Wuxia Fiction Author Jin Yong 金庸: His Writing Process, Influences, & Legacy (+ a Guest Visit from His Granddaughter Jasmine Chiu)

This blogpost is dedicated to Jin Yong and Jasmine Chiu.

Ever since I first watched a TV series based on Jin Yong’s Legend of Condor Heroes, I have become interested in Jin Yong’s wuxia (martial arts) fiction as well its many adaptations and translations. But despite the incredible popularity of his work in the Sinophone world and beyond, I could only find very limited information online about his writing process, inspiration, and influences.

In summer 2018, as a part of my search for answers, I travelled half way across the world from Vancouver to Mainland China and Hong Kong for research. I examined Jin Yong’s manuscripts and spoke with the former curator of the Jin Yong Gallery at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum. In the weeks and months that followed, I also scoured wuxia-related collections and archives at the Hong Kong Public Library and libraries in Vancouver and Toronto. I even got the chance to visit many historical sites and real-world places in Mainland China that appear in Jin Yong’s work, interview one of his English translators, and speak with his granddaughter Jasmine Chiu about her work as a ballet dancer, her personal memories of him, and her connections to martial arts.

The Jin Yong Gallery at the HK Heritage Museum

I arrived at the HK Heritage Museum on April 29, 2018. Brian Lam, the curator of the museum at the time who has now left the position, spent over 1.5hrs chatting with me to answer my detailed interview questions as well as give me a guided tour of the Jin Yong Gallery. The wall near the gallery’s entrance was covered with illustrations of characters from Jin Yong’s novels, bringing well-known figures such as Guo Jing, Huang Rong, Linghu Chong, and Zhang Wuji to life.

Jin Yong’s Writing Process

Why did Jin Yong start writing wuxia fiction? According to Brian Lam, a well-known martial arts tournament happened in Macau in 1954, where martial arts masters met to fight to see who was superior in skill, making big-time news and attracting widespread interest. This event and the rising popularity of martial arts at the time led to Jin Yong and another author, Liang Yusheng 梁羽生, being invited to write wuxia fiction in a serialized format for the newspaper New Evening Post. These writers soon became leading authors in the New Wuxia movement.

As I wrote about in my first post for the #LiteraryJianghu project, there are many earlier legends and folktales that feature martial artists, such as this Tang dynasty legend about “The Woman in the Carriage.” Additionally, according to Brian Lam, earlier writers of wuxia fiction often followed a style similar to the gong’an genre 公案小说, which featured characters such as magistrates or government officials who solved crimes and fought bandits. In contrast, the writers of New Wuxia brought many new innovative elements to the genre, introducing now common tropes such as complex multi-dimensional characters, romantic subplots, fantastical martial arts moves, and the use of surprising plot twists. 

Jin Yong wrote the first drafts of his stories using fountain pens. He began with The Book and The Sword 书剑恩仇录. Lam states that some scholars believe this first book might have been inspired by The Water Margin 水浒传, because Jin Yong’s tale also follows a traditional Chinese narrative format that features different heroes appearing in turn.

Due to the fact Jin Yong’s wuxia fiction was first serialized in newspapers, nearly all of his handwritten manuscripts of these stories from the 1960s and 1970s have been lost, cut into pieces as a part of the newspaper printing and production process. But miraculously, a portion of his manuscript The Smiling, Proud Warrior 笑傲江湖 (1968) has been found by an editor in a newspaper office in Singapore, where Jin Yong lived briefly and ran a newspaper. To date, it’s the only known surviving original handwritten manuscript of Jin Yong’s wuxia fiction.

The HK Heritage Museum has borrowed a portion of this manuscript for a special display at the Jin Yong Gallery. These surviving pages show that Jin Yong wrote three pages of wuxia fiction every day, at around 400 characters per page, for a daily feature of 1200 words. The manuscript has remarkably few edits, suggesting that he wrote very smoothly and efficiently, having thought out the story well in advance and making few edits as he drafted.

After he finished writing his last wuxia novel, The Deer and The Cauldron 鹿鼎记, Jin Yong spent fifteen years to revise his stories that originally appeared in newspapers. The Jin Yong Gallery had some of his revision drafts on display as well, such as pages showing a different ending to Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils 天龙八部 and changes made to The Book and The Sword 书剑恩仇录.

In contrast to the minimal edits on Jin Yong’s original drafts, these manuscripts show many crossed-out words and careful line edits. He also wrote extensive notes in the margins. These manuscripts suggest that Jin Yong spent a lot of time and effort during his revision process, thinking carefully about the flow and precision of his words as well as making significant revisions to the stories’ plots and characters.

Jin Yong’s Advice to His Newspaper Staff

While I couldn’t find any documents directly pointing to Jin Yong’s advice for wuxia writers, I came across his handwritten instructions to his staff for putting together a supplement of Ming Pao newspaper. He stressed that the newspaper’s pieces need to fulfill five criteria. They need to be short (短), interesting to readers (趣), and timely and recent (近), as well as have substantial contents (物) and illustrations (图).

I’m curious if his views on the selection of newspaper pieces aligned in any way with his approaches to writing wuxia fiction. His stories were initially read by many working class folks living in Hong Kong and beyond, and have often been praised for their entertainment value as well as writing, so it seems that his way of writing wuxia fiction also followed his belief in writing works that are “interesting to readers.”

 

Jin Yong’s Literary and Film Influences

Early in his career, Jin Yong worked in the film industry, where he wrote under another pen name, Lin Huan 林欢. As a playwright, he wrote the script for around seven films, and his debut film script was The Peerless Beauty. Around the same time, he also contributed editorials and film criticism to the journal Great Wall Pictorial as a part of his work for Great Wall Movie Enterprises.

According to Brian Lam, Jin Yong’s experiences with and knowledge of film impacted his approach to writing wuxia fiction. The structure of his stories bear resemblance to the plot structure of films at the time. His approach to introducing main characters gradually, through hinting at their reputation first via other characters’ dialogue rather than having them appear in the story immediately, is also inspired by film and staging techniques. For example, when Yang Guo disappears for sixteen years, the story builds up to his arrival by having other characters discuss his reputation and rumors about him before he finally appears. Jin Yong’s descriptions also mimic the panning of a camera on set, unfolding first with the scenery, followed by a description of who appears where, what brought them there, and finally, their thoughts.

In addition to Lam’s comments, I also uncovered more of Jin Yong’s influences while walking through the exhibit, as I have written about in an article for carte blanche: “One exhibit panel [at the gallery] commented that his works use techniques like cliffhangers and freeze frame, which were borrowed from international films and rarely present in Chinese literature before his time. Jīn Yōng also stated that he found inspiration from Greek myths such as Pygmalion, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, and Shakespeare’s plays.”

An exhibit of some books from Jin Yong’s library showed he owned many Chinese books about the history of different dynasties, literary theory, novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber, classics such as I Ching, and books on Daoism and Buddhism. His bookshelf also included western classics and books of English literature. 

One of Jin Yong’s favourite books was Zizhi Tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government) 资治通鉴. This multi-volume reference work, first published in 1084, chronicles the official history of sixteen dynasties, spanning nearly 1,400 years. This volume taken from Jin Yong’s library was well-read and full of marginalia.

For example, as shown in the image below, Jin Yong left margin notes commenting that he thought the Tang dynasty tax system was designed in a way that fit the historical circumstances at the time. Specifically, he wrote that he agreed with the policy that farmers should pay taxes using a portion of their harvest rather than with paper money, because paper money wasn’t yet a common currency at the time. Annotations such as these suggest that Jin Yong engaged deeply with texts during his reading process and possessed deep historical knowledge and context while drafting his wuxia fiction. 

Staff members of the Jin Yong Gallery also discovered during the curation process that Jin Yong used to break thicker and heavier books into smaller volumes for ease of carrying and portability, so that he could read more easily while away from his office. After he finished reading the books, he would then get the books rebound, and these rebound books could be spotted in his personal library. 

According to Brian Lam, Jin Yong spent around four hours reading each day. He wrote in the document “Benefits of Reading” that reading was the most important activity in his life apart from breathing, eating, drinking water, and sleeping.

Translations of Jin Yong’s Works

As I reached the end of the exhibit, I spotted a wall covered from floor to ceiling with covers of translated editions of Jin Yong’s work. His work has been translated into Korean, Japanese, French, English, and Thai, with a complete set of translations existing in Japanese. The exhibit also featured some recordings of interviews with Jin Yong’s Japanese and French translators, each commenting on their translation process and what drew them to translate his work. 

In late 2018, after returning from my research trip, I had the opportunity to interview one of Jin Yong’s English translators, Anna Holmwood. She wrote the following in reply to my questions about the challenges of translating A Hero Born:

“The balance between domestication and foreignization is the fundamental tightrope any translator has to walk. Some of the terms in this book have been translated elsewhere and have long entered English through martial arts communities. The concept of shifu, for example, is familiar to anyone who has taken a class in some form of martial arts in the west, whether in its Mandarin form or through the Cantonese term sifu.

Wulin and jianghu have entered parlance through the gaming community, but I did feel that adding some extra information in a prologue, to set the scene, would help to evoke the unique linguistic and cultural meaning behind those words. They are not just their literal translations; these concepts contain a world of meaning. Their translation occurs over the course of the whole book, rather than as one word or phrase.

When it comes to the martial arts moves: I have had feedback from Chinese speakers that people would have preferred me to use pinyin, because any attempt at their translation is futile. But I think that attitude is a real shame. These weird, quirky names are just that in Chinese, and they’re so much of what people love about Jin Yong. I have faith that English readers can and want to experience that part of Jin Yong’s writing rather than have it locked off from them through the use of pinyin. It’s precisely the fact that there is no genre of fiction like it in English that makes translating and reading Jin Yong’s work so exciting.”

Additional Travels and Research

In addition to my visit to HK, I got the chance to visit many heritage sites in Mainland China that are referenced in Jin Yong’s work, such as the Shaolin Temple, Mt. Wudang, Mt. Qingcheng, Yue Fei’s grave near West Lake, and the fortress where the characters Guo Jing and Huang Rong supposedly stood to defend the gates of Xiang Yang. In my future posts for the #LiteraryJianghu project, I hope to go into more details about my visits to these heritage sites. 

A very vivid memory from my research journey sums up that trip: while I was watching an episode of Legend of Condor Heroes (2017) as I rode on a bus across a bridge atop Great Lake in Jiangsu, I discovered, to my surprise, some characters in the show were also on their way to the very same lake that I was traveling across. These surprising connections between my real life and wuxia happened repeatedly during my research, as if I were a traveller through jianghu myself.

I have also consulted many archives and collections at the HK Public Library, Southwest University of China, the Shanghai Public Library, University of British Columbia library, University of Toronto library, and the Richmond Public Library over the past two years. To describe everything I have learned would go beyond the scope of this piece, but here are some reference materials and books from my bookshelf that I have consulted in detail. The top row features an informational booklet from the Jin Yong Gallery and a Library Resource Guide on Jin Yong from the Hong Kong Public Library. The four books that follow have given me an overview of some in-depth literary analysis of Jin Yong’s work, in terms of his use of writing techniques, historical settings, characterization, story structure, and more.  

Meeting Jasmine Chiu, Jin Yong’s Granddaughter

Just as I thought my formal research on Jin Yong’s writing process and influences was drawing to an end in 2019, I found out through one of my close friends that Jin Yong’s granddaughter, Jasmine Chiu, is one of her high school classmates. This was another moment of serendipity, a special and touching connection that allowed me to learn more about his personal life, legacy, and Jasmine Chiu, another woman of color artist from the Sino diaspora who I immediately found commonalities with.   

After reading Jasmine’s Instagram post that shared a profile written in Chinese about her memories of her grandpa and their shared love of ballet, I reached out to her online. We even got to meet in person while she was returning to visit her home, Vancouver, and we spent several hours discussing her ballet journey, my research, Jin Yong, and being a woman of color in creative and artistic fields. 

To wrap up this blogpost and add a collaborative element to the #LiteraryJianghu project, I have invited Jasmine to appear as a guest on my blogpost and share in video format her own journey as a dancer, her memories of her grandpa, and her impressions of wuxia. Here are some specific questions I invited her to speak about:

1. Can you introduce yourself? Name, what you do, where folks can find you online. 
2. What are some memories of Jin Yong that you can share? 
3. What have you seen or read of his work and how do you connect with it? What does it mean you?
4. Your experience doing martial arts training and performing in a musical, and how that connected you to his work or wuxia.

You can find Jasmine Chiu online via her Instagram and website, and I highly encourage you to follow her and check out her work. 

Jasmine also sent me this video about translating dance into martial arts, and the video include clips of her martial arts training, interviews, and discussions about the kungfu musical Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise.

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If you enjoyed reading this post and would like to show your support, please share it and consider making a Ko-Fi donation to support the #LiteraryJianghu project and my writing. 

Thank you so much to the Canada Council for the Arts’ Digital Originals initiative for supporting the initial stages of the #LiteraryJianghu project. Thank you also to the staff members at the HK Heritage Museum and former curator Brian Lam for their help in providing me a guided tour, interviews, detailed close-up images of his manuscripts, and a chance to take photos at the Jin Yong gallery. Thank you to Anna Holmewood for her interview and the HK Public Library for their reesarch assistance. Thank you so much to Jane Shi for connecting me with Jasmine Chiu and Jasmine for her collaboration. 

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