1. Yuen Wo-ping (1945–…) has choreographed over forty action films including Drunken Master (1978), Once Upon a Time in China (1991), The Matrix (1999, 2001, 2003), Kill Bill, Vols. 1 and 2 (2003, 2004), Kung Fu Hustle (2004), Fearless (2006), and The Banquet (2006). His work on Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon marked the beginning of a new phase in martial arts films. For more on the history of the martial arts film genre prior to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, see David Bordwell’s Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (2000).

2. David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1848–1911 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997), 21.

3. See Lydia Liu’s interrogation of “uncontaminated” native knowledge in Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity China, 1900 – 1937 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), 1–44.

4. Liu Zaifu’s term in his article “The Nobel Prize During These One Hundred Years and the Absence of Chinese Writers (Bainian nuobeier wenxue jiang he zhongguo zuojia de quexi),” (Spring, 1999).

5. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 243.

6. Ye Weilian criticizes the amnesia of Hong Kong writers who fail to reflect on their colonial experience. According to Ye, the colonizers of Hong Kong successfully made Hong Kong people rely on them by means of cultural production. “The real humanity, cultural connotations, and national consciousness of Hong Kong people were repressed and monopolized by the commercialization of Hong Kong with the help of colonial cultural production,” he says. “As a result, they degenerated to fetishism, which we can describe as a double distortion of humanity.” See his article “Colonialism: Cultural Production and Consumer Desire (Zhimin zhuyi: wenhua gongye yu xiaofei yuwang),” in Ye Weilian, Interpreting Modern: A Reflection on Postmodern Living Space and Cultural Space (Jiedu xiandai: houxiandai shenghuo kongjian yu wenhua kongjian de sisuo) (Taibei: Dongda, 1992), 146–165.

7. In the case of Althusser, his research helps us, or the “free subjects,” to see how ideology works, and consequently to find possibilities for resisting it. For Foucault, the main concern is “the polymophous techniques of power,” that is, “to locate the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourse it permeates … the paths that gives it access to the rare or scarcely perceivable forms of desire, how it penetrates and controls everyday pleasure.” Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), vol. 1, 11.