Selling Punches and Puns: From Huo Yuanjia to Bruce and Jet Li

From heroes of the people to superstars of the world, Chinese Kung-fu artists have come light years away from the simple, incognito guardians of temples, officials and small villages of the past to dominate the world cinematic stage. They are a continuing, palpitating presence of the Chinese past in the global imaginary. The present lecture treating Hou Yuanjia, Bruce Lee and Jet Li, offers a historical way of viewing the nationalization and commodification of the Kung-fu master in twentieth century, diasporic China. Tracing the lives, films and fames of these artists suggests a compelling narrative by which we may witness a traditional Chinese cultural practice evolve into a nationalistic and world-wide, financial force of entertainment.

Huo Yuanjia (霍元甲)(1868-1910)

Huo’s story is the stuff made of legend. He was raised in a family of boxers, where his father made a living as a bodyguard. Fighting prowess, however, was not the only skill passed down through the Huo generations. Legend has it that Huo’s father turned down on principle the offers of all the Fat Cats and officials who petitioned his services. Instead, his father was satisfied to lend his services only to those who truly needed it: the poor and misfortunate. He was morally opposed to backing corrupt officials and merchants no matter how enticing the offer (a genuine superhero). Huo, would absorb this sincerity for the masses that would come to characterize his history. At first, though, his future as a martial artist was dim. His father refused to teach a son so obviously physically disadvantaged. The potential damage to the family reputation was too great. But constant, secret training done at night turned him into an adept Labyrinthine boxer (密宗拳).

After his childhood years, Huo moved to Shanghai, a major international port city during the late Qing, where he ardently promoted the martial arts and established an institution called the Jingwu Gym (1910). He was a frequent contestant in international martial arts bouts and was widely known as the defeater of the Japanese and the Occidental strongmen. One of his most famous matches was with a Russian who had moved into Tianjin selling his arts and claiming to be the world’s greatest fighter (1901). Rumors flew that he disparaged the Chinese and their meager martial arts; China and its people were sickly (病夫之国). Huo was enticed by the Westerner’s claims and challenged to take him on in the ring. The crowd mocked him as he approached the mat, but he paid no attention. When he met his Russian contender, he said proudly, “I’m sickly, Asian Huo Yuanjia come to measure up with you on the mat” (“我是‘东亚病夫’霍元甲，愿在这台上与你较量”). Huo proposed two conditions and one consequence to the Russian: (1) retract his claim to be the world’s best fighter, (2) publically apologize for insulting the Chinese empire, or (3) fight to the death. The Russian having heard of Huo’s fame accepted the conditions and snuck out of town. (There are other accounts of similar things happening with foreign challengers). Huo’s fame spread so widely that Qing rebel and Father of the Chinese Republic, Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) indicated Huo as the example of the health and vibrant spirit of the Chinese people: “If you want to make China strong, you must study the martial arts.” In his own hand, Sun wrote calligraphy that hung in Huo’s gym.

Huo's death occurred mysteriously, some believe at the hands of Japanese visitors to Shanghai. In 1910, a team of Judo masters came to Shanghai to test Huo and his students’ metal. They were soundly defeated. It was at a general banquet after the competition that Huo supposedly ingested poison. He died shortly thereafter. As a result of his exploits and fame, however, the martial arts experienced an explosion in interest. A decade after his passing, over 40 branches of his gym had been established with over 40,000 ascribed disciples.

Bruce Lee (李小龙)(1940-1973)

In posthumous evaluations of Bruce Lee’s life, all contributions find their ultimate significance in Lee’s success in publicizing the Chinese martial arts. Of all the things he was and the titles he was given (e.g. “One of the World’s Seven Best Fighters,” “Kung-fu King,” “The Emperor of Martial Arts,” etc.), the one that tied together all his other successes was the attribution that he was the most effective at promoting world-wide Kung-fu. Without that intense marketing and exposure, all other contributions might have remained personal gains, but they would have never ruptured the East/West divide on such a grand scale as he did in accelerating Hollywood’s affair with China and by spurring philosophical, intellectual and athletic interest in traditional, Chinese martial arts the world over. Thus, Bruce Lee’s expansive influence, largely taken for granted in its current pervasiveness, is a consequence of his relationship to the media, principally the videocamera. In many ways, Lee’s role as oriental object, and later director, of the international media blazed the trail for future Chinese actors, actresses and directors to assume prestigious heights in international cinema.

Lee’s first appearances on stage began long before his martial arts exploits. At the time of his birth in San Francisco in 1940, Lee’s father was counted among the most renowned actors of Hong Kong opera. Rumor has it that as an infant Lee was coddled around on stage. As a child growing up in Hong Kong, he would appear in numerous local films. In fact, before he left for the United States in 1959, he had already appeared in 20 productions. He was on course to becoming a famous actor like his father, but because of a scuffle with local gangs Bruce was forced to emigrate for his safety. While in the States, Bruce abandoned his dreams of becoming an actor and gave himself over to his childhood love for the martial arts. What had really began as a suggestion by his father to toughen up, became in his twenties a consuming passion while studying (or not studying) at the University of Washington in Seattle. The rest, as they say, is history. We look at Bruce Lee today for his interpretation of icon Huo Yuanjian in the film, Chinese Connection.

Materials:

Chinese Connection (1972)
Fearless (2006)

Questions:

(1) How is Kung-fu used as a tool for Chinese nationalism?
(2) Is the way Kung-fu used in these histories a means to modernization or the resistance of it?
(3) What is ironic about the use of cinema to lionize the power of a traditional Chinese art?

Links:

*Jet Li, Fearless (O'Brien Scene)

"Iron Women and Foxy Ladies"

Promoting women's liberation began many years before the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Three decades earlier (circa 1919), May Fourth intellectuals and writers had sought earnestly to reform the status of women and to disabuse the public mind with regards to their proper place in traditional society. Having suffered generations of emotional and sexual repression, female liberals took direct aim at relationships and passions as a root of their ills. Yang Zhihua, an author with multiple romantic partners, wrote the following in 1922 about disassembling the taboo of heterosexual relationships:

"First, when a man and a woman start to socialize by speaking and writing to each other, going to the parks together, or studying together, people jump to the conclusion that this young man and this young woman are in love, even though they are actually just friends. Consequently, some young men and women succumb to these outside pressures and speculations, go ahead and push themselves in to the 'business of love,' and then have sex. After that, they break up, agonize, and part ways. The whole process usually lasts a very short time because their relationship has the wrong foundation to begin with. This kind of love is caused by outside pressure, so it is not true love. It is not a personal choice, so it usually does not last long."

Another important voice in this movement, Ding Ling, raised quite a few eyebrows with her explicit depiction of female desire in her 1928, fictional memoires, Miss Sophie's Diary:

"I looked up and saw the corners of his soft, read, and deeply inset mouth. Could I tell anyone how I looked at those two delightful lips like a child longing for sweets? But I know that in this society I’ll never be allowed to take what I want to satisfy my impulses and my desires, even though it would do nobody else any harm."

These criticisms leveled at traditional Confucian propriety and the containment and control of female desire opened high society up to the possibility of alternatives to the traditional Chinese, female stereotype. Nonetheless, the majority of Chinese women (particularly the illiterate) would gain little from Yang and Ding's kind of liberation.

With the victory of the Communists over the Nationalists in 1949, Mao and his party sought a more pragmatic and far-reaching type of women's liberation that would produce more tangible results. A shift in focus from individual sexuality to passion for one's work and country became the avenue of emancipation for women seeking to break out of traditional modes. They were given the material means to be socially and financially independent.

A feminist and Chinese scholar, Tonglin Lu, has doubts that that kind of liberation has actually freed women from their ancient restraints:

Up to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the situation of Chinese women after the May Fourth movement in 1919 and since the socialist revolution in 1949 can be summarized by two pictures: Nora leaving her husband’s house and the white-haired girl at the exit of her grotto. The former symbolized individual freedom in the bourgeois revolution; the latter, the liberation of the labor class in the socialist revolution. The two images raise the same question: "What can a woman do after abandoning, or being saved from, her previous slavery?" (4)

In Lu’s analysis, she can only be reabsorbed into ever newer incarnations of patriarchal notions of salvation that engender inequality (3). Communism is the new face of patriarchal repression, in her opinion.

A new generation of young Chinese women rushing to maturity in a contemporary age of economic prosperity might see things quite differently from Lu, however (see reactions to the White Haired Girl in the 21st century)


Readings:
Mao's Red Book (Ch. 31, Women)
Historic Liberation of Chinese Women (1994)

Questions:
(1) Why were women being liberated?
(2) From what were they being liberated?
(3) What do you perceive as ulterior motives for the liberation of women in modernity?

Links:
*Stefan Landsberger's Iron Women and Foxy Ladies
*White Haired Girl (1950, film version)
*Jing Haozhou's 2003 evaluation of the Communisty Party and Women's Liberation
* The Status of Women (Beijing White Papers, June 1994)

Secondary references:
*Tonglin Lu. “Introduction.” Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society. Ed. Tonglin Lu. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1-22.

Insanity: A Diagnosis of China

Starting with the Opium Wars (1839-1860) and continuing through the Boxer Rebellion (1891-1901) and the aftermath of World War I (1918-1919), China's Qing rulers and numerous warlords were made again and again to suffer the injustices of foreign incursions and reperations. As an ancient civilization firmly rooted in its traditional forms of science and government, China was unfit and unable to match the diplomatic, militaristic and economical forces of the West and the nearby, modern upstart Japan. As a result, under this cloud of foreign repression a fleet of leaders and intellectuals rushed to modernize China materially and culturally in the opening decades of the twentieth century.

Lu Xun, a leader in this cultural force to modernize, led a life that would serve as a template for a generation of young authors seeking to make their mark on a new Chinese literature. Lu Xun was born in 1881 at the end of the decaying Qing dynasty (1644-1912) into an important family, the Zhous. As a young man, he, along with his siblings, aspired to positions of high repute in government and society. Because conditions in China did not offer good prospects for education, Lu Xun studied abroad. In 1904, Lu Xun enrolled in Japan's Sendai Medical Academy where he hoped to learn the science of medicine and bring much needed reform to the backwards practice of traditional Chinese medicine. While in Japan, though, he became disillusioned with the power of the sciences to heal his peoples' ills. He tells the story of how he converted to pursuing the arts as a young man witnessing the humiliation of his people:

"I do not know what advanced methods are now used to reach microbiology, but at that time lantern slides were used to show the microbes; and if the lecture ended early, the instructor might show slides of natural scenery or news to fill up the time. This was during the Russo-Japanese War, so there were many war films, and I had to join in the clapping and cheering in the lecture hall along with the other students. It was a long time since I had seen any compatriots, but one day I saw a film showing some Chinese, one of whom was bound, while many others stood around him. They were all strong fellows but appeared completely apathetic. According to the commentary, the one with his hands bound was a spy working for the Russians, who was to have his head cut off by the Japanese military as a warning to others, while the Chinese beside him had come to enjoy the spectacle. Before the term was over I had left for Tokyo, because after this film I felt that medical science was not so important after all. The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they may be, can only serve to be made examples of, or to witness such futile spectacles; and it doesn't really matter how many of them die of illness. The most important thing, therefore, was to change their spirit, and since at that time I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I determined to promote a literary movement" ("Preface," Call to Arms)

Because all matter of cures and technologies could not reform the spirit of the Chinese, Lu Xun decided to effect change via the arts. The rest of his life would be spent teaching at a number of universities, heading up and editing fledgling literary journals and institutions and writing a mass of influential short stories and essays. Two of his most famous short stories appearing in the collection a Call to Arms (1922) exaggerate and satirize the plight of a modern China in tension with its traditional past.

Readings:
Diary of a Madman
The True Story of Ah Q

Questions:

(1) In what ways is the figure of Ah Q a pun on the unreformed, pre-modern Chinese spirit?
(2) How are the men who escape their cultural pasts depicted in both stories?
(3) What effect do frames/introductions by secondary narrators add to the tales?

Links:
* Ah Q
* 阿Q 外传
* Insanity and Criminality in Contemporary China

Secondary references:
* Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage Press, 1988.
*Zhang Jingyuan. Psychoanalysis in China: Literary Transformations, 1919-1949. Ithaca: Cornel UP, 1992.

Monkeys Rule

Journey to the West, or The Monkey King, is a late Ming, fictitious creation based on the journey of the historical figure Xuanzang (602-664CE) to India during the Tang dynasty (618-907CE). At the time, Xuanzang was a monk at Jingtu Temple in the capital of Chang'an. Disheartened by social corruption and the poor quality of translations of Buddhist scriptures, Xuanzang took it upon himself to travel to India to learn the doctrine directly and eventually provide superior replacements for the flawed Chinese canon. With the Emperor's blessing and the help of other Buddhists, Xuanzang made the treacherous journey across the barren deserts and steppes of central and western China. His journey lasted 17 years, from 629-647CE, during which he faced numerous hardships, visited important religious sites in India and studied at the ancient Indian university at Nalanda.

Popular stories of Xuanzang's travels cropped up during the Song and Yuan dynasties (960-1368CE). Finally, at the end of the Ming (1368-1644CE), novelist and poet Wu Cheng'en (~1500-58CE) combined all these legends, adding to them his own allegorical, literary and political sensibilities to form a summa of the legends about Xuanzang's journey. Like the other great novels of the late Ming and high Qing, Wu's work was a daring linguistic project, taking up the vernacular instead of the classical language to tell his story. For centuries, in fact, the authorship of the text was in doubt because its author elected to remain anonymous in order to avoid censure for having written in dialect. Journey to the West, like Dream of the Red Chamber, is a work not only read for its surface narratives but for the political and religious meanings that subtend it.

Wu's story contains 100 chapters that recount the perilous journeyings of Tripitaka (Xuanzang) and his four spectacular companions/gaurdians (Monkey, Piggie, Sandy and Dragon) in the episodic manner of Arthurian legend. Assaulted by ghosts, goblins, beasts, often trials programmatically arranged by the gods, the pilgrims are in constant danger but always miraculously pull through. In the end, Tripitaka makes it to India and receives the Buddhist scriptures from the living Buddha atop Vulture Peak.

Readings:
Journey to the West (see ANGEL)

Questions:

(1) How do you see the Monkey King functioning in the story?
(2) Where are there passages where soci0-religious criticisms may be being made?
(3) How is the tale an allegory for the human soul?

Secondary references:
*
*

Palace Politics

The Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone, written by Cao Xueqing in the 18th century, is one of the "Four Great Qing Novels." In fact, it is considered the most important of the four and the culmination of classical Chinese novels. Princeton sinologist Andrew H. Plaks encapsulates the importance and universal scope of the work:

"Nearly all readers of the Dream of the Red Chamber--both native and foreign--come away with the impression that what they have experienced in the lengthy span from cover to cover is a comprehensive view of the entire civilization of the Imperial China. This sense of cultural completeness may be largely attributed to the simple fact that the novel presents at exceedingly close range the day-to-day life of a bygone age of glory--and there is little doubt that this aspect is responsible for the degree of emotional attachment with which the work has been treasured by two centuries of readers." (11)

Cao's work is unique in its sheer bredth, taking in the whole sweep of Chinese history, mythology, religion and arts. Having written the novel in the vernacular Beijing dialect, Cao also used the work to legitimize linguistic forms of literary expression other than Classical Chinese, used almost exclusively in the practice of the high literary arts.

The novel records the daily lives of important members of the Rongguo and Ningguo Houses of the Jia Clan, one of the most illustrious clans at court at the time. The history of the fall of these houses follows the narrower narrations of the lives of over thirty main characters and four hundred minor ones. Jia Baoyu, a precious Genji like boy, is the heir of his family and the main character of the novel. His emotional entanglement in love affairs and the mythic nature of his birth and end provide some of the novel's most poignant and engaging episodes.

Like the great works of the Western literary tradition (e.g. the Commedia, The Canterbury Tales, the Quixote, etc.), The Dream of the Red Chamber has accumulated centuries of commentaries and criticisms. The study of the novel in fact has its own designation called "Redology." Four schools of criticism have grown up around it and have debated insoluble historical and literary cruxes for centuries. Important themes that have occupied and intrigued researchers and readers have been the novel's autobiographical, social, archetypal and politically allegorical elements. In reading some passages from the novel, we will focus on some of the social and archetypal aspects of the text.

Readings:
Dream of the Red Chamber (see ANGEL)

Questions:
(1) What are some of the mythic and religious elements informing the story?
(2) How do these elements seem to function in the convoluted realities of this prestigious clan?
(3) What do we learn about social relations between classes and genders during the Qing from in this text?
(4) What some to be some of the inherent tensions between fiction and history in the tale?

Secondary references:
*Plaks, Andrew H. Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.
* Xiao Chi. The Chinese Garden as Lyric Enclave: A Generic Study of The Story of the Stone. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001.
*Alexander des Forges, "From Source Texts to 'Reality Observed:' The Creation of the Author in 19th Century Chinese Vernacular Fiction," CLEAR 22 (Dec. 2000): 67-84.

So I Married an Axe Murderer

So I Married an Axe Murderer

This unit introduces what is commonly thought of as lightweight literature: Chinese ghost stories. Not until the twenteith century has ficiton of this nature even been considered a remotely respectable form of literature. That means that for centuries in China the writing of ghost stories and their enjoyment were almost entirely an unrespected, diversional activity, the indulgence of innocent children, bored youth and weery scholars. This however does not imply that they were not well crafted or culturally significant. Quite to the contrary. Ghost stories were an imaginative realm of the Chinese mind that gave vent to fears, desires, angsts and fantasies too often smothered in reality by taboos and propriety. They were often elegantly penned by the hand of learned literati. Furthermore, they contain much in the way of contemporary, social criticism and satire. Their role in the development of modern Chinese literature is significant (v.s. David Der-wei Wang, "Second Haunting").

Ghost stories in China are not strictly speaking horror stories, as understood in the Western sense. As a genre that grew out of taoist hagiographies (tales of magical sages), ancestor worship, folk religions and old stories, the tales involve the occult and fantastical but not necessarily the gory or terrifying. Their most acclaimed narrators in China come out of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912): Pu Songling and Zhi Yun.

Readings:
Pu Songling's Strange Tales (see ANGEL)
Zhi Yun's Sketches from a Cottage (see ANGEL)

Questions:
(1) What are unique about these ghost stories?
(2) What social issues do these tales seem to tackle?
(3) Locate some of the stories' stock characters. What is significant about their function?

Links:
*Tang Menglai's Preface

Secondary references:
* Chang, Chun-shu and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang. Redefining History: Ghosts, Spritis, and Human Society in P'u Sung-ling's World, 1640-1715. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998.
* Zeitlin, Judith T. Historian of the Strange: Pu Songlin and the Chinese Classical Tale. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.
*David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei. Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005.

My Zen Teacher is Nuts!

My Zen Teacher is Nuts!

During the Tang dynasty, the foreign, import religion, Buddhism, became officially recognized and patronized by the imperial courts. Shen Xiu, the face of Buddhism for a time and founder of what is know historically as the Northern School of Zen, was strongly supported by aristocrats and nobility. In the shadow of of this public respendlence, however, another breed of Buddhism began to grow, and, very appropriately, from the unlikeliest of sources. Hui Neng, an illiterate fuel-wood peddler, and his energetic pupil Shen Hui began challenging the meaning and doctrines of prevailing Buddhist beliefs and practices by their emphasis on the religious significane of mundane, human experiences. According to this radical strand of thought, formal practices such as meditaiton and absolute quietude were unnescessary, even troublesome , auxiliaries to the perfectly adequate activities of everyday life in realizing one's Buddha-nature. The renowned sinologist Wing-tsit Chan summarizes the nature of Hui Neng and Shen Hui's poistion, named the Southern School (what would prevail as the as the orthodox Chan or Zen school), in the following way:

"Everything other than the cultivation of the mind, such as reading scriptures, making offerings to the Buddha, reciting His name, joining the monastic order, are regarded as unnescessary. The total effect is to minimize, if not to wipe out, the whole Buddhist organziation, creed, and literature and to reduce Buddhism to a concern with one's mind alone" (A Source Book 428)

Just how was this minimization brought about? The history is complex and the methods are sundry, but the prinicple is singular: to attach oneself to a master who will disabuse you of all attempts to attain Buddhahood. This seems perfectly counter-intuitive and counter-productive. It is. But because the Southern School believed that what was necessary for enlightenement was a stripping down of Buddhist practices, the methods tended to seem wildely irreligious and irreverent. This was meant to free the mind from the bonds of desire and logic in pursuing Buddhist ideals. A whole library of literary works cropped up documenting the surreal teachings and strange encounters between Zen masters and their pupils. Here is a typically beffudling example from the classic the Blue Cliff Record (碧巖錄)(1125CE). These short, pithy accounts are known as gong an (koan). They were purported to have lead many a lucky pupil to enlightenment:

"Nansen told Joshu what had happened, and asked him for his view. Joshu thereupon took his sandals, put them upon his head and went away. Nansen said, 'If you had been there, I could have spared the cat.'"

Where is the doctrine? Where is the logic?... Exactly.

Readings:
(1) Platform Sutra (see ANGEL)
(2) Records of the Teachings of Master Yi Xuan (see ANGEL)

Questions:
(1) What purpose do you see obsurdity having in religious experience?
(2) What is the logic of irrationality?
(3) How would this kind of teaching change the image of a sacred, religious figure like the Buddha?

Links:
*Blue Cliff Record , The Gateless Gate , Book of Equanimity
*A Finger Pointing to the Moon (Bruce Lee)
*Steve Carrell babbling

Secondary sources:
* Wing-Tsit Chan. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963.

* Bill Porter. A Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits. Mercury House, 2009.

* Edward Burger's documentaries on Buddhist hermits

* Zhou Yu. Bai yun shen chu 白云深处 (Deep Dwelling in the Clouds). Jilin Publishers, 2010.