Nostalgia For Martial Arts Culture Among China’s Youth
The more you want to forget something, the more you engraved it on your mind. Once someone told me, when you don’t possess something anymore, the only thing you can do is to keep telling yourself -- never forget it.
-Wang Kar-wai, director of Ashes of Time
Young generation in China nowadays do not set their profile pictures on social media using photos of popular idols like Kendall Jenner or Selena Gomez. Instead, they love using old photos to represent their social identity to convey a sense of pure beauty and nostalgia. These old photos are mostly from characters in martial arts novels written by Louis Cha during 1955-1970, well known by Chinese people as Jin Young. My friends use photos of Joey Wang, Maggie Cheung and Leslie Cheung as their profile pictures on Instagram, Facebook and even Tinder. This common nostalgic star-worshipping phenomenon makes me wonder the reason behind the unceasing popularity of novels written by this 94-year-old man among young people nowadays. From my standpoint, the zeal among youngsters toward Louis Cha’s martial arts world can be credited to Cha’s skillful employment of Chinese as a language, the description of fascinating stories and the creations of vivid figures. More crucially, the utopian world he creates and the vital values and social norms he advocates in his novels, in the context of today’s modern, speedily-developing China, poses various questions about current ethics and social values we hold. These values accord with what young generation believes they are supposed to do, thus contributing to the nostalgic phenomenon among China’s youth.
There is a saying,“ After Louis Cha, there will be no more authentic martial arts novels.” Louis Cha was born in Haining, Zhejiang Province in China on February 6th 1924. He is the greatest wordsmith alive in Chinese people’s opinions. Louis Cha was invited to teach in Oxford University, Cambridge University, Peking University because of his unimaginable widely spread influence on Chinese people and Chinese culture. He has not written anything in the past forty years but still everyone deems him as the ultimate authority of Chinese martial arts literature. When I ask my friends why they use those nostalgic pictures, they often laugh at me and say: “ Well because other people will think I’m such a cool person when I use martial arts characters as my profiles. They will feel like I know tons of cultural stuff.“ Even my little cousin, a 9-year-old pupil, started reading Louis Cha’ s novels. She is so absorbed by them to play with or even talk to me when she is reading them…
Nostalgia, defined as a sentimental longing or wistful affection of the past, is not usually a typical thing among younger generations, especially in China. Since the past of China has many painful memories that elder people would not like to talk about, Chinese people are simply grateful for what China has became today. And for teenagers like me, we are told in history class to embalm the nation’s humiliating past in our minds and revitalize our motherland using knowledge we have learned. In a sense, Chinese people do not long for going back to the sad past. However, the craze for Louis Cha’ s martial arts world has not stopped for almost 70 years. Teenagers are even more into his novels than their parents, who are considered to be more likely to feel nostalgic for the past. Surprisingly, young generation, consisting of people from age 15 to 25, are fans of Louis Cha’s martial arts novels not only because they are impressed by the beautiful appearances of actors in Cha’s adapted films, but also, mostly, because they resonate with the truthful and realizable moral values and ethics presented in the novels and the martial arts world Louis Cha builds.
China’s development in the past 60 years can be seen as a miracle. Myriad things have changed since the beginning of “the New China”—the founding ceremony of People’s Republic of China on October 1st, 1949. In respect to the radical changes that happened in Chinese literature, after Culture Revolution (1966-1976), intellectuals started to absorb ideas and philosophies from Western literatures to promote the so-called novelty of Chinese literature. (Petrus, 2011) Nonetheless, Louis Cha, who was a student in Chinese traditional education system, insisted on his determination of wielding indigenous resources and literary aesthetics that only Chinese people are able to resonate with to compose his works. In contemporary China, as economy has been experiencing rapid growth, on the one hand, China is no more a conservative country, but a nation that is willing to accept cultures from all over the world.
On the other hand, China promotes Chinese traditional culture, time-honored moral principles and tacit ethics even more than 60 years ago. The popular TV shows nowadays among young generation are not singing or performing contest between handsome boys but are showed related to Chinese classical poems related shows like China Ancient Poetry National Contest. The other factor, which can be attributed to nostalgia for Chinese traditional literature is that the present Chinese educational system puts more importance on technical knowledge geared toward the professional needs of bureaucratic and managerial elites. (Petrus, 2011) As a student who completed twelve years of education in China, I strongly agree. For students themselves, they do not want teachers to classify them as “science students” and “liberal arts students”. Rather, young generation tend to prefer a mixture of both kinds of knowledge. The world Louis Cha constructs in his novels, Jianghu, is an unfettered ideal utopia without any traces of capitalism, rationalized governance and chaos of economic growth. People’s status in Jianghu solely depends on their martial arts skills. (Petrus, 2011) Martial arts skill is the only thing that exists in Jianghu. As country that has the largest population on earth, it is competitive for Chinese people, especially young people, to do almost everything. For example, Gao Kao, a college entrance examination, is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for Chinese high school students. In 2017, nearly a billion of students took Gao Kao, but only less than 10 percent of them can enter top 20 universities in China. Hence, under this type of complicated and exhausting busy life, Louis Cha’ s Jianghu offers to his readers is considered to be an utopian imagination, a shelter that people can get away from their daily life for a while and worry about nothing. What young generation is nostalgic for is definitely not only the magnificent description of martial arts skills, but also the transient delight they are able to attain from a world without interventions and intricate social norms, that is, Jianghu, created beneath Louis Cha’s loving hands. (Zhao, 2015)
The ideology of heroism in martial arts world is probably the main reason why there is incessant passion towards Louis Cha’ s novels generation after generation. Noticeably, male characters by Cha are fairly distinctive from female characters in a sense that males characters in his books can be classified in three categories: pure evil, pure good, or in the middle. Each male character possesses his ubiquitous personal trait according to his background. Take undoubtedly the most famous character in all Louis Cha’ s works, Guo Jing, as an example. He holds on to his principles of righteousness extremely firmly. He is able to break off relations with his son-like apprentice simply for the reason that his apprentice falls in love with a young woman who has taught his apprentice before. In Chinese culture, feeling any other emotions more than respect towards teachers is a taboo for students in conservative China. Therefore, male characters in Cha’ s martial arts novels all have their distinctive and independent personal traits, which diversifies the content of his books, attracting more and more people to love his works in their very own way. From my experience, my friends and my little cousin all have their favorite character, but none of them like the same character.
The way young individuals define beauty is fairly different from the past. It is human nature to crave and long for something we are not able to have anymore. And the female characters in Louis Cha’ s novels are perfect representations of pureness, originality and independence, which is indeed what young people nowadays really appreciate in China. However, they often fail to achieve it. Louis Cha constructed most of his female characters, no matter if they are evil or good, as very beautiful women. Li Muo Chou, one of Cha’s most well-known character in The Return of Condor Heroes, is an evil woman with unusual beauty who kills innocent people without a blink of an eye. She is invincible because there is nothing in this world that she fears to lose. But eventually, she shows great mercy to a newborn child. Therefore, we can tell from Louis Cha’ s novels that what defines beauties is not appearances, but the soft spots in people’s hearts; in other words, the inner beauty. Cha established hundreds of female characters in his whole writing career; all of them, no matter their fate are pathetic, miserable, successful, or unscrupulous. To some extent, they can always be touched by some types of love they cherish in their hearts (Chen, 2012). From today’s perspective among young people, it seems to me that this kind of beauty—the beauty that combines from what is inside and what is outside -- is a goal, which is fairly difficult for young people in China to realize. Popular people with pretty faces on social media in China are called “Wang hong”, which basically means “pretty face but no brain.” Also, young people lack the patience to appreciate other people’s inner beauty.
Louis Cha, known as the best-selling author alive in China, is possibly the only living author and intellectual who still writes in the idiom of traditional Chinese narration, which is known as the hardest yet most elegant form of Chinese, widely inferred as four-character-phrases (sizichengyu). (Lorge, 2012) Integrating Chinese traditional literature and his own brilliant inspirations, Louis Cha builds his martial arts world with the greatest wordsmith skills. In addition, he employs symmetry and parallelism of poetic principles, which are akin to neo-Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism and classical aesthetics of Chinese poetry. The stories and plots of Cha’ s novels occur between AD 1000-1700, which is a chaotic yet prosperous period in China’s 5000 years history.(Lorge, 2012) Louis Cha based his books on actual historical events and figures. However, it is unavoidable that gaps and holes exist in history. In order to concoct these vacancies, Cha utilizes his fabulous imagination to interweave the real history with his own “history”. (Petrus, 2011) For instance, in his novel The Deer and The Cauldron, the story takes place in the seventeenth century in which China had border conflict with Russia about east Siberia, which results in Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk. (Lorge, 2012) When my little cousin reads her Louis Cha’ s books, she loves to discuss Chinese history with her parents. Her dad always ignores her and say, “the history you learned from Jin Young’s books is all fake!” This statement is not necessarily true. Even if the backgrounds in Louis Cha’ s works do contain concoctions of history, it is incontestable that young people, who gradually realize the significance of traditional culture, would rather pick up Louis Cha’ s legendary novels from the bookshelves at home than open a real history book. Indisputably, reading Louis Cha’ s novels enable Chinese young people, who lag behind young people from other countries on the quantity of books read each year, to at least gain some knowledge about Chinese history. I think that is exactly what my friends meant by “cultural stuff”.
Louis Cha was born in the wrong time—the poor conservative China--but his works were created in the right time. The lines from his martial arts novels are being eulogized by people from different classes, various walks of life and diverse age range. The characters, the stories and plots, the historical values Louis Cha’ s books encompass all contribute to his unprecedented success in Chinese literature. Whereas the economic environment, communist social norms and values, and the acceptance of other cultures all further promote patriotism and traditional Chinese culture, which tally with what Louis Cha advocates in his books. Thereby, Louis Cha’ s martial arts novels enable young generation to ingrain precious Chinese values and ethics in their minds and help them realize that only by cherishing the past can we have insight to the a more harmonious future. Nostalgia is a vital and unalienable part of a culture. I sincerely wish individuals nowadays can pay more attention to their nations’ treasures in order to carry forward the past into the future.
Work Cited
Cha, Louis. The Legend of the Condor Heroes. Hong Kong: Hong Kong
Commercial Daily, 1957
Cha, Louis. The Return of The Condor Heroes. Hong Kong: Ming Pao, 1959
Cha, Louis. The Deer and The Cauldron. Hong Kong: Ming Pao, 1969
Chen, Ya-Chen. Women in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium:
Narrative Analyses and Gender Politics. Lanham, Md. : Lexington Books, 2012.
Hamm, John Christopher. Martial Arts Fiction And Jin Yong. The Columbia
Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, 2016
Lorge, Peter Allan. Chinese Martial Arts: from antiquity to the twenty-first
century. New York : Cambridge Press, 2012.
Liu, Petrus. Stateless Subjects: Chinese martial arts literature and postcolonial
history. Ithaca, N.Y. : East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2011.
Wang, Kar-wai, director. Ashes of Time. Newport Entertainment (Hong Kong),
HKFM(US), 1994.
Zhao, Henry Yiheng. Why Jin’s Martial Arts Novels Are Adored Only By Chinese.
CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture. 2015.