WORD SMITH
The martial arts novels by Louis Cha (Jin Yong) resonated across genres, generations and borders, and inspired a stream of blockbuster films, writes Mathew Scott.
The works of the author Louis Cha Leung-yung have for generations opened up minds to the intricacies that lie within the world of martial arts and to the extent its boundaries can be stretched through action, intrigue, romance and even spirituality.
Writing under the pen name Jin Yong, Cha produced 14 novels, which have sold more than 100 million copies, starting with The Book and the Sword in 1955 and culminating in the 1972 release of The Deer and the
Cauldron. In between came The
Legend of the Condor Heroes, the first of the Condor trilogy, considered a classic of the wuxia genre.
Cha passed away on Oct 30, at 94, after a long fight with liver cancer. Tributes to the man flooded in from around the world and people in all walks of life. These tributes reflected just how far and wide Cha’s influence had reached and the impact his novels had on a crosssection of Chinese cinema.
Those honoring Cha’s life and times included President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang, while closer to home Hong Kong SAR Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor expressed “deep sorrow” over the author’s passing.
“A learned man and an acclaimed writer of martial arts novels, Professor Cha’s works inherited the tradition of Chinese classics with the integration of history and culture, and are very popular among the Chinese in various parts of the world. His works had been widely adapted into television serials and films, contributing significantly to the promotion of Chinese culture,” Lam’s statement read.
Wong Jing, one of the most commercially successful filmmakers Hong Kong has produced, believes Cha played a vital role in expanding people’s minds, especially when it came to the nuances of romance. Wong began reading Cha’s works as a child in the 1960s when they were serialized in the Ming Pao newspaper that the writer founded.
“His visions of love were like a breath of fresh air and very epochal in the 60s, when society was relatively conservative, yet he already had these views that people didn’t even dare to conceive,” says Wong. “So even today, you won’t see his love views as dated.”
Among the more than 100 films Wong has produced are
Royal Tramp and Royal Tramp II, box-office hits back in 1992 and films that showcased the talents of Stephen Chow and Brigitte Lin, who took Cha’s characters and inventive action set-pieces, and showed they could even be played mostly for laughs.
“Ever since childhood, he has been a respected Chinese martial arts novelist and legend to me,” says Wong. “So much so that when I became a director, being able to make movie versions of his work was naturally a dream come true.”
Wong Kar-wai remembers
Other filmmakers have also taken Cha’s works and pushed them to wonderful extremes at times.
Art-house auteur Wong Karwai and his former collaborator Jeffrey Lau used The Legend of the Condor Heroes as the basis
for their lyrical Ashes of Time
(1994), but sharpened their focus on to romance that was longed for and lost, with Leslie Cheung and Lin (again) shining. They also somehow found time to put together an accompanying parody piece — The Eagle
Shooting Heroes — with Lau
as director.
Wong Kar-wai produced his re-cut “redux” version of the film in 2008, and following a screening for press at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea that year, he explained how much trouble the film had been to make as he strove to live up to the lofty standard of Cha’s work.
On hearing of Cha’s passing, Wong used social media to post a heart-felt tribute to a man he has long claimed as an inspiration.
“I have heard people say, when you can’t have it again, the only thing you can do is to keep yourself from forgetting … Thank you! Mr Jin Yong.”
There was a nod to Cha’s influence in Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love (2000) and
2046 (2004), with Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s character shown as a writer of martial arts novels and a romantic at heart. Chow also acknowledged the writer’s influence in his box-office smash
Kung Fu Hustle (2004) with a sneaky nod to the main characters in The Legend of the Condor Heroes.
Other filmmakers to use Cha’s work as source material and inspiration include Tsui Hark (Swordsman and Swordsman II) and Ann Hui (The Romance
of Book and Sword), while acclaimed director Johnnie To Kei-fung got his big breakthrough as a scriptwriter for the wildly popular TV adaptation of The Legend of the Condor Heroes
in 1983.
Kiki Fung, head of Asian programming at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, seconds a common consensus that the attraction for filmmakers has been just how much there is always at play within Cha’s work, and when it came to martial arts the author had quite simply “perfected the form”.
“What set him apart were his sophisticated mediations on the morals and ethics of action heroes, and philosophical musings of the predominant principles in Chinese society: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism,” says Fung. “I should add that his depiction of romances is just as captivating as that of action. It is in this sense that his novels are at once classical and modern.
“It is fair to say that most directors of martial arts films would have been consciously or unconsciously influenced by Cha.”