In the following interview, I talk to Angus Stewart about #LiteraryJianghu, my wuxia research, the challenges I encountered while translating “The Woman in the Carriage,” the tropes in the story, reading recommendations, and more. The interview has been edited by me for clarity and conciseness.
Angus: Let’s get on and listen to my chat with my guest, Yilin Wang, as we talk about “The Woman in the Carriage.” Hi Yilin, it’s great to have you on the show. How’s it going?
Yilin: Good, doing pretty well. Thank you so much for having me!
Self-Introduction and Introduction of the #LiteraryJianghu Project
Angus: It’s great to have you on. We’ve had a great wuxia 武侠 season, and although this is the last episode, I’m expecting it to be a pretty interesting one, given the story we’re going to be talking about. But before we get onto that, can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, and maybe your journey as a translator?
Yilin: Yeah, so I am a translator, translating primarily from Mandarin into English, and also a writer and editor, based here in Canada, in Vancouver. I have been working as a translator for about three years now. I never set out deliberately but a translator at the beginning, but people would find out that I’m a writer who is bilingual, and approach me for various projects related to translation. When I became interested in drawing on the wuxia literary tradition in my own writing, I started delving more deeply into the similarities between writing/translation and in thinking about how to translate the genre, tropes, and culture surrounding the genre into English. Since then, I’ve translated a lot of fiction and poetry.
Angus: Cool. It’s time to depart from modern society and head into the jianghu 江湖. Before we talk about the story for this episode “The Woman in the Carriage,” I’d like to ask you a few questions about the project that you’ve been working on that includes this translation. What is your #LiteraryJianghu project? How did it begin, and how is it coming along?
Yilin: I just launched the project on August 1st this year. This is the first podcast interview I’m doing for the project. It’s a project that I decided to do, to create a series of digital works—social media posts, blog posts, Twitter, Instagram, translations, photography, hybrid form work—in response to my research on the wuxia genre. The Canada Council for the Arts put a call for writers and artists in different disciplines to create digital work during the quarantine and Covid-19, so I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to share some of the research I’ve been doing. The research itself goes back to around 2017 and 2018.
Angus: So “The Woman in the Carriage” is being translated near the start of your project. Is there any other way we can think about the story in the context of the whole project?
Yilin: For the first stage of the project, I will be translating three pieces, all folktales or legends related to wuxia, as well as creating three essays, plus doing some events and interviews. In terms of the wider context, I’d like us to think of this piece as a Tang Chuanqi 唐传奇, a Tang dynasty legend. The genre includes some early stories that have influenced the wuxia genre, and it’s one way to think about the early beginnings of wuxia, before it became the modern-day new wuxia genre, with renowned authors like Jin Yong 金庸.
Angus: My next question is: have you had any fun surprises along the way, either in your project, or with the story in particular? Were there any gems that you never would’ve seen coming?
Yilin: Yes, I’ve been talking recently on Twitter and in my writing for #LiteraryJianghu about serendipity. I grew up watching and reading a lot of these wuxia stories, but I didn’t think of them as intimately connected to my own life. Yet I’ve had a chance during my research to meet people, like Jin Yong’s granddaughter, for example, who has become a friend. I also met martial artists as well during my travels, including a grandmaster of the Qingcheng School at Mt Qingcheng 青城山 in Chengdu, and also a grandmaster of a sect at Mt. Wudang 武当山 as well.
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Angus: So even in the case of wuxia, ok, the story is fictional, but you met the head of the sect, you met the granddaughter of an author, and you know, it’s connections to things in the past, which aren’t with us anymore, but they were real, and here we are, still talking about wuxia. My next question is about the traveling you’ve done to augment your research. Can you tell myself and the listeners a bit about it?
Yilin: In 2018, I went to Hong Kong, and also Mainland China, to do research on wuxia. And I had a couple key questions in mind. One was about the origin of the genre, to supplement the reading that I had already been doing, and how those tales as well as works by Jin Yong and Gu Long 古龙 established traditions and tropes. I also had questions about the world of jianghu, such as the martial arts schools, the world of jianghu during different dynasties, and the general martial arts culture. How it’s been adapted into films.
I used these guidelines to chart out my journey. I started in Hong Kong, where I went to Jin Yong Gallery, did some research at the Hong Kong Public Library, and talked to some martial artists, including a martial artist who did a documentary called Kung Fu Quest about his experiences visiting different schools in Mainland China. So that was really helpful.
Then I went to places like the Shaolin Temple 少林寺 and Mt. Wudang 武当山. I also focused on ancient capitals like Xi’an 西安 and Luoyang 洛阳 because of my interest in history. My family is from Sichuan四川, and Sichuan has many xianxia 仙侠 fiction writers. I discovered that a family friend is a disciple of the Qingcheng School, so through him I was able to meet the grandmaster of the school. One of his disciples actually taught me for a day, to give me the experience of what it’s like to be a disciple in a martial arts school in China, so I could write about it in the future.
I also went to the city of Kaifeng 开封, one of the Song dynasty capitals, where I visited an open-air museum where they recreated the Song dynasty jianghu based on Outlaws of the Marsh水浒传. You know, walk around in the teahouse. There were actors dressed up in period costumes, like guards, or xiake 俠客 (warriors) wandering around. You would see a guard passing by, holding a banner for a wanted criminal.
Angus: Is that well done, or was it a little bit cheesy?
Yilin: I think it was fairly well done, because the museum paid a lot of attention to referencing historical sources, paintings, and records as much as they could. They also had historical exhibits, artifacts, and documents. They also staged fights. One of the fights was very memorable. They put on scenes from Outlaws of the Marsh, with combat on horseback and the storming of a fortress, using real explosions.
Angus: So you spoke to martial artists, who’re doing martial arts in the real world. Did those martial artists have much to say about the martial arts in the fictional wuxia, or did you feel connection or a disconnection between the two?
Yilin: The martial arts we see in wuxia are generally very different from the martial arts in the real world. We have some wuxia authors, whose name I can’t recall right now, who are actually martial artists, but there are very few. And we have Jin Yong and Gu Long, who are arguably the most influential ones. Neither of them knew martial arts. They offer a creative, artistic interpretation of martial arts. I don’t have a lot of personal experiences with actual physical real-world martial arts but it’s very interesting to get the martial artists’ perspectives, nonetheless. To learn a bit more about the cultural and historical context. For example, in wuxia, we have disciple-teacher relationships, or we have stories about rivalries between different schools. I’m interested in those aspects of martial arts as well.
A Deep Dive into “The Woman in the Carriage”
Angus: Let’s zoom in a little bit and look at our story for this episode. “The Women in the Carriage.” So, this is a chuanqi from the Tang dynasty, quite far back in history. With that in mind, do we know the author of the story?
Yilin: This story was originally collected in a Tang dynasty collection called Yuan Hua Ji原化记, the Yuan Hua Records. These biji, records, were becoming popular around the time. We know the author was a Tang dynasty person with the family name Huangfu皇甫. We actually don’t know their full name. These types of Tang dynasty records collect different prose pieces, including accounts of history, observations, unofficial legends, gossip, fiction, and supernatural tales, all these hybrid genres. It’s very difficult to know exactly how the story came about.
Angus: The Wikipedia page for chuanqi starts with a literal translation of chuanqi, “transmission of the strange.” So that was the expectation I had going into this story. And that’s more or less what I got. Have you read any of the other stories in the collection this one is in? Is this one typical, or is like a standard, or is it different?
Yilin: So, I actually did not end up reading that collection. I consulted Taiping Guangji 太平广记, the Extensive Records of the Taiping Era, a larger collection that often gets consulted for chuanqi stories. I think it contains five hundred scrolls, from the Han dynasty to early Song. What’s interesting about it is that it groups the records into types. So, for example, you’ll find a section that’s on like wuxia heroes. I don’t remember the exact categories, but there are ones about yaoguai 妖怪.
Angus: What’s a yaoguai?
Yilin: They’re spirits. Like fox spirits, hulijing 狐狸精.
Angus: Right.
Yilin: So, there are sections on snake spirits or fox spirits. There are chapters about scholars, or mysterious and supernatural places. It’s broken down into all these different scrolls.
Angus: I love that so early on, things were being categorized into proto-genres. Do you know, in these dynasties of the past, who was reading these stories, or is that kind of down to guesswork?
Yilin: I think it’s down to guesswork, but not everyone was literate.
Angus: Of course.
Yilin: I think a lot of these were written by male scholars. And I remember reading somewhere, don’t quote me on this exactly, when scholars went to take imperial exams, or when they were studying, they were also reading these chuanqi records.
Angus: So, what drew you to this story? Why did you decide to translate it and include it inside your project?
Yilin: While I was doing research, I learned that a lot of these Tang Chuanqi featured women heroes. Out of all the ones in the Tang dynasty, the best known one, which has been written about and adapted into films, is “Nie Yin Niang” 聂隐娘. It’s about a woman assassin. I wanted to find some other stories that are less well-known and spoke to different aspects of wuxia’s origins and women heroes. I came across around five to ten representative stories, and out of those, this one really stood out because it features a woman who is the leader of a group of bandits. Also, she seems to be in a position of power, which I think is interesting. A lot of other stories focus on women who become warriors to avenge their husbands, or to avenge a lord they had, or fulfill their obligations as a servant girl. This story also has a lot of complexity and ambiguity.
Angus: Yeah, the ambiguity. When I was trying to visualize this story in my head, I was imagining a surrealist film, where every line seems laid with strange meanings, because even the fact that the band is a criminal gang is never stated outright. You have to infer from the fact that our heroes’ horse was found after some youths borrow it that the youths are the ones that carry out the robbery. But then later in the story, when he was in jail, it’s the woman leader of this gang who rescues him. And there’s no reason given out to us why she did that. What do you make of the woman and the youths individually and as a whole?
Yilin: There’s a lot of ambiguities here. When I was translating, I also did some research on the scholarship around the story, to see whether critics had written on it, or reached any kind of conclusions. The common take seems to be that the woman is playing a trick on this youth. Her gang stole an item from the palace, but she is still kind and decides to rescue the scholar, instead of just letting him take the blame for the gang. A lot of these tales don’t really inscribe motivation. That’s a common characteristic of chuanqi. It’s just reported like a factual thing, or like gossip or oral history. It’s told from a removed, camera point-of-view. You don’t know what characters are thinking.
Angus: What you were saying about the whole thing being a trick, I would buy that. In the beginning, our protagonist is challenged by the lady to show a trick, and he walks a couple step on a wall. Then immediately, he’s blown out of the water by these dozens and dozens of youths who are doing these supernatural, or almost supernatural, feats. It seems so humiliating. So I would buy that it’s all a joke on the poor young man who wanders into Chang’an 长安. Do you think the scholars more or less got it there? Or do you think there’s another way of looking at all the events?
Yilin: I think this reading makes sense. But I also want to point out the nuance. Who is the main character and the protagonist of the story? If you read it as the scholar’s story, it’s like a warning tale. Don’t be foolish and ignorant, as a young man going to the capital, or else this is what happens to you. At the same time, it’s the woman who has a key role, and the agency, in terms of rescuing him and giving him advice, so it feels like her story too. But we don’t really know much about her and she doesn’t really appear until midway through the story. And what is her motivation? One interpretation I came across says that, she asked him to show his skills because she had heard about him and wanted to recruit him, but she wasn’t impressed by his martial arts. So she actually set him up to get him into trouble so he wouldn’t be able to gossip about the gang later.
Angus: I also want to ask, so both the band of youths and the young lady get described as birds. One as a flock. The other as an individual. Do you think there’s anything we can make of that, apart from just a recurring motif?
Yilin: This is a common metaphor used in Chinese to describe characters who move quickly. But in some of these stories, there are supernatural occurrences. People are able to flock about, walk through walls, or turn a paper donkey into a real donkey. So in this story, she flew high above the city and leapt out of the city of gates. It can be fantastical if you want to read in that way.
The Tropes of Wuxia, Different Mediums, and Genre Influences
Angus: So, in this story specifically, what roots of modern wuxia do you see?
Yilin: I actually see quite a few connections. The idea of a band of characters. Theft and trickery as motifs. The use of intellect and strategy instead of physical force. Also, tropes like being able to climb walls or jump around in the air. The flying is more fantastical, but we do see similarities between the descriptions of martial arts here and later wuxia. We also have a gang, an organization existing in jianghu, far from the imperial court and everyday urban life. We also have the gray morality aspects of wuxia and some plot twists.
Angus: Right, totally. Although we’re not out in the mountains and right in the heart of the empire, it feels like the band are hidden away. A lot of things happened in the streets and alleys, so you get the feeling of an urban jungle. The next question I got for you is, do you see yourself as having a big advantage, doing this project online, being able to give hyperlinks, notes, and intros into your stories. Is that a very helpful thing? Or is it just kind of like a necessity, because it isn’t an online project?
Yilin: Both. Sometimes I need to do more introduction and setup, because everything’s online. But I do think that’s helpful. In addition to creating works of translation, one thing I want to explore with my project is also ways to engage readers who don’t know as much about wuxia and jianghu. Be a way into the genre. In that regard, I’m also sharing the larger context as well. And for me, personally, as someone who’s translating, and also wanting to write wuxia in English, I also want to explore adaptation. How does my writing and translations change, or how does the representation of wuxia change, on social media, in a blogpost, or in book form?
Angus: Right. When you’re reading wuxia, is it generally stuff in print, or have you been reading any of the web novels and web fiction that’d been covered on this series?
Yilin: Most of my exposure has been with earlier works, like Jin Yong’s. I read those in book form. A lot of Chuanqi tales have now been digitalized online. I haven’t really read the newer web novels, but I know they’re very popular. There’s so much out there, so I just haven’t got to them yet.
Angus: Jin Yong’s wuxia writing started out not in a book print, but in a newspaper, so they were kind of in very brief installments, a little like web novels. And I know you have done research on Jin Yong. Is there anything you learned about the publishing of wuxia in newspapers that you can share with our listeners?
Yilin: I learned, through my research in Hong Kong, and also at various libraries and archives, that Jin Yong and Gu Long, in addition to drawing on these early stories, were also influenced by films and stage plays. Early on in his career, Jin Yong wrote scripts, worked for a movie production company, and reviewed films. He talked about being influenced by movies he watched, as well as drawing on influences like Shakespearean tragedies and The Count of Monte Cristo. I find these unexpected influences fascinating. Something else I learned is that, he wrote very quickly, and very smoothly, because he had to write these episodic, daily features for the newspapers every single day. Later on, he spent fifteen years revising all the different stories and compiling them into book form.
Angus: It’s fascinating how different mediums can interact. I forget if there’s direct evidence of this surfaced speculation, but I think there’s a lot of thinking that Gu Long might have been influenced by Spaghetti Westerns.
Yilin: Yes, I was also trying to track down Gu Long’s connection to Westerns. In an essay called “Regarding Wuxia,” he wrote that he was influenced by The Godfather. I also know from his essays that he watched a lot of films, and also looked at Japanese mysteries.
Technical Aspects of Translating “The Woman in the Carriage”
Angus: Let’s go back to your notes that you gave before the story. Could you tell listeners what is the original style of the story? What’s the style of English writing you opted for, and how did you make that decision?
Yilin: The original was written in the Tang dynasty, so it’s in Classical Chinese, wenyanwen文言文. I think an equivalent would be Medieval English. It sounds very different from modern Chinese prose, but to readers back then, this was what people used in written communication. Although they were perhaps scholarly texts, they were also similar to popular literature, with supernatural happenings and entertainment value. Keeping all that context in mind, I chose to translate the story into direct, straightforward, modern English. All other chuanqi tales I have read have been translated this way. It’s not very realistic to translate this into an older form of English. The language just happened to be archaic. It wasn’t deliberately written that way as a stylistic choice.
Angus: Makes a lot of sense to me. Were there any engaging, challenging, or surprising translation problems you had to solve while you were working on getting the translation together?
Yilin: I normally work with modern contemporary prose. I have translated fiction (fantasy and wuxia) and classical poetry, so that helped me a bit with unpacking classical prose. But it was still my first attempt at translating chuanqi. Classical Chinese has its own grammatical rules and syntax, and certain diction and allusions that were familiar to folks back then. You have to know a bit about what Tang dynasty Chang’an was like. The tales sometimes use very archaic terms to describe the neighborhood and streets, what kinds of clothes people wore, and what kind of carriage was used. As a translator, it can be quite challenging for me to figure out exactly what they’re describing. There’s no explanation. I don’t always have notes or artifacts to reference, when it comes to what a particular carriage looks like. The other challenge was stylistic—how to maintain the overall pacing, flow, and more distant perspective. Not prescribing motivation, being more distant, and just creating a feeling of a reported tale.
Angus: Yeah, this is what happened. A woman did indeed, jump ten miles through the air. I think the style, not deceived me, but reading through it I was like…. and then something crazy happens. So, could you suggest a Chinese word of the day for this story?
Yilin: The one I came up with is daozei 盗贼, which means thief. I think it’s very appropriate for this story.
Angus: Right. I find it interesting that we don’t get told what’s stolen. We learned the palaces suffered a theft, there were stolen goods, but it doesn’t go on to tell us what exactly was stolen. So yeah, another ambiguity. Are there a lot of thieves in this sort of stories? Is thievery a running theme?
Yilin: I think we do see it now and then. In general, there’s a lot of sneakiness. Stories happening at night. People stealing an object, or people committing crimes in the dark.
Angus: Next miscellaneous question, definitely the silliest one I’ll be asking. If “The Woman in the Carriage” were a drink, what kind would it be?
Yilin: I drink a lot of tea, so I am going to recommend the high mountain green tea, which is from Mt. E’mei 峨眉山. The mountain is home to a martial arts sect known for many women warriors who are very agile.
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Further Readings and Resources
Angus: Alright. We had a fair amount of promo for your project through the show, but this is your designated self-promo slot on the show. So where should we take this opportunity to direct the listeners?
Yilin: My website is the best place to go. There’s a dedicated page for the #LiteraryJianghu project. On the page, I link to different pieces I have written, interviews, and social media posts.
Angus: Cool. You mentioned earlier, this is the first interview you’re doing. Do you have any other interesting interviews in the works or coming up that the listeners would be able to look out for?
Yilin: I have another interview coming out on Learn Writing Essentials in October, about my translation and #LiteraryJianghu. I’m also doing a poetry reading soon with some cool Chinese diaspora poets.
Angus: If our listeners want to check out more wuxia, or chuanqi, be it online or in print, where would you direct them? Where do you think they should go look at?
Yilin: So, in terms of wuxia from the modern day, I would say definitely check out translations by folks like Gigi Chang and etvolare. We’re actually in the same translators’ collective. I highly recommend their work. In terms of older chuanqi tales, a lot of them are still not as well-known or as widely translated. One collection of supernatural tales, which are zhiguai志怪 stories similar to chuanqi, is called The Man Who Sold a Ghost. The title story is indeed about a man who ends up tricking and selling a ghost. You’ll find some of the same reporting style, surprising twists, and unexpected humor in these stories as well.
Angus: Speaking of finding books and reading, is there anything that you’re reading just now?
Yilin: I’m currently reading a book in Chinese on Chinese legends and folktales. And it’s called Chinese Myths and Legends 中国神话传说. It fuses together Chinese myths and legends from Daoist and Buddhist traditions, into one coherent, overall collective story. It starts with early creation stories and goes through different eras. I’ve been finding that fascinating, because I encountered a lot of these stories in separate little pieces, growing up in the Chinese diaspora. But it has been really interesting and informative to read this overall mythological history.
Angus: Thank you very much for coming on the show, Yilin. It’s been a really interesting episode, and, definitely, not the end I expected when I started a wuxia series, but a really great end. Thank you so much.
Yilin: Thank you. I really enjoyed this, and I’m so glad that you invited me here.
Angus: Thank you again to Yilin Wang for coming on for the interview. If you want to reach out, the Twitter that I use, partly for the show, partly for myself, is @AngusLikesWords. The show has its own Instagram account, @trchfic. If you would like to support the show, there is Patreon or Buy Me A Coffee.
Of course, the best way you can support the show is just spreading the word. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your teachers, tell the local band of robbers who spend their time climbing up walls, and swinging from the rafters, and if you do know a young woman who can launch herself ten miles in the air, tell her too. Cause you know, she might enjoy the show. We’ll give her something to listen to, while she’s flying through the sky, because there’s not really anyone to chat with up there. So yeah, until next time, 再見 zaijian!
A final note from Yilin: Thank you to Angus Stewart for the interview and Jenna Tang for her initial work transcribing the original interview. You can listen to the episode in podcast format in full here. If you enjoyed reading this, please share and consider supporting me on Ko-fi.
