The Jin Yong Phenomenon: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and Modern ...

During their endless journeys, Jin Yong’s wandering heroes usually have the ability to select an open definition of nationalism in contrast to a definition based on geographical boundaries. For example, even if the young hero Zhang Wuji leads the Han people to fight against the Mongolian invasion, he still finally chooses his love for the daughter of the Mongolian Duke over the push toward national resistance; with a hybrid identity - both Han and foreign - Xiao Feng sacrifices his own life in order to prevent a fight between two sides. Through these wandering heroes, Jin Yong’s writing represents a profound contemplation of the Hong Kong experience, from which a multilayered national and cultural identity is revealed.

As Stuart Hall points out, there are two ways of conceptualizing cultural identity: one reflects “the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as ‘one people,’ with stable, unchanging, and continuous frames of reference and meaning”; the second is “subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power.” Instead of regarding these two axes of identities as opposite to each other, Hall suggests a dialogical relationship between “the vector of similarity and continuity” and “the vector of difference and rupture.”¹² The dialogical relationship between these two different cultural identities helps explain why Jin Yong’s novels in one way create a Chinese identity in colonial Hong Kong, but in another way allow this identity to find resonance with different Chinese communities around the world regardless of geographic boundaries.

There is no doubt that the special cultural space inhabited by Chinese tradition in Jin Yong’s novels formulates a resistance to Western hegemony; however, it does not mean this space is conceived of as either fixed or essential. Rather, the Chinese identity in his novels is always in the process of construction and deconstuction, making a monolithic and authentic “Chineseness” impossible. In other words, we should situate Jin Yong’s notion of Chinese identity within the paradigm of the Chinese diaspora, in which there are multiple Chinese identities instead of one.