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

Extending Benjamin’s conception that it is impossible to think of any artwork as “original” in this age of mechanical reproduction, Rey Chow criticizes the “self-sufficient” native, an imaginative space that becomes “the place of mythmaking and an escape from the impure nature of political realities.” As she puts it, “we see that in our fascination with the ‘authentic native,’ we are actually engaged in a search for the equivalent of the aura even while our search processes themselves take us farther and farther away from that ‘original’ point of identification.”¹¹ Chow’s criticism also helps us realize that the search for the “original” and “authentic” Chinese knowledge in Jin Yong’s novels will lead to disillusionment. Not only because cultural production in the technological era diminishes the aura of Chinese tradition that Jin creates, but also because the hybridity of the postcolonial condition makes the Chinese identity inauthentic. Such disillusionment will in turn question the points of view that see the cultural space in Jin Yong’s novel as fixed and self-sufficient, as a transparent carrier of the collective unconsciousness of Chinese identity.

It is precisely the geopolitical space of colonial Hong Kong that engenders Jin Yong’s displacement of the one and only universal Chinese identity. Even though he embraces a nostalgic imagination of China, Jin Yong never attempts to culturally ghettoize Chineseness. In the world of “rivers and lakes” (jianghu), the Han people are always designated by Jin as a weak ethnic group that has to defend itself against the invasion of foreign tribes, and that eventually must face the fact that foreign tribes have become the dominating power in their land. Such designation symbolizes the colonial situation in Hong Kong, in which Hong Kong people had to confront the conflict between the East and West, personal and historical memory, and the ambivalence of cultural identity. However, his symbolic world of nation/ethnicity does not limit itself within the narrow binaries of domination/repression, right/wrong, or foreign/native. Instead, his heroes are rather problematic: they are lonely, homeless, fatherless, and ceaselessly wandering on an endless journey. Heroes such as Xiao Feng are recurrently tortured by identity crises, as a foreign person raised by the Han people, he cannot fully commit himself to either side of power, but is perpetually haunted by the intriguing question “Who am I?” Doesn’t the same question also consistently disturb Jin Yong and his followers, those who fit neither into the culture of their motherland nor the dominant culture of the colonizer?