ABSTRACT
Widely disseminated in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Macau, Thailand, and later in Taiwan, mainland China, and overseas Chinese and non-Chinese communities (thanks to the multilingual translations and multimedia adaptations), Jin Yong’s (Louis Cha, 1924-2018) martial arts (wuxia) narrative has built up an epic, lyrical, geographical, and emotional “cultural China” shared by a transregional, border-crossing, and worldwide audience from the Cold War to the post-Cold War eras since the mid-1950s. This chapter aims to situate Jin Yong’s phenomenal, monumental, imaginative, and historical martial arts works into three entangled worlds: (1) the literary world (jianghu), or Jin Yong’s postcolonial and post-loyalist chronotopic reconfiguration of fiction, history, and geography overdetermined by a Sinophone and diasporic obsession with a chivalrous China, along the four coordinates of transregional and psychogeographical trajectory: Jiangnan region and the south as the memorable yet inaccessible and nonreturnable homeland, the Central Plains as the origin or beginning of Chinese culture, the peripheries or frontiers as the sites of resistance and rebellion, as well as the imperial capitals as the conspiracy of politics and labyrinth of desire; (2) the multilingual and worldwide translations and circulations of Jin Yong’s works in Asia and the other regions of the world, as well as the disparate yet symptomatic receptions in different social-cultural contexts within and without Sinophone communities; and (3) the inter-arts and transmedia adaptation and reproduction of Jin Yong’s works by popular culture industry (television drama series, commercial films, theatrical performances, local operas, comic books, animations, video games, intellectual properties, and theme parks) and, more importantly, by avant-garde film directors and artists (including Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, King Hu, and Wong Kar-wai, among others).
