Chinese martial arts hit
home By Eric Koo Peng Kuan
One of the few remaining Chinese
cultural values to live beyond the second half of the
20th century, and moreover, thrive and adapt
itself into the modern commercial world is
gongfu (martial arts).
Gongfu is still taught by
traditional Chinese organizations such as ethnic,
provincial and clan organizations, or in proper
martial arts schools, most likely found in the US,
China or Taiwan. But what has really made
gongfu endearing to Chinese culture is its
adaptation to the world of movies and drama
series.
Beginning in the 1960s,
moviemakers in Hong Kong captured the hearts of
ethnic Chinese audiences worldwide in film production.
When
TV became easily available in the 1970s,
gongfu drama series that retold stories
written by novelists using as central themes the
wuxia, or martial arts hero, were major
favorites with Chinese viewers.
Such
entertainment productions, featuring actors and
actresses dressed up in colorful, surreal costumes
and wielding props of Chinese swords or sabers,
appealed to a remarkably wide section of Chinese
audiences worldwide.
These productions are
called period costume dramas or movies. The world
of wuxia, much in the same manner as the
Western fantasy sub-culture of the Dungeons and
Dragons game genre, was make-believe, derived
entirely from Chinese historical and cultural
roots and populated by a host of chivalrous
swordsmen, fairy-like maidens, highly skilled
Shaolin gongfu monks and treacherous
villains.
In the 1980s, alongside typical
fictional wuxia dramas, Hong Kong and
Taiwan drama series-makers and movies branched out
with other productions based on different themes,
such as romantic, historical, classical,
supernatural, fantasy or religious.
Historical works, for example, narrated
the life stories of famous Chinese figures, such
as Chin Shi Huang, Genghis Khan and the Kang Hsi
emperor, thus heightening awareness of the
achievements of great Chinese men and women in
history.
Also, Taiwanese drama
series-makers specialize in producing romantic
soap operas mostly adapted from their own
homegrown novelist, Qiong Yao, of which the
Princess Returning Pearl series proved to
be very popular in the late 1990s.
Mainland China, however, proved much more
ambitious, and starting in the 1980s sought to
reproduce and bring to the screen as mega-drama
series Chinese literary classics such as
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The
Journey to the West and the Dream of Red
Mansions.
Chinese producers, however,
in a tremendous effort to keep to rigid and
accurate adaptation from novels or stories written
several hundred years ago, incurred huge costs in
filmmaking, costume productions and the prodigious
use of manpower in the form of extras.
And
poor marketing and the lack of publicity and mass
appeal further curtailed such mega productions
from making a niche in the international
entertainment market and competing with Western
films and productions, limiting such drama series
or movies to domestic consumption.
By far
the most popular of Chinese period costume dramas
and movies for Chinese audiences, however, are
still the wuxia drama series and films.
These are mostly adaptations of Mandarin novels
written by professional wuxia novelists, of
whom Louis Chia was the most successful and well
known in the Chinese literary world.
A
talented author with a history background, Chia
wove historical elements, humor, romance, human
nature and politics into his books. His
descriptions of scenes and characters are vivid
and life-like and easily related to the reader.
His literary style and use of language are similar
and of the same literary standards as famous
Western fantasy authors such as David Gemmell,
Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis. Most importantly,
his novels were written in such a dramatic style
that filmmakers could easily adapt his story to
the screen.
The themes he portrayed in his
books also involved typical human relationships
without language barriers, that made excellent
material for dramatic acting. This aspect thus
differentiated his works from true Chinese
classics, which were written in drier form. Chia's
works could portray aspects of Chinese history to
the modern reader, who could relate to his stories
based on its humanistic aspects.
For
example, his Return of the Condor Heroes
chronicled the life and adventures of a fictional
swordsman, Yang Guo, who was in love with an older
woman (his beautiful teacher, Little Dragon Girl).
Much of the drama involved Chinese societal
rejection of such a relationship, which was
against the Confucian ethic of a student, being in
an inferior position, having an intimate
relationship with a teacher. Such a relationship
was considered taboo in the past, and even in
contemporary times is still frowned upon in less
liberal Chinese communities.
Return of
the Condor Heroes proved to be so popular that
no fewer than five adaptations thus far of Chia's
work have been produced by entertainment makers
from four different sources - Hong Kong, China,
Taiwan and Singapore.
Japan even produced
an animation version of his story. It was fast
becoming regarded as one of the great Chinese
contemporary romantic literary works besides being
a wuxia novel. Yang Guo and Little Dragon
Girl became household names after the successful
character portrayals by Hong Kong actors Andy Lau
and Idy Chan in the early 1980s. In fact, the two
storybook characters were unofficially dubbed the
Romeo and Juliet of the Far East.
The
opening lines of a poem written by Chia for
Return of the Condor Heroes proved more
popular with the modern generation of young
Chinese than classical poems from the Tang or Song
eras. However, novelists such as Gemmell,
Hickman, Weis and a host of other such authors,
have attained international celebrity status due
to writing to English audiences, while Chia's name
is known only to the Chinese world. His works
appeal only to readers capable of reading Chinese
script and writing, or able to appreciate
adaptations of his wuxia stories in
Mandarin or Cantonese television dramas or movies.
Nevertheless, Chia's works are appreciated
by millions, if not billions of Chinese worldwide,
as the number of adaptations of his novels into
film and drama attests.
Ironically, the modest efforts of entertainment
makers to keep their works as close to
historically fact as possible became a form of
unofficial education for Chinese audiences of their
own rich historical past. Chinese audiences, for
example, learned that their male pre-modern ancestors
did not wear pigtails until the Ching dynasty.
Many Chinese came to believe that the past
was accurately being portrayed on the screen,
which was not completely true as the entertainment
industry is commercial and relies on retaining
customer appeal. For instance, the colorful
costumes worn by on-screen characters could not
have been produced in the past as dyes and weaving
techniques were much more primitive and less
available.
Also, wuxia on-screen
characters, who more often than not could perform
fabulous athletic feats such as leaping over walls
and running lightly on rooftops, make for great
entertainment, but are hardly convincing in terms
of historical realism. By the early 2000s,
computer-generated on-screen special effects, such
as causing an explosion or splitting the ground by
simply waving a sword, had even less credibility
to an audience numbed by saturation of
computer-generated graphics in the information
technology age.
Meanwhile, a US film
company in 2000 finally released the first-ever
authentic wuxia movie on the silver screen,
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, starring an
entire ethnic Chinese cast and with the original
dialogue in Mandarin.
By Chinese film
appreciation standards, the story line or filming
effects of Crouching Tiger were nothing
remarkable, and had it not been for its unique
status of breaking into the American market, the
film could only be best classified as a
stereotypical wuxia film with an artistic
touch. However, it is a source of Chinese pride
that Westerners are finally acknowledging Chinese
ideas, concepts and cultural values, such as
wuxia, into their markets, thus garnering
international fame.
The popularity of this
form of entertainment has prompted many Chinese to
study, do research and understand the richness of
their cultural and political history.
Eric Koo Peng Kuan has a MSc in
strategic studies and is a member of the
International Institute for Strategic Studies,
London. He currently writes commentaries and
analysis articles on international affairs,
security issues and terrorism for newspapers. The
views expressed here are his own and he can be
reached at erickoopk@yahoo.com
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing
.)
