Literary ‘kung fu pandas’: the Chinese wuxia genre and why Westerners don’t know it (Part I) | The Bubble
While wuxia stories may be fundamentally historical in nature, it is impossible to understate their literary and sociocultural importance among contemporary Chinese communities. To illuminate this, we only have to consider the sheer influence of one particular writer: the late Louis Cha, pen name Jin Yong (the surname Jin is placed first in Chinese), author of 15 wuxia novels and father of the genre as we perceive it now. By serialising his works in the newspapers of 1950s-60s Hong Kong, Jin popularised the genre alongside Gu Long and Liang Yusheng—the other members of the wuxia ‘Holy Trinity’—and inspired almost every wuxia writer that has followed. His already impressive corpus of 15 novels has also given rise to a whopping count of almost 120 film and television adaptations, with further productions of his most famous book, The Legend of the Condor Heroes, upcoming in both forms of media (film and television).
Among Westerners who have read wuxia novels, however [there is] a generally positive perception and feedback. It’s not that wuxianarratives would be entirely unenjoyable to a Western audience, then, but perhaps that they are difficult to approach and access instead in the first place—and as long as translators themselves also share this opinion, anglophone readers will probably continue to be minimally exposed to the genre. So what are the obstacles complicating the translation and dissemination of these beloved Chinese novels?