83 - The Legend of the Condor Heroes 🦅
Hey there, !
1.
My parents moved from Hong Kong to Melbourne in the 1980’s. At the time, globalisation wasn’t really a thing yet, and one of the only ways that they could connect with their culture and homeland was to watch TVBJ, the only real channel that produced Hong Kong media content. It was free to air in Hong Kong, but you had to buy a special box to watch it if you wanted to watch it from overseas.
I was brought up on Cantonese TV shows. When I was young, they filmed TV series of great, epic tales like Journey to the West, The Creation of the Gods and The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber. There was this one insane sci-fi story that I particularly remember called A Step into the Past, where a 21st century policeman gets sent back in time just prior to the Qin Dynasty, and helps Qin Shi Huang gain power through his modern day knowledge and intelligence.
I doubt many of you would have heard of these shows, and for good reason! Y’all ain’t following the Hong Kong media scene (right…?). But what it meant for me when I was younger was that I was watching TV shows that no-one really knew about. When I’d watch the Monkey King do some cool shit, I could only really talk to my family about it. There weren’t like…fan forums that I could access online (at least none that I could decipher with my shitty Chinese); there weren’t Facebook groups to talk about stuff like this. So even if I wanted to share, it would be extremely hard to explain to people about Chinese stories about gods and magic and fantasy.
2.
I used to go to a babysitter when I was young - and we’d go early enough that I would still be able to catch a few shows from Cheez TV. This is where I first got introduced to anime - namely, Dragon Ball Z and One Piece. I knew that there were these types of 2D cartoons (I’d been exposed to things like Doraemon, Snoopy and Hello Kitty while in Hong Kong. I had a bunch of those Snoopy figurines from the Happy Meals and Steph had a bunch of Hello Kitty merch) but I hadn’t really seen it be animated in English!
In typical shounen fashion, this anime was full of cool powers, flashy action scenes, believing in yourself and the ~ * power of friendship * ~. Everything a little kid wants to see in their TV!
As I grew older, I wanted to read and absorb more about these series, and found out about manga - the written form of anime. I devoured as much manga as I could in high school - Naruto, Bleach, One Piece - the Big 3 at the time, and found some incredibly written stories with fantastically imagined worlds and characters. I still read to this day - it’s just more efficient y’know? Watching anime takes too long…
I remember that while I was watching these shows at the babysitter’s place, I recognised Goku in Dragon Ball Z having all the same powers as Sun Wu Kong (the Monkey King from Journey to the West) - he had the Nimbus Cloud, and the staff that could grow and shrink at will. But I didn’t share that, because I knew, even at that age, that no-one round me would really understand.
(Also I didn’t know it at the time but ‘Son Goku’ in Japanese has the same characters as ‘Sun Wu Kong’ in Chinese (it was a direct ripoff)!)
3.
Dad loved watching these types of shows. They were essentially his childhood put up on a screen - he had read all about them, and now they were TV shows! A lot of them were really classic stories - for example, Journey to the West is one of the ‘Big 4’ Chinese masterpieces. When I was young, and was forced to take naps, Dad would read stories from Journey to the West to me to help me sleep. Unfortunately, I don’t remember ANY of the stories from what he told me about (sorry Dad!)…all my memories are from the TV show :P
But he also told me about many many other epic stories that had been written by an author named Jin Yong - who was one of the most prolific Chinese wuxia writers in the 1960’s, and came up with 100’s of the ‘mythical’ martial arts that are still used in Chinese media today. Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre, for example, is the last book in a trilogy of books called the Condor Trilogy by Jin Yong. Even Stephen Chow’s excellent movies Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle have techniques that were written by Jin Yong!
I used to play Dynasty Warriors on Playstation 1 and 2 (a LOT) because it had such fun gameplay (you mash buttons to hack and slash through fights), but also because I was slowly learning about Chinese history. I used to go back to Dad and say ‘hey - I learnt about Lu Bu and the Hu Lao Gate!’, and Dad would then proceed to tell me even more about the story, things I’d missed through the gameplay, and the more historic context behind it. There are many Chinese sayings that reference this period of history - it’s a really famous era that is a cornerstone of Chinese culture.
I loved it.
4.
Chinese writers have such a unique perspective, informed by their cultural upbringing and pop culture references of their era. I came across Liu Cixin’s sci-fi trilogy of books (The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy), as well as his many short story collections. The melding of Communist Chinese rule with some absolutely mind-bending concepts (faster than light travel and communication, the concept of ‘Wall-facers’ whose minds are the only ones that aliens cannot decipher, as well as some crazy spaceship escapes) are just the tip of the iceberg!
Some other good recommendations: Ken Liu’s collection of short stories ‘The Paper Menagerie’ is written in English but is heavily Chinese-inspired, with wolf spirits and the Monkey King included. Ted Chiang, the author of the original short story that inspired Arrival, is another wonderful Chinese sci-fi author that I’ve been reading.
My sister has told me to read Wild Swans by Jung Chang as well - I thought I might pass that on to you all as a recommendation!
I think I started getting into these writers because I wanted to learn more about the writers who are connected to my heritage. It’s this hole in my cultural learning that I never had, and I really want to understand it. Part of knowing yourself is knowing the story of your history, and this is a little part of it that I want to learn more about.
5.
Can you imagine my surprise finding these two books at my local library?!
These are translations of the Condor Trilogy (Legend of the Condor Heroes, Return of the Condor Heroes, and The Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre). It’s so-called as the Condor Trilogy because in the second book, the protagonist learns martial arts from a giant condor (LOL). I’ve also learnt that the entire trilogy is being translated into 12 books total - and if these are anything to go by, it looks like a multi-year reading journey for me to come :D
These translations are fantastic. I can ‘see’ what’s happening when they describe the martial arts - imagining essentially the TV shows that I’ve seen being recreated on a page:
- There’s a smarmy, super attractive guy who can control snakes and essentially just roams China with a pack of them
- There’s a Beggar Chief who’s partial to excellent cooking, and teaches the protagonists top tier martial arts because they feed him good food
- There’s an elite martial arts master who secluded himself on an island and built a labyrinth based on the Eight Trigrams to protect his secrets (not gonna lie, very attractive proposition right now)
- One of the protagonists (Guo Jing) is adopted by the family of Genghis Khan, learns kung fu from the ‘Seven Freaks of the South’, and learns even more martial arts from the legendary Nine Yin Manual which was being kept hidden by yet another martial arts master who has been imprisoned on an island.
How cool do these adventures sound?! I absolutely love the weaving in of historical events, with the fantastical nature of martial art forms. The translations are a little wonky (White Bone Claw, Twin Killer Dark Wind, inner energy / qigong) but they’re better than nothing.
Most of all, this gave me another thing to connect with dad about. I went straight to him after reading and was babbling about all the cool stuff in the books that happened. There’s the translation barrier, but at least we could share these stories together. There’s still so many books to go though - many fun reads ahead :D
Stories reaching across generations - what could be better?
Chat soon :)
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