RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS
Read “Reading Jin Yong in Translation, Part I” HERE.
Jin Yong, aka Louis Cha Leung-yung (1924-2018). Picture via.
▚ Jin Yong (author), John Minford (translator), The Deer and the Cauldron (1969–72) in three volumes, Oxford University Press, 2018. 1,574 pgs.
▚ Ann Huss and Jianmei Liu (editors), The Jin Yong Phenomenon, Cambria Press, 2007 (paperback reissue 2023), 354 pgs.
▚ John Christopher Hamm, Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts Novel, University of Hawaii Press, 2005. 360 pgs.
The timing was fortuitous. In 2018, just as the first volume of Jin Yong’s four-part epic Legends of the Condor Heroes arrived in English, Oxford University Press reissued his final novel, The Deer and the Cauldron (1969–1972), in the three-volume translation by John Minford that was originally published between 1997 and 2002.
As someone who knew Jin Yong only from the earlier series, I found reading The Deer and The Cauldron to be downright revelatory. Without it, I wouldn’t have known that Jin Yong was capable of a radically different mode than the straightforward heroic register he mastered in Legends of the Condor Heroes, or that the wuxia novel was flexible enough to contain a bold self-questioning, even self-parody; or that it could provide such a comfortable home for the literary archetype of the trickster. In Jin Yong’s centennial year, any reckoning with his fiction in English translation needs to acknowledge his wild carnivalesque swansong as much as the more conventional heroic fantasies that made him famous.
The Deer and the Cauldron takes place in the late 17th century. The trickster in question is “Trinket” Wei, the teenage son of a Yangzhou prostitute, illiterate but endowed with all the self-interested worldliness that comes of being brought up in a brothel. Through a series of picaresque misadventures, this fast-talking adolescent scamp eventually finds himself in Peking, where he not only ends up masquerading as a palace eunuch but also becomes a favourite of the young Manchu Emperor, Kang Xi. His native cunning and utter lack of scruples mean that Trinket can outwit all the venal palace courtiers at their own game, eventually acquiring wealth, power, and status beyond his wildest imaginings. At the same time, a series of twists leads to his being adopted by a band of rebels, the Triad Secret Society, who are plotting to overthrow Manchu rule. Trinket’s position inside the palace hierarchy makes him an ideal double agent for the society, but his split identity hardly stops there. Later in the narrative he will adopt the guise of a Shaolin monk and he will also be named the “White Dragon Marshal” of the fearsome Sect of the Mystic Dragon, a cult-like group of fanatics with their own lust for absolute power. Trinket’s ability to play all of these roles off of one another, for hundreds of pages and through a series of increasingly extravagant comic set pieces, testifies both to his own craftiness and his creator’s narrative ingenuity.
As John Christopher Hamm relates in his critical study Paper Swordsmen, early instalments of The Deer and the Cauldron met with incredulity among some of Jin Yong’s fans, who apparently refused to believe it was his work at all. Their indignation is understandable because the tone, the perspective, couldn’t be more different from the chaste, chivalrous world of Legends of the Condor Heroes. This is a work that quickly shows itself to be flagrantly disrespectful of the martial tradition Jin does so much to codify in the earlier books. As in some of the ruder Shaw Brothers horror films of the 1970s, a kind of slapstick Grand Guignol prevails, with dismemberments, decapitations, and even a castration played for laughs. In lieu of the elaborately ritualised martial artists’ code of honour, we get Trinket’s Falstaffian credo, “the famous Thirty-Sixth Strategy: when all else fails, beat a hasty retreat”. A running gag is that Trinket is too lazy to learn any of the moves that his Triad mentor, the dashing “Helmsman” Chen Jinnan, tries to teach him, and he notches his first significant triumph by stabbing an adversary in the back.
The irreverence very much extends to the verbal environment in which all of these shenanigans unfold. Scabrous invective enlivens Trinket’s dialogue and internal monologues alike, with “dickhead” and “rotten piece of shit” among some of his milder epithets (f-bombs drop as well). Other exclamations like “Go and salt your grannies’ fannies and sell them as pickled pork!” lead me to wonder how flavoursome the character’s unique argot must be in the original.
The pungent language, and the clear delight Jin Yong takes in it, are only part of what gives The Deer and the Cauldron such a unique linguistic texture. A clue that we’ve entered a special realm comes early on, when a fight breaks out in the bordello that is Trinket’s first home:
The Madame’s fleshy jowls quivered and she started mumbling frantic prayers to the Lord Buddha, and looking more than a little souffrante. (Book One, 55)
Connoisseurs of Chinese fiction in English translation may recognise that as the inimitable sound of John Minford and David Hawkes, the duo whose five-volume rendering of Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century novel The Story of the Stone (aka The Dream of the Red Chamber) for Penguin Classics has justifiably become a classic in its own right. A kind of linguistic promiscuity governs the Minford and Hawkes lexicon in Stone: I remember marvelling early in Volume One at a reference to “great actors or famous hetaerae”, both because of its audacity and because it felt self-evidently right in the context the translation had already established. Minford has stated that he follows a muse “with an unlimited capacity for transformation, invention and mischief”,[1] offering a hint to the maximalist ethos that guided him and Hawkes in both The Story of the Stone and The Deer and the Cauldron. (Minford is credited as the sole translator on The Deer and the Cauldron, but in his introductions to each volume he makes it clear that Hawkes, who also happened to be his father-in-law, was an active behind-the-scenes presence.)
As the gibes quoted earlier suggest, a lot of the mischief in The Deer and the Cauldron stems from how the trademark Minford and Hawkes capaciousness regularly extends to such a low-down register. Another choice example occurs in Book Three when Trinket, back in Yangzhou after years away, goes to visit his mother at her place of business, but has to wait when she turns out to be busy with a client:
“Hot popping momma!” he thought to himself. “I wonder what scabby old toad is poking my old mum tonight? Who’s my stepdad this time round?!” (Book Three, 238)
Needless to say, the eventual reunion is anything but a tender portrait of mother-son relations.
If you laugh at a passage like the above (I did), The Deer and the Cauldron is probably for you. But the moment also hints at how some aspects of the novel’s rough-and-tumble humour have aged better than others. Teenage Trinket’s induction into the pleasures of the flesh arrives in Book Two, at the hands of Princess Ning, the Manchu emperor’s spoiled, sadistic, tomboy younger sister; her playfully kinky early spats with Trinket, kung fu seasoned with S&M overtones, showcase Jin Yong at his most outrageous. All well and entertaining, but what’s disappointing is that by the end of Book Three, the princess will become just another one of Trinket’s many lady friends, all of whom are rendered increasingly docile, and characterless, by the time they enter what is effectively his harem. It’s especially dismaying to see Trinket’s plucky and resourceful aide de camp, Doublet, sidelined like this; a reader can hardly conceive of Lotus Huang in Legends of the Condor Heroes ever consenting to a similar fate. The women characters’ subjugation is a reminder, like the topless shots that punctuate some 1970s kung fu movies, that the era’s new freedoms could serve distinctly retrograde attitudes.
Sexual politics aren’t the only thing here that might discomfit present-day readers. Ethnic nationalism was already a subtext in Legends of the Condor Heroes, in which all of the good guys are Han Chinese and other peoples, no matter how sympathetic they seem at first, ultimately prove untrustworthy. In The Deer and the Cauldron this condescension reaches its nadir with the arrival of a group of clownish Tibetan monks whose fractured Chinese, not exactly hilarious the first time we hear it, is a gag that gets tediously overworked. A similar kind of jokey xenophobia prevails when Trinket later winds up in Russia, first as a captive and then as the emperor’s emissary, in the book’s two most cartoonish sequences.[2]
And yet: Even in this area, Jin Yong, like his hero, can catch a reader off guard. In the novel’s concluding scene, Trinket pays another visit to his mother at her place of work, “the House of Vernal Delights”, and implores her to reveal, at long last, who his father was. After first begging off (“How the hell should I know?”), she leaves him with a tantalising thought. His father might have been Han, Manchu, Mongol, Muslim, or Tibetan—a provocative twist that simultaneously redeems the novel from its less savoury aspects and validates Jeanette Ng’s claim in a 2021 essay for Tor.com that Jin Yong’s work “can sustain any number of seemingly contradictory interpretations”.[3]
Ng’s essay is a good starting point for any newcomer who might be curious about the political dimensions of both Jin Yong’s fiction and the wuxia genre. The topic is especially pertinent because for all its high spirits, The Deer and the Cauldron is unmistakably shadowed by real-world events. In a long prologue, the Manchu authorities are terrorising a community of righteous scholars over a supposedly seditious text. In the Second Book, Trinket is kidnapped by the frightening Sect of the Mystic Dragon, who are in thrall to an imperious if withered “Leader” and his ruthless, scheming wife, who assures her followers: “The Leader will always be good to any loyal Comrade. Total loyalty to the Leader is the only thing that matters.” To drive the point home, the Leader delights in pitting his younger, more ideologically driven minions against the older loyalists who have been with him for decades. It’s safe to assume that virtually everyone reading the novel at the time of its serialisation, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, would have understood the allusions to calamities unfolding not so far away.
Trinket will navigate around the threat posed by the Mystic Dragons, just as in the end he avoids being crushed by the pressure of his competing loyalties to the Manchu emperor and the Triad Secret Society. His peculiar kind of integrity remains intact, too, as he ultimately manages to stay true to all of the various people he’s close to, whatever their allegiances, while floating free of the larger entities in which they remain enmeshed. Today, readers in the know may detect in this artful dodging an ambiguity that almost eerily anticipates Jin Yong’s own public career in the decades after he gave up writing fiction. The success of that fiction allowed him to found several newspapers and journals, which in turn led to his becoming an increasingly lionised pillar of the Hong Kong establishment—a status ratified beyond all doubt when he was one of the city’s first doyens granted an audience with Deng Xiaoping (said to be a fan) in Beijing in 1981 and, later, when he helped draft the official policy for Hong Kong’s handover to the PRC. In any case, from the perspective of the 2020s, Trinket’s final escape into an anonymous private life untroubled by any political entanglements reads like this novel’s most poignant form of wish fulfilment.
On the surface, Trinket’s various contradictory personae would seem to suggest a schizoid personality; perhaps Jin Yong’s most audacious decision in The Deer and the Cauldron, and the reason the book had to be a comedy, is to leave them all cheerfully unreconciled. But if the character is allowed to contain multitudes, with even the question of his ethnic makeup left teasingly open-ended, that may be the culmination of a struggle that began all the way back in Jin Yong’s debut novel, The Book and the Sword (1955), whose hero was already wrestling with rival commitments.[4] We should note here that several commentators in The Jin Yong Phenomenon see a perspective unique to Hong Kong—the “floating city” of local writer Xi Xi’s allegory, famously poised between East and West—as key to Jin Yong’s handling of identity. For Jianmei Liu, that perspective “encourages and celebrates boundary crossing, spatial mobility, and hybrid identities,” and as for Trinket himself, “what is important is that he is a hybrid and can easily balance hybridity in society”.[5]
But we’ve come a long way from “Hot popping momma!” and hijinks in the palace boudoir. Jin Yong’s themes, which only seem to get more pertinent in the 21st century, offer fertile grounds for critical inquiry and debate as more of the novels become available in reliable print translations. On that note, it’s heartening to report that the first instalment of the second Condor Heroes cycle, from 1959–61, is already available in a rendering by Gigi Chang.[6] But the Jin Yong work I’m most eager to read is The Smiling, Proud Wanderer, from the later 1960s, in which apparently a more ambivalent portrayal of the jianghu and its code foreshadows the outright burlesque of The Deer and the Cauldron. In the 2017 critical anthology A New Literary History of Modern China, Petrus Liu calls The Smiling, Proud Wanderer “one of the finest works in the genre” and “a novel that explores the ways in which political labels . . . divide our world into normative values and fossilized beliefs, often with violent consequences”.[7] Doesn’t that sound like a wuxia novel more people should get to read right about now? Perhaps it’s not too much to hope that with time and further translations, a place will open in the Western literary consciousness for a writer whose kung fu is superior.
NOTES
1 John Minford, “Kungfu in Translation, Translation as Kungfu,” in The Question of Reception: Martial Arts Fiction in English Translation, edited by Ching-chih Liu (Hong Kong: Centre for Literature and Translation, Lingnan College, 1997).
[2] The weaknesses of these sections may not be all the author’s doing. In his Translator’s Note, John Minford acknowledges that Books Two and Three of The Deer and the Cauldron are abridgments of the Chinese original—which might account, in part, for the peculiarly weightless quality of the Russian interludes.
[3] Jeanette Ng, “The History and Politics of Wuxia,” Tor.com, June 29, 2021, https://www.tor.com/2021/06/29/the-history-and-politics-of-wuxia/.
[4] The same imprint of Oxford University Press published Graham Earnshaw’s translation of The Book and the Sword (a diverting fledgling effort) in 2004.
[5] Jianmei Liu, “Gender Politics in Jin Yong’s Martial Art Novels,” in The Jin Yong Phenomenon (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2007, reissued 2023), p. 181, 198.
[6] Jin Yong, A Past Unearthed (Return of the Condor Heroes 1), translated by Gigi Chang (London: MacLehose Press, 2023).
[7] Petrus Liu, “Jin Yong Publishes The Smiling, Proud Wanderer in Ming Pao,” in A New Literary History of Modern China, edited by David Der-wei Wang (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), p. 686.
How to cite: Tompkins, Jeff. “Hot Popping Momma!: Reading Jin Yong in Translation, Part II.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 31 May 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/05/31/jin-yong-ii.
Jeff Tompkins is a writer and zine artist in New York City. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and Words Without Borders, among other outlets. [All contributions by Jeff Tompkins.]