| Chapter : | Introduction |
The hybridity of Chinese identity is most evident in Jin Yong’s last novel The Deer and the Cauldron (Luding ji), a book that has been labeled an antiheroic, anti-martial arts novel. As the son of a prostitute, the protagonist Wei Xiaobao does not know who his father is, what nation he belongs to, or how to name his own existence. While he tries to search for his roots, his mother’s answer, which points to the possibility of fathers from as many tribes as he can imagine, actually symbolically deconstructs the purity of the origins of Chinese identity as well as conventional Han chauvinism. Because of his hybrid personal identity, he appears as an ambivalent person who vacillates between the Manchu emperor and the resistant group, between the court and the world of “rivers and lakes.” On the surface, he seems to be loyal to both sides, but this double loyalty at the same time also entails double betrayal. Jin Yong’s designation of Wei Xiaobao’s hybridity has thus compromised the authority of both dominant and resistant sides, not merely indicating the impossibility of his identity but denying a representation of an essence. The hybridity of Chinese identity is also represented by the language of Wei Xiaobao, which is pregnant with the “parodic imitation” of famous Chinese historical stories and Chinese idiom. We can see that the “native” Chinese knowledge in Jin Yong’s novels has been displaced through the act of parodic imitation. This displacement profoundly mocks the authenticity of Chinese language writing, unsettles the coherence of Chinese identity, and disturbs the utopian dream of the masculine martial arts world which signifies the building of a strong and independent nation, China.
Writing in Hong Kong, Jin Yong formulates hybrid Chinese identities with two goals in mind: to decenter Mainland China and to express a certain anxiety of utopian protest toward Western hegemony. Both goals exclude any form of essentialist nationalism. But Jin Yong’s project does not end here. By crossing boundaries at many levels, ethnic, territorial, national, ideological, linguistic, and so on, Jin Yong has constituted a special cultural space in which different Chinese communities have found their shared common home, even if this home is fictional and temporary. It is from this home that the remapping of Chineseness becomes possible.