jianghu tale catch the attention of a Western audience steeped in kick-boxing and Jackie Chan? However, why did Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon put many an audience member in Shanghai to sleep when it was shown in China?

To answer these questions, we must fi rst step away from Li Mubai and Yu Xiulian, Lo and Jen, and engage in a closer reading of the “real” tigers and dragons of the wuxia , or martial arts world, the characters that people the pages of the martial arts novels penned by Jin Yong. It was Jin Yong’s character Wei Xiaobao, and not Ang Lee’s Li Mubai, who fi rst captured the hearts and minds of wuxia readers across Asia and throughout the diaspora; Jin Yong’s descrip-tion of jianghu in Fox Volant of Snowy Mountain and The Deer and the Cauldron —and not the bamboo forest of the Wu Dang viewers saw upon the screen—brought Chinese from politically, geographi-cally, and culturally diverse places together to worship the telltale remnants of traditional Chinese culture. Jin Yong writes in what has been referred to by readers and critics as “the common language of Chinese around the world.” The universal circulation of his novels and their fi lm, television, comic book, and video game versions have created a “Jin Yong phenomenon.” Not only has his popularity and the literary value of his oeuvre been affi rmed by the public, but the academic world has also gradually, although begrudgingly, begun

3

to pay attention to his achievements. In 1994, he was nominated by a group of serious Mainland Chinese critics as a twentieth-century Chinese literary master, fourth only to Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, and Ba Jin; Beijing University presented him with an honorary professor-ship that same year, and several international conferences focusing on Jin Yong’s novels have since been conducted in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States.

This “Jin Yong phenomenon,” however, is not without its critics. The complex politics that surround the funding of academic confer-ences and the Nobel Prize, as well as concepts of identity, both per-sonal and professional, that remain inextricably linked to geography, national pride and politics, diaspora cosmopolitanism, and the pro-vincialism of writers such as the much-acclaimed “hoodlum” author Wang Shuo all contribute to our understanding of Jin Yong, his writing, and the martial arts novel as a genre. Scholars around the globe often assume that it is impossible to discuss the writing of Jin Yong without making a political statement about the future of Hong Kong, the effi -cacy of the Nobel Prize competition, and one’s own personal political leanings. However, the editors and the contributors of this collection beg to differ. As academics, while we note the inextricable importance of politics—national, academic, and personal—to Chinese literary history, we have tried not to allow such politics delay our scholarly purpose: a long overdue, detailed investigation of a genre that has captured the hearts and minds of Chinese around the world for gen-erations, a genre that forces to the surface like no other genre can the complex relationship between mainstream modern Chinese literature and uncanonized popular cultural production.

Has Jin Yong invested his own funds to bring attention to his work? Yes. Has he used his own newspaper, Mingbao , as a medium for fur-ther discussion of his political views? Yes. Has he been intimately involved in Mainland–Hong Kong politics for decades? Yes. Has he personally launched a clandestine campaign to wrest the Nobel Prize from European hands? This is a silly question and one that cannot determine the boundaries of our investigation of his oeuvre . The ques-tion of the Nobel Prize, and indeed all literary prizes, is from many

Introduction

4 THE JIN YONG PHENOMENON

perspectives a political one and not the object of our inquiry in this collection.

The research presented in this book, as mentioned earlier, bridges mainstream modern Chinese literature and uncanonized popular cultural production via close, scholarly readings of impor-tant literary texts. The scholars who have contributed to The Jin Yong Phenomenon represent the worlds of classical and modern Chinese literary thought and hail from China and the United States. All are keenly aware of the importance of positioning the study of Jin Yong’s novels within the larger scope of twentieth-century litera-ture and culture, in stark contrast to past scholarly attempts to limit research on Jin’s wuxia project to the much-denigrated genre of the martial arts novel. It is only from this vantage point that important theoretical issues such as modernity, gender, nationalism, East–West confl icts, and high literature as opposed to low culture, can be seri-ously reconsidered.

Most scholars of modern Chinese literature have studied Jin Yong’s novels within the boundaries of “martial art novels,” an approach which to a large degree has not only ignored the posi-tion of Jin Yong’s writing in the modern Chinese literary tradition, but also disregarded the impact of specifi c historical circumstances on the production of literary works. To remedy this weakness, our selection considers Jin Yong’s anti-Europeanized Chinese writings as works which effi ciently rejuvenate long-neglected elements of the native literary tradition: huaben xiaoshuo , classical essay lan-guage, and the style of the Mandarin Duck and Butterfl y School ( Yuanyang hudie pai ), all suppressed long ago by the New Literary Tradition. In addition to reclaiming the importance of Jin Yong’s language, our collection also engages Hong Kong, and the cultural and geopolitical space within which Jin Yong’s writings were pro-duced from the 1950s through the 1970s. In this way, we go beyond the limits of literature, ushering the research of Jin Yong’s novels into the interdisciplinary world of political, social, cultural, and fi lm studies. We believe that the popularity of Jin Yong’s works offers us an opportunity to reconceptualize the relationship between high

5

and popular culture, the canon and the uncanon, the modern and the traditional, the East and the West. A closer look at the wuxia project of this seasoned politician, businessman, and master of the literary jianghu, will lead us toward a greater understanding of the comp-lexity of the concepts of nation, globalization, and diaspora.

AN ANTI-EUROPEANIZED CHINESE WRITING

Emerging in the postwar Hong Kong Chinese community in the 1950s, Jin Yong’s writing traveled beyond its given place and greatly infl u-enced Chinese around the world. By basing his works on the genre of martial arts novels, Jin has successfully inherited the native literary tradition, long ago expelled by mainstream literature in modern China. Ever since the May Fourth new literature movement, the native literary tradition has been labeled as backward, obsolete, and reac-tionary because of its inability to keep up with rapid modernization and its reluctance to acknowledge the new vernacular, baihua . How-ever, increasingly scholars have begun to notice the intricate relation-ship between the native literary tradition and Chinese modernity. In his book Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction , 1848 - 1911 , David Der-wei Wang draws our attention to the native literary tradition in late Qing novels, which in his opinion has the capacity to generate its own literary modernity in response to for-eign infl uence, but was repressed or downgraded by modern literary history. He argues:

Repressed modernities point to a genealogy of Chinese fi c-tion since the late nineteenth century that has been wittingly or unwittingly excluded from the canon of literary history, a gene-alogy that recognizes genres such as science fantasy, deprav-ity fi ction, grotesque expose, Mandarin Ducks and Butterfl ies fi ction, neo-impressionism, critical lyricism, and the chivalric novel. These genres are of no less interest to us when we try to imagine what modernity would be like in a Chinese context, although they never made it their goal to defi ne the modern or even to defi ne themselves as modern, as did high-brow literature.

Introduction

6 THE JIN YONG PHENOMENON

By choosing to repress the modernities in these genres, many critics have missed a chance to draw a more complex pic ture of Chinese literature, much less a comprehensive picture of modernism. Such repressed modernities, however, keep reap-pearing by infi ltrating, haunting, or distracting mainstream discourse, and they thus constitute another fascinating aspect of modern Chinese literature. 2

What has been put into question here is a literati mentality since the May Fourth movement that sees literary history as evolution-ary or revolutionary. In addition, what must be seriously reconsid-ered, according to David Der-wei Wang, is the project of modernity embraced by enlightened Chinese intellectuals throughout the entire twentieth century. Interestingly, the success of Jin Yong’s novels in the later half of the century has greatly challenged the traditional view of the “obsolete” native literary tradition; more importantly, Jin’s success urges us to reexamine the infl uence of Western-infl uenced modern discourse in modern Chinese literary history.

The most striking change brought by the May Fourth Movement was that most writers discarded native literary language in favor of a modern literary language explicitly based on the grammatical construc-tion, sentence cohesion, narrative format, and rhetorical conventions of Western models. What has been largely affi rmed is the positivity of this change, which helped the Chinese people to transit from the tra-ditional to the modern. No doubt, the adaptation of Western models retains great signifi cance because it gave impetus to the formation of a new modern Chinese language ( xiandai hanyu ). However, what has been neglected is the consequence of this transition, marked by an “ ouhua ” or “Europeanized” Chinese language, a consequence that abruptly interrupted the tradition of the classical essay and created a huge gap between the modern and classical Chinese languages. One may wonder what an “ ouhua ” or “Europeanized” Chinese language means to modern Chinese literature; what forms of ideology lurk behind a “Europeanized” language, which so abruptly abandoned the substance of classical language and literature? How can the spirit of classical language as well as its cultural value be preserved in modern

7

Chinese language? What is the signifi cance of maintaining this spirit in the future development of modern Chinese language and literature? By raising these questions here, we do not mean to draw a clear line between the indigenous Chinese and the exogenous Western. In fact, although the development of modern Chinese literature left no lan-guage “uncontaminated,” 3 this study is not an attempt to recover an essentialized indigenous Chinese language.

As a matter of fact, in contrast to mainstream modern Chinese lit-erature, Jin Yong’s writing has successfully preserved elements of classical Chinese language and literature by refusing to use too much Europeanized Chinese language. A meaningful connection between modern Chinese language and the languages of classical essays and vernacular stories has thus been well established. In the meanwhile, Jin also developed the writing of modern Chinese by adding an ele-ment of “ wen ” to it. If this so-called “ wen ” refers to the special color and beauty of Chinese language and its inherent cultural content that derives from classical language, then Jin Yong’s writing has explored an innovative way of combining baihua with wen . Past research on his novels has, however, undervalued the signifi cance of the special language that he created.

Even within the new literary tradition, authors such as Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, and Eileen Chang consciously or unconsciously revived traditional modes of discourse in their modern narratives. The linkage between their articulation of modernity and their Chinese heritage, to a certain extent, makes the writing of modern Chinese less Europeanized. Liu Zaifu’s term “accumulated cultural treasures” ( wenhua diyun ) 4 refers to the process that these writers implemented; the knowledge they prepared as a preface to their writing was deeply rooted in the classical literary tradition, and such knowledge enhanced the cultural spirit of their novels. Ironically, these accumulated cul-tural treasures were eradicated by the infi ltration of “Mao discourse” ( Mao wenti ) during the Cultural Revolution. As politically progres-sive writers marched toward a form of discourse that subordinated literature to revolutionary purpose, the beauty of writing in a modern Chinese language completely disappeared.

Introduction

8 THE JIN YONG PHENOMENON

Jin Yong’s writing has emerged as an interrogation of Chinese intellectuals’ project of modernity. Jin’s anti-Europeanized writing not only disturbs defi nitions of canonized mainstream modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth movement forward, but also points out a new direction for the institution of Chinese writing that waned under the control of Mao discourse. One is compelled to ques-tion whether an anti-Europeanized language might achieve its own literary modernization without privileging the hegemonic discourse of Western modernity.

The signifi cance of Jin Yong’s writing, which benefi ted from the native literary tradition, lies in its effort to slow down the linear pro-gression of modernity, to negotiate with modernity within its effec-tive operation. If, however, we seal the sign of Western modernity within the simple ideas of progress and truth, we are then blinded to the historical conditions under which the power relations of defi n-ing the “modern” were engendered. Modernity, as Homi K. Bhabha suggests, “is about the historical construction of a special position of historical enunciation and address. It privileges those who ‘bear wit-ness,’ those who are ‘subjected,’ or in the Fanonian sense … [those who are] historically displaced. It gives them a representative posi-tion through the spatial distance, or the time lag between the Great Event and its circulation as a historical sign of the ‘people’ or an ‘epoch,’ that constitutes the memory and the moral of the event as a narrative, a disposition to cultural communality, a form of social and psychic identifi cation.” 5 What Homi K. Bhabha stresses here is fully historical and discursive difference inside the articulation of moder-nity rather than a teleological or transcendent politics of address. Therefore, as we interrogate how twentieth-century Chinese defi ned the modern and what kind of language they used to talk about it, we should keep in mind the danger of homogenizing modernity.

The richness of Jin Yong’s language illustrates how the writing of cultural difference in the midst of modernity can be inimical to binary boundaries. As a combination of the traditional and the modern, his writing not only preserves the native literary tradition, but also mod-ernizes this “obsolete” tradition by adding modern narratives and

9

consciousness to it. The western philosophy of existentialism seems well mixed with Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism in his novels. Jin Yong’s way of modernizing the Chinese native tradition, which makes the writing of the Chinese language an ambivalent process, has properly challenged our sense of the historical identity of culture as a unifying entity, authenticated by an original past. It is from this point that we would like to regard his writing as an attempt to interrupt or negotiate with the Western discourse of modernity rather than an essentialized form of anti-imperialist discourse. It is impossible, how-ever, to talk about Jin Yong’s contra-modernity without fi rst situating his writing within the postcolonial context of Hong Kong, where he chose the anti-Europeanized language to name the condition of his and his compatriots’ existence.

CULTURAL SPACE AND CHINESE IDENTITY

Jin Yong’s writings responded to a specifi c and unprecedented histori-cal situation in which the colonial and the global overlapped. Earning fast fame in the mid-1950s, Jin Yong’s writing, which became the best representative of the genre of “new Martial Arts novels,” attracted large audiences in Hong Kong. One may assume that this special genre emerged in Hong Kong simply in resistance to colonial discourse. The reason for this assumption is quite simple: fi rst, in contrast to the colo-nizer’s language, English, Jin’s fi ction is written in “non-Europeanized” modern Chinese language; second, the martial arts genre belongs to the Chinese native literary tradition, a tradition which inevitably appears as an authentic space for Chinese identity in the colonial context; third, the fi ctional imagination of a masculinized martial arts metaphori-cally satisfi ed Chinese readers’ dreams of a strong and independent nation. Yet this assumption fails to recognize the historical experience of the “native” who resides in a place where questions of exploitation, resistance, and survival are more complex than those described by the binary of hegemony and counter-hegemony.

Does Jin Yong’s Chinese writing in the colonial context automatically constitute a site of resistance to the offi cial language of the colonizer?

Introduction

10 THE JIN YONG PHENOMENON

Or on the contrary, have Jin Yong’s martial arts novels, which are closely related to the commercialization of cultural production, furtively helped the colonial discourse repress and control “the real humanity, cultural connotations, and national consciousness of Hong Kong people”? 6 A “yes” to either of these questions would inevitably simplify the compli-cated cultural space that is Hong Kong, either fi xing Jin Yong’s writing in the position of the repressed or reaffi rming (and totalizing) the hege-monic power of the colonizer. What needs to be reconsidered here is Foucault’s notion of “hypothesis repression.” Against the Althusserian negativity of power, Foucault sees power as productive, ubiquitous, multiple, and never fi xed but constantly subject to changing conditions. 7 As he puts it, “the action of these power relations [was] modifi ed by their very exercise … with effects of resistance and counterinvestments, so that there has never existed one type of stable subjugation, given once and for all.” 8 Therefore, rather than reducing the question of Jin Yong’s writing to a binarism of native resistance and Western domina-tion, we should see it as a site where complex processes of domination, resistance, and appropriation can be interpreted and where the problem-atic cultural space of Hong Kong can be perceived.

Many critics have noticed that Jin Yong’s novels mirror an extremely broad knowledge of Chinese tradition, from religion to philosophy, from the elegant tastes of the literati—musical instruments, chess, cal-ligraphy, painting ( qin, qi, shu, hua )—to the practice of medicine, from court politics to public life. 9 The fact that Jin Yong’s writing prevailed in colonial Hong Kong demonstrates that he created a cultural space that the hegemony of the colonial authority could hardly permeate and monopolize. Identifying with this cultural space, Hong Kong people could somehow fi nd a way to retrace traditional Chinese culture and release their nostalgic anxiety. 10 However, can this cultural space pro-duce “original” authentic Chinese knowledge? If not, what has been displaced in Jin Yong’s building of Chinese culture? What does this displacement mean to Hong Kong people as well as to other Chinese readers around the world?

Extending Benjamin’s conception that it is impossible to think of any artwork as “original” in this age of mechanical reproduction,

11

Rey Chow criticizes the “self-suffi cient” native, an imaginative space that becomes “the place of mythmaking and an escape from the impure nature of political realities.” As she puts it, “we see that in our fascination with the ‘authentic native,’ we are actually engaged in a search for the equivalent of the aura even while our search processes themselves take us farther and farther away from that ‘original’ point of identifi cation.” 11 Chow’s criticism also helps us realize that the search for the “original” and “authentic” Chinese knowledge in Jin Yong’s novels will lead to disillusionment. Not only because cultural production in the technological era diminishes the aura of Chinese tradition that Jin creates, but also because the hybridity of the postco-lonial condition makes the Chinese identity inauthentic. Such disillu-sionment will in turn question the points of view that see the cultural space in Jin Yong’s novel as fi xed and self-suffi cient, as a transparent carrier of the collective unconsciousness of Chinese identity.

It is precisely the geopolitical space of colonial Hong Kong that engenders Jin Yong’s displacement of the one and only universal Chinese identity. Even though he embraces a nostalgic imagination of China, Jin Yong never attempts to culturally ghettoize Chineseness. In the world of “rivers and lakes” ( jianghu ), the Han people are always designated by Jin as a weak ethnic group that has to defend itself against the invasion of foreign tribes, and that eventually must face the fact that foreign tribes have become the dominating power in their land. Such designation symbolizes the colonial situation in Hong Kong, in which Hong Kong people had to confront the con-fl ict between the East and West, personal and historical memory, and the ambivalence of cultural identity. However, his symbolic world of nation/ethnicity does not limit itself within the narrow binaries of domination/repression, right/wrong, or foreign/native. Instead, his heroes are rather problematic: they are lonely, home-less, fatherless, and ceaselessly wandering on an endless journey. Heroes such as Xiao Feng are recurrently tortured by identity cri-ses, as a foreign person raised by the Han people, he cannot fully commit himself to either side of power, but is perpetually haunted by the intriguing question “Who am I?” Doesn’t the same question

Introduction

12 THE JIN YONG PHENOMENON

also consistently disturb Jin Yong and his followers, those who fi t neither into the culture of their motherland nor the dominant culture of the colonizer?

During their endless journeys, Jin Yong’s wandering heroes usu-ally have the ability to select an open defi nition of nationalism in contrast to a defi nition based on geographical boundaries. For exam-ple, even if the young hero Zhang Wuji leads the Han people to fi ght against the Mongolian invasion, he still fi nally chooses his love for the daughter of the Mongolian Duke over the push toward national resistance; with a hybrid identity - both Han and foreign - Xiao Feng sacrifi ces his own life in order to prevent a fi ght between two sides. Through these wandering heroes, Jin Yong’s writing represents a profound contemplation of the Hong Kong experience, from which a multilayered national and cultural identity is revealed.

As Stuart Hall points out, there are two ways of conceptualizing cultural identity: one refl ects “the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as ‘one people,’ with stable, unchanging, and continuous frames of reference and mean-ing”; the second is “subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, cul-ture, and power.” Instead of regarding these two axes of identities as opposite to each other, Hall suggests a dialogical relationship between “the vector of similarity and continuity” and “the vector of difference and rupture.” 12 The dialogical relationship between these two different cultural identities helps explain why Jin Yong’s novels in one way create a Chinese identity in colonial Hong Kong, but in another way allow this identity to fi nd resonance with differ-ent Chinese communities around the world regardless of geographic boundaries.

There is no doubt that the special cultural space inhabited by Chinese tradition in Jin Yong’s novels formulates a resistance to West-ern hegemony; however, it does not mean this space is conceived of as either fi xed or essential. Rather, the Chinese identity in his novels is always in the process of construction and deconstuction, making a monolithic and authentic “Chineseness” impossible. In other words, we should situate Jin Yong’s notion of Chinese identity within the

13

paradigm of the Chinese diaspora, in which there are multiple Chinese identities instead of one.

The hybridity of Chinese identity is most evident in Jin Yong’s last novel The Deer and the Cauldron ( Luding ji ), a book that has been labeled an antiheroic, anti-martial arts novel. As the son of a prosti-tute, the protagonist Wei Xiaobao does not know who his father is, what nation he belongs to, or how to name his own existence. While he tries to search for his roots, his mother’s answer, which points to the possibility of fathers from as many tribes as he can imagine, actually symbolically deconstructs the purity of the origins of Chinese iden-tity as well as conventional Han chauvinism. Because of his hybrid personal identity, he appears as an ambivalent person who vacillates between the Manchu emperor and the resistant group, between the court and the world of “rivers and lakes.” On the surface, he seems to be loyal to both sides, but this double loyalty at the same time also entails double betrayal. Jin Yong’s designation of Wei Xiaobao’s hybridity has thus compromised the authority of both dominant and resistant sides, not merely indicating the impossibility of his identity but denying a representation of an essence. The hybridity of Chinese identity is also represented by the language of Wei Xiaobao, which is pregnant with the “parodic imitation” of famous Chinese histori-cal stories and Chinese idiom. We can see that the “native” Chinese knowledge in Jin Yong’s novels has been displaced through the act of parodic imitation. This displacement profoundly mocks the authen-ticity of Chinese language writing, unsettles the coherence of Chi-nese identity, and disturbs the utopian dream of the masculine martial arts world which signifi es the building of a strong and independent nation, China.

Writing in Hong Kong, Jin Yong formulates hybrid Chinese identi-ties with two goals in mind: to decenter Mainland China and to express a certain anxiety of utopian protest toward Western hegemony. Both goals exclude any form of essentialist nationalism. But Jin Yong’s proj-ect does not end here. By crossing boundaries at many levels, ethnic, territorial, national, ideological, linguistic, and so on, Jin Yong has con-stituted a special cultural space in which different Chinese communities

Introduction

14 THE JIN YONG PHENOMENON

have found their shared common home, even if this home is fi ctional and temporary. It is from this home that the remapping of Chineseness becomes possible.

THE LITERARY CANON AND POPULAR CULTURE

Why have we chosen to investigate Jin Yong’s martial arts novels? Under the infl uence of the new Chinese literary tradition, the familiar scholarly view holds that the genre of martial arts novels can only be categorized as a popular cultural form, inferior to the canon of mainstream literature. High literature and low literature have been conventionally observed as opposites. Recent research on Jin Yong’s writing in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, however, has signifi cantly challenged this limitation. Scholars have increasingly noticed that Jin Yong’s writing falls at the intersections of elite cul-ture and consumer culture, serious writing and popular writing, the taste of the literati and the taste of the masses, and modern and tra-ditional values. Embraced by a large number of people from differ-ent classes, genders, ethnic groups, and countries, his novels have raised a serious question for us: how are we going to rewrite modern Chinese literary history?

The thirteen articles in this collection both respond to the above question and begin to map the development of the study of popu-lar culture. It is well known that the fi eld of Cultural Studies has never been limited to one distinct approach to inquiry; every essay here employs different methodology to examine Jin Yong’s novels, novels which straddle canonized high literature and the popular literature. In Tony Bennett’s opinion, Cultural Studies is com-mitted “to examining cultural practices from the point of view of their intrication with, and within, relations of power.” 13 We must interrogate the ideology that stipulates the hierarchical opposition between the high and the low, and examine the cultural fi eld that is defi ned by the struggle to articulate, dearticulate, and rearticu-late cultural politics. Such interrogation is also always a process of rearticulation because “the meaning of a cultural form and its place

15

or position in the cultural fi eld is not inscribed inside its form. Nor is its position fi xed once and forever.” 14 Based on such an interro-gation, each essay presents a view that stresses the multiple impli-cations of the cultural politics that we observe in Jin Yong’s novels and suggests alternative means of engaging in the study of modern Chinese literature and culture.

For Liu Zaifu, culture is a major site of ideological struggle, from which he responds to two different histories and traditions—new literature and native literature—and a whole set of formations. By exploring different conjunctures and moments in these two trajecto-ries, he questions the power of naming in literary history, in which the signifi cance of the native literary tradition as well as Jin Yong’s writing, which modernizes this native tradition, has been ignored. As Liu reminds us, “without suffi ciently reevaluating Jin Yong’s novels, the history of modern Chinese literature would be incomplete.” In his argument, Jin Yong’s succession and development of the native literary tradition, his free spirit of writing, and non-Europeanized vernacular, have challenged the mainstream literature that has been shadowed by political ideology. By affi rming Jin Yong’s position in the history of modern Chinese literature, he critiques the discourse of enlightenment, the “new” literary tradition, and Chinese intellectuals’ long-standing obsession with China.

Using the special term “Jin’s baihua ,” Li Tuo thinks the impor-tance of Jin’s language is two-sided: fi rst, it inherits but distinguishes itself from the language of the native literary tradition; second, it takes advantage of the grammar and rhetoric of a Europeanized new modern Chinese language. He then raises a very controversial question: “With the emergence of the new literature, realism domi-nated, and the tradition of nonrealism, which originated from tradi-tional zhiguai (fantasy) and chuanqi (legend), fell into decay. Does this phenomenon have anything to do with the Europeanized new modern Chinese language? Has this kind of Europeanized language, from its inner structure, determined that modern writing must rely on the regulations of Western realism? Or going one step further, is it possible that the Europeanization of the modern Chinese language

Introduction

16 THE JIN YONG PHENOMENON

has led to the inexorable connection between the narrative of modern Chinese language and the Western model of representation, which controls all narrative formation and expression in the West?” Those questions force us to reconsider the relationship between modernity and Chinese writing.

Indeed, what needs to be problematized is the question of what is suppressed and denied when research describes and limits Jin Yong’s writing within the category of popular literature. However, it is also very problematic if we simply promote his writing to the level of pure literature. In the article “Transcending ‘High/Low’ Distinctions in Literature,” Chen Pingyuan points out that Jin Yong’s multiple roles—writer, political critic, editor, and entrepreneur—have compli-cated the study of popular literature. The traditional idea of popular culture only regards martial arts novels as public entertainment, but Jin Yong’s multiple roles, which encourage the reproduction and circulation of his novels, have forcefully transformed his writing into a means by which public space is constituted and shaped.

In his research on Jin Yong’s efforts to canonize his martial arts novels, Li Yijian introduces readers to the ambivalent position of Jin Yong in popular culture. Since martial arts novels in original form fi rst appeared as serial fi ction in newspapers, produced daily and meant to cater to mass interest, Jin Yong’s ten-year revision of the original form successfully canonized his novels. Taking different cul-tural forms into consideration, Li Yijian focuses on the process of production and reproduction of martial arts novels, through which he redefi nes the notion of canonization.

As the author of Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and Modern Chi-nese Martial Arts Novels , the fi rst single authored book on the study of Jin Yong’s fi ction in English, Chris Hamm set the foundation for Jinology in the Western academic world. His article in our col-lection examines the often undervalued novel Song of the Swords-men (Xiake xing), which revitalizes Chinese cultural heritage and retreats from political history. By doing so, Hamm addresses a thematic concern that runs through most of Jin Yong’s novels. In his close reading of the text, Hamm suggests that “Jin Yong’s

17

work employs traditional Chinese literature to fashion a modern, ‘diasporic’ Chinese identity—to demonstrate the validity of this claim, and also to specify the terms of its applicability.” His analy-sis illustrates that the two major themes of this collection—modern Chinese literary history and diasporic Chinese identity—are inter-related and that the interesting interplay between the two situates the “Jin Yong phenomenon” within Chinese literary critical discourse and the mapping of global Chineseness.

To address the nature of Hong Kong’s cultural space as it relates to Jin Yong’s writing, we must again raise the question of national-ism, cultural identity, and historical memory in Jin Yong’s fi ctional world. In his fi rst essay, Weijie Song, the author of From Entertain-ment Activity to Utopian Impulse: Rereading Jin Yong ’ s Martial Arts Fiction (1999), which made a groundbreaking contribution to the study of the martial arts novel, argues that Jin Yong’s writing has gone beyond a single metanarrative of the motif of “nation-state”; Song illustrates how Jin’s diverse representation of hybrid national-ism, the paradox of identity, and historical amnesia have shown a more complex colonial space. However, as Song points out, even if Jin Yong has deconstructed the old binarism of domination/resistance in terms of the oscillation between nation building and personal emo-tion, he still holds the belief that Chinese culture is much broader and more profound than that of Western and other ethnic groups.

Since culture is a terrain where the unequal divisions of ethnicity, gender, and class are established and contested, a study of these divi-sions helps us locate Jin Yong’s novels within the broader context of symbolic production and expression and within the larger struggle of power relations. Following Weijie Song’s decoding of Jin Yong’s allegoric meaning of nationalism/ethnicity, Jianmei Liu takes gender politics into consideration. From the perspective of the group image of “bad” and “strange” women and the defi nitions of femininity and masculinity, Liu’s essay attempts to reveal Jin Yong’s writing posi-tion as ambivalent, which enables him to question Western moder-nity and vacillate between high and low literatures. Furthermore, such an ambivalent position is connected to and conditioned by the

Introduction

18 THE JIN YONG PHENOMENON

postcolonial context, in which Jin Yong’s writing is sharply contrasted with the revolutionary literature of the Mao period.

In contrast to the negative idea of popular culture which only acknowledges the manipulative and deceptive sides of the cultural industry, 15 Xiaofei Tian’s essay argues that “fi ctional China,” a histor-ical cultural space that Jin Yong has produced in his novels, becomes the spiritual home for modern Chinese. In terms of the rhetoric of “the fantastic,” which is the inner structure of martial art novels, Jin Yong has built up a utopian society in fi ctional China, a society in which the old morality has been preserved and heroism poeticized. Although Jin Yong’s novels include multiple voices, they eventually submit to a larger metanarrative by means of the dissolution of irony. This metanarrative voice constitutes a solid, complete, classical, and moral space that has signifi cantly supplemented what has been lack-ing in real modern society.

Xiaofei Tian’s essay reminds us of William Tay’s interrogation of the martial arts genre: Does the popularization of martial arts novels indistinctly refl ect conscious and unconscious collective empathy? Is there an inner connection between the long-term bitterness of modern China and martial arts novels which provide a temporary escape from real time and space? Do these novels refl ect the pursuit of a Utopia? Do the traditional values and righteousness in the world of “rivers and lakes,” which are often seen in martial arts novels, refer to a sense of nostalgia for old moral principles and the old social order? Is this utopian, nostalgic search meant to ease the anxiety and pressure brought about by modern industry? 16 The answers that Xiaofei Tian provides in her essay suggest a positive evaluation of the relationship between the cultural industry and mass audiences.

Weijie Song’s second essay in this book tackles the same issue of the utopian cultural space created by Jin Yong’s novels, yet he situates his examination at the intersection of Western and Chinese concepts of utopia. He fi rst sees fi ctionalized jianghu and wulin as “a combination of utopia and anti-utopia,” then reveals the binary pair of utopian motifs in jianghu – seclusion and rescue. Since the confl ict-ing motifs of seclusion and rescue can be traced back to the classical

19

Chinese literary tradition, Song concludes, “Jin Yong’s martial arts fi ction constructs an imagined world that bears a defi nite similarity with the western utopian genre, but with important differences.”

Translators and their texts provide yet another interesting perspec-tive on the study of Jin Yong’s novels. “Translation,” as Lydia Liu puts it in her study of translingual practice, “is no longer a neutral event untouched by the contending interests of political and ideologi-cal struggles.” 17 On the other hand, Shuang Shen’s essay focuses on what kind of knowledge can and cannot be translated and what the consequences of this untranslatability are. By examining the differ-ence between Jin Yong’s The Deer and the Cauldron and its English translation, Shuang Shen questions whether the complicated cultural meanings in Jin Yong’s novels can be duplicated or are transformed in English translation. Her conclusion is that both are impossible. We can take Shen’s conclusion a step further and ask: what does this untranslatability mean to the cultural space that Jin created in colo-nial Hong Kong? Has he attempted to create an ambivalent zone that Western hegemony cannot enter? What is the connection between his non-Europeanized (or nontranslatable) language and Western modernity?

In studies of popular culture, the interplay between visual and verbal rhetoric still remains an unexplored area. Delving into Jin Yong’s “picture manuals” in The Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils (Tianlong babu), Calos Rojas’s essay suggests that visual literature can be taken as a site for understanding the relationship between desire, representation, and contested identities. Collectively, his close reading of the interaction between visual images and narrative lan-guage, his anthropological study of the gradual transformation of the sociocultural status of “sex manuals” and “picture manuals,” and his analysis of the debate between Wang Shuo and Jin Yong, have given us a new context in which to envision the unstable, self-evident signs of diasporic “imaginary communities” in Jin Yong’s texts. Indeed, as a visible sign of cultural production, the “picture manual” can indi-cate the seams within an imagined national culture where race, gen-der, and geography are stitched together.

Introduction

20 THE JIN YONG PHENOMENON

Ping Fu’s essay examines Hong Kong fi lm director Wong Kar-wai’s cinematic adaptation of Jin Yong’s fi ction. Fu argues that this fi lmic transformation reveals a political and cultural reconfi guration of jian-ghu and embodies the fi lmmaker’s challenge towards the popular genre that Jin Yong’s works represent. As Fu concludes, however, regardless of how many different media attempts are made to transform or even deconstruct Jin Yong’s works, such attempts serve only to underscore the canonical position of Jin Yong’s writing in mass culture.

While The Jin Yong Phenomenon as a whole seeks to expose the dialogical relationship between elite and popular literature, we want to stress, in concluding, that the research collected here has not exhausted all of the possible interconnections. What must be emphasized is the everyday life of popular culture—for it has been the choices of every-day folk that have allowed Jin Yong’s novels to emerge and change the shape of the canonized and hegemonic narratives. Those choices not only activate the popularization of Jin Yong’s novels, but also offer the possibility of producing contestatory modernities. Residing in every-day folk imagination, Jin Yong’s writing challenges us to resist the refl exive urge to pin down a single version of the literary canon with-out fi rst taking into account the contradictions, tensions, and absences inherent in any narrative of the past or present. His stance makes it possible to re-read many of the canonized narratives, as well as the uncritical assertion of essence that underlines much of the history of modern Chinese literature.

Ann Huss and Jianmei Liu Hong Kong and Potomac, Maryland

21

ENDNOTES

1. Yuen Wo-ping (1945–…) has choreographed over forty action fi lms including Drunken Master (1978), Once Upon a Time in China (1991), The Matrix (1999, 2001, 2003), Kill Bill, Vols. 1 and 2 (2003, 2004), Kung Fu Hustle (2004), Fearless (2006), and The Banquet (2006). His work on Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon marked the beginning of a new phase in martial arts fi lms. For more on the history of the martial arts fi lm genre prior to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon , see David Bordwell’s Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (2000).

2. David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1848–1911 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997), 21.

3. See Lydia Liu’s interrogation of “uncontaminated” native knowledge in Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity China, 1900 – 1937 (Stanford, California: Stanford Univer-sity Press, 1995), 1–44.

4. Liu Zaifu’s term in his article “The Nobel Prize During These One Hun-dred Years and the Absence of Chinese Writers (Bainian nuobeier wenxue jiang he zhongguo zuojia de quexi),” (Spring, 1999).

5. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 243.

6. Ye Weilian criticizes the amnesia of Hong Kong writers who fail to refl ect on their colonial experience. According to Ye, the colonizers of Hong Kong successfully made Hong Kong people rely on them by means of cultural production. “The real humanity, cultural connotations, and national consciousness of Hong Kong people were repressed and monopolized by the commercialization of Hong Kong with the help of colonial cultural production,” he says. “As a result, they degenerated to fetishism, which we can describe as a double distortion of humanity.” See his article “Colonialism: Cultural Production and Consumer Desire (Zhimin zhuyi: wenhua gongye yu xiaofei yuwang),” in Ye Weilian, Interpreting Modern: A Refl ection on Postmodern Living Space and Cultural Space (Jiedu xiandai: houxiandai shenghuo kongjian yu wen-hua kongjian de sisuo) (Taibei: Dongda, 1992), 146–165.

7. In the case of Althusser, his research helps us, or the “free subjects,” to see how ideology works, and consequently to fi nd possibilities for resisting it. For Foucault, the main concern is “the polymophous techniques

Introduction

22

of power,” that is, “to locate the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourse it permeates … the paths that gives it access to the rare or scarcely perceivable forms of desire, how it penetrates and con-trols everyday pleasure.” Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), vol. 1, 11.

8. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality , vol. 1, 97. 9. See Chen Shixiang’s letter to Jin Yong, in Jin Yong, Tianlong babu

(Hong Kong: Minghe she, 1978), 2127–2130. 10. In his analysis of The Deer and the Cauldron (Ludingji), Lin Ling-

han suggests that Jin Yong’s elevation of Chinese culture has shown that Hong Kong writers utilized the limited cultural space in the colony to continue their cultural identity with China on one hand; on the other hand, it also shows that the English government in Hong Kong could not make the colonized subordinate to them. See Lin Linghan, “Cultural Production and Cultural Identity (Wenhua gongye yu wenhua rentong),” in Chen Qingqiao, ed. Cultural Imagination and Ideology (Wenhua xiangxiang yu yishi xingtai) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1997), 241.

11. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 46.

12. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” ed. Padmini Mongia, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: Reader (New York: Arnold, 1996), 110–121.

13. Tony Bennett, “Pulling Policy into Cultural Studies,” What is Cultural Studies: A Reader , ed. John Storey (London: Edward Arnold, 1996), 307.

14. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‛the Popular,’ ” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader , ed. John Storey (Athens: The Univer-sity of Georgia Press, 1998), 442–453.

15. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1993), 120–167.

16. William Tay, “Genre, Narration, Popular literature (Wenlei, xushi, dazhong wenxue),” in Liu Shaoming and Chen Yongming, ed. Theory of Martial Arts Novels (Wuxia xiaoshuo lunjuan) (Hong Kong: Minghe she, 1998), 268.

17. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice , 26.

THE JIN YONG PHENOMENON