Ishmael
Here's Yue Fei the source of Kingston's tattoos for Mulan, as translated by Sir T.L. Yang, the Chief Justice Hong Kong . There's a biblio at the end,
It may be a waste of my time, but somebody CA ... a CA writer has to stand up for the Chinese children's story and the Chinese story. You're right no CA writer will touch the Chinese children's story.
Frank Chin
Frank,
You're wasting your time, because American academics don't give a flying f- and the ethnic ones aren't all that interested in literature; they get degrees merely as a way of joining the middle class.
I've tried to defend myself from charges of misogyny for years even pointing to article and texts where black feminists agree with me( but the white feminists who are pushing minority feminists don't care about that- feminists who are silent about how white men treat them- they see joining in an attack on us as the cheapest way to express solidarity with the minority sisters who accuse them of excluding them from the movement.
Ishmael
•
There used to be an English course for college students deprived of what they needed to know about their own language. English 1-A was designed to bring students the knowledge and ability to manipulate English up to the minimum level required by college English courses. In English 1-A , deprived students learned, among other things, the importance of the European and American children’s stories like JACK AND THE BEANSTALK, CINDERELLA, THE UGLY DUCKLING.
This is the minimum knowledge of Chinese children’s stories that should bek required for students of Asia-American writing.
It’s been 35 years since Maxine Hong Kingston’s THE WOMAN WARRIOR spread a lie American white racists found sweet. A lie about Mulan, the heroine of the children’s BALLAD OF MULAN bearing the tattoos of Yue Fei on her back. A few Chinese complained that her Mulan was an offensive fake. But the white press using Ornamental Orientals and “feminists” as “reviewers” praised the book for revealing the misogyny at the heart of Chinese culture.
After being listed as an expert of Chinese folk culture in one encyclopedia of American Literature, after the other, and fooling at least four American universities into exposing their racism by awarding her honorary degrees, she confessed in a 1986 interview with Kay Bonetti, that she racistly changed the facts of THE BALLAD OF MULAN for feminist purposes:
Oh, yes, the myths I change. I change them a lot, and I’ve been criticized for that by traditionalists
[“Traditionalists” her Orwellian Newspeak for “Ugh! Chinese!” ]
because they
[ the Chinese ]
don’t understand that I have no intention of recording myths. I mean, I’m not an archivist
[Orwellian Newspeak for “Ugh Chinese!” ].
I want to give you an example of the myths that I’ve changed. When the woman warrior has the words carved on her back, that’s actually a man’s story. It’s about a man named Yüech Fei who had a vow carved his back by his mother. Now, I took that and gave that to a woman. I gave a man’s myth to a woman because it’s part of the feminist war that’s going on in THE WOMAN WARRIOR, to take the men’s stories away from them and give the strength of that story to a woman. I see that as an aggressive storytelling act, and it’s also part of my own freedom to play with myth. and I do feel that myths have to be changed and played with all the time, or they die.
She sounds like Ford talking about Mercury the car, not Mercury the myth.
The problem with doing all that is the way to inform people and at the same time play around with them
[ the people or the myths?]
I think at that point I decided not to tell anybody the original stories, and then tell them how I played around with them because I just wanted to get on with the story, and I just figured, well, let the scholars
[the, ugh! Chinese!]
figure it out later,
[She doesn’t sound like Ford, the John who saw the whole story. We know THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE and agree with the editor who burns his notes and says. “I’ve learned that when the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.” But we’ve seen what Jimmy Stewart saw after shooting his little pistol and we saw what John Wayne saw. John Ford was out RASHOMONing Kurosawa’s great movie RASHOMON. He was giving a tip of his hat to Kurosawa by playing with the form and style based on RASHOMON. Lee Marvin, the Liberty Valance of the piece is Toshiro Mifune, the electrifying bandit throwing sparks and spit from RASHOMON]
but they’ve actually attacked me for not sticking with the story.
Actually Kingston’s “they” attacking her are really just me. Her counting me as many is being too generous. I am the one Chinese traditionalist, the one Chinese archivist, the one Chinese scholar, out of all the Chinese-American writers of the last 35 years that calls Kingston, a white racist fake.
Kingston admits using and violating one hero to change another. White racists are protecting her lies against me by presenting only Ornamental Orientals boohooing about being born to a people so immoral they have to die, as the “real Asian-American writers.”
White Americans love the people that admit they’re inferior. I am dismissed as “jealous” by Amy Tan and writers in white favor, and banned from the teaching of Asian American lit.
What do I pose, jealously against the Ornaments? The anonymous text of THE BALLAD OF MULAN and GENERAL YUE FEI a hero that the white racist Americans have never heard of. I pose the Chinese children’s story and the hero she admits wronging, as the proof of Kingston faking Mulan.
Whites reading this see nothing wrong with not wanting to soil Kingston’s prose creation of Mulan with anything like the text of THE BALLAD OF MULAN or traditional texts or the archived text, or the only Chinese text capable of being scholarly. Why limit her creativity? If she wants to say George Washington was tattooed the night before he went to fight in the French and Indian War, that’s her right, right?
THE WHITE WARRIOR a girl’s autobiography of dreams of George was published in China, and a hit! THE WHITE WARRIOR came to America looking to be published. I like to think, American publishers would cut the Chinese version of George Washington down for not sticking with the facts of George Washington’s story. Or would they buy Kingston’s Mulan argument that “myths have to change or they die?” Would the same Whites that can understand Chinese forgetting who Mulan was, also understand that Washington had to be tattooed or his myth would die? Think of all the American hero’s that can use Max’s refreshing tattoo treatment! Custom worded Revenge Tattoos. Choose your language. Choose your script. Choose your enemy.
Kingston had freed the know-nothing priests of sociology from knowing what they were talking about. So AAS after AAS raged against what they didn’t know. Ugh! Asia and ugh! Chinese! Anyone speaking for the Chinese children’s story and Chinese lit was a misogynist. Kingston was the first woman with the feminist truth about China in 1976. Everything the Chinese had written in history and lit, was a man’s lie, and should be spat out of memory and washed out of the mouth. Kingston revived the 19th Century Missionary stereotype of rateyed Chinaman, licking their teeth and cruelly fingering and molesting the depths of women. She was second only to Jade Snow Wong in giving that stereotype an authentic Chinatown tremble.
Asia was a sociological misogynist fact, based on Kingston. The “Asia” of “Asian-American Studies” was pure theory. Asian lit was removed from Asian-American lit. Asian lit was no longer a part of Asian-American lit. Starting with an Asian blank slate and their racist dogma of sociology, high school and college AAS programs enshrined Kingston as the truth of Far Mulan and my insistence that Mulan was the first poetic embodiment of male-female equality and not Kingston’s victim of traditional parental abuse, was dismissed as a “personal attack” on Kingston and AAS’s reason for being.
And so it is.
Back to literature based on text. In RASHOMON, have you noticed the temple where the three men take shelter from the rain, and have a different eye on the same event, is the same dark shape of the railroad station in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. Too bad that both Kurosawa and Ford are gone. Did either of them have a sense they talked to each other in the film’s they made?
Kingston’s WOMAN WARRIOR raised the question of Mulan and were there tattoos in the BALLAD or did Kingston carve them on Mulan’s back? It was a question every Chinese-American writer should have been able to answer. They could tell the difference between a real and a fake Chinese children’s story, couldn’t they?
Some men of literature like John Goshert, wonder why I am the only writer banned by AAS. The answer exists in two works. But even he ignores the texts that answer his question and compares me to a woman of a markedly different culture and issues. She wages an argument based on her idealism. Mine is based on text.
Two texts of 2 works of known Chinese lit that Kingston has admitted were the source of her Mulan. THE BALLAD OF MULAN and GENERAL YUE FEI. My difference with Kingston is the differences between the real Mulan of THE BALLAD, the embodiment of sexual equality on the battlefield in war and in peace, on the farm, and Kingston’s freakily tattooed victim that whites like. She admits she took the story of the tattoos from Yue Fei. She’s proud of having fucked with the facts of Chinese history. I think I’ve proved she’s a white racist hoax in American literary history. But Goshert’s forgotten the question that began his piece and manages to avoid throwing any light on any question related to me or the Sociological- AAS advocacy of Kingston’s fake Mulan.
Akira Kurosawa and John Ford are not sociologists. They directed with the eyes of a poet and shot through the twisted minds of their characters. Their stories of the real and the fake turned on an open mouthed and glaring likable bad man, the bandit Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin’s Liberty Valance who everyone but themselves sees as bad. The people writing about Asian-America can’t hold the real and the fake, on the same screen. The Christians in disguise can’t tolerate lesser cultures having books. Every Chinese children’s story published by a New York house is a Chinese Red Riding Hood or a Chinese Cinderella, always a Chinese story self-consciously like a familiar white story. Never a favorite Chinese children’s story among the Chinese. Always a story pre-told by whites. Kingston could not tell her white readers that her Mulan was a temper tantrum against a Chinese name. Surprisingly Sociology and AAS forgave her.
•
If you haven’t noticed, Chinese-America has been taken over by Sociology. Not History, not Literature. And unfortunately, Sociology defines Asian American Studies as taught at the big three Yale, Princeton and Harvard in the East to the U. Michigan in the Midwest to the multi-campused University of California and Stanford in the west. And even AAS at San Francisco State U is founded on the fake science of Sociology.
History and Literature can handle the differences between the myths concocted by love or hate of, say George Washington and the facts of Washington’s life that Sociology can’t.
Take the story of GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE CHERRY TREE intended to emphasize the positive, not negative, qualities of The Father of His country to American children.
"George,'' said his father, "do you know who has killed my beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden?''
This was a hard question to answer, and for a moment George was staggered by it, but quickly recovering himself he cried:
"I cannot tell a lie, father, you know I cannot tell a lie! I did cut it with my little hatchet.''
The anger died out of his father's face, and taking the boy tenderly in his arms, he said:
"My son, that you should not be afraid to tell the truth is more to me than a thousand trees! Yes - though they were blossomed with silver and had leaves of the purest gold!''
This story is always acknowledged to have been made-up by M. L. Weems, based on his American love of Washington and not based on fact. There is the mythical love of Washington’s believers, and there are the facts of the Washington’s life.
One of Kingston’s literary axioms is myths have to change or die. Weem’s told a story of Washington’s honesty that wasn’t true to encourage white kids to tell the truth? Why hasn’t Sociology changed the text of the myth of Jesus Christ? If they can change THE BALLAD OF MULAN they can change the myth of Christ or Hitler before the myths die, right?
Kids learn the difference between the facts of a person’s life, as told in the histories, and a romantic story based on history. If a Chinese historian was wrong in any of his facts, he was killed. Every Chinese knows the story of Sima Qian (Ssuma Chien) (C.145 bc) the Grand Historian who judged the facts of a battle, against the emperor. The Emp couldn’t argue with the facts, but demanded Sima to change his opinion, or have his balls cut off. He was expected to commit suicide rather than suffer the humiliation of having his nuts lopped off. Sima closed his eyes, suffered his manhood getting offed, became friendless and continued to write honest histories, including the RECORDS OF THE HISTORIAN.
Chinese-American writers either know the Chinese children’s story or they don’t. Those that know the stories, either because they had a Chinese childhood, or they learned the 100 Stories and the heroic tradition, to teach their children and save them the ignorance of those that don’t, are Asians. Those that don’t and dignify their ignorance as white approval, are white racists or, White Ornamental Orientals. The Ornamentals have killed the Chinese children’s story to please the whites. All their knowledge is pre-known by whites.
Asian American Studies is really Ornamental Oriental Studies because they teach an invention of sociology, the AA “identity problem,” and ban the teaching of the Chinese story. The identity problem is simply the missing Chinese children’s story in the Chinese-American childhood, and experience.
Kingston has accurately identified the problem and the solution. All AAS has to do to get rid of the “identity problem” is teach the Chinese children’s story. Jeff Yang the publisher editor of the short lived white racist mag A. Magazine, sloughed off the importance of the Chinese children’s story, as the stories known by criminals. I dare say Billy the Kid and Paul Newman’s Billy the Kid, in THE LEFT HANDED GUN knew JACK AND THE BEANSTALK, as did John Wayne, and Pres. Bill Clinton and all Americans from embarrassing crackpots played by Timothy Carey to the exalted silver tops of Washington.
Why all the excuses to withhold the teaching of the Chinese children’s story from the Chinese THE BALLAD OF MULAN? Why deny the Chinese children’s story exists? In 1976 before the children’s stories of the world became available on the Internet, AAS could get away with being stupid, but no more. It’s a new day.
WHERE HAVE THE CHINESE STORIES GONE?
The Chinese children’s story begins with the creation myth of POON GOO and NUR WAW. Two separate stories. One: The giant Poon Goo stops in space, dies and his body parts become the sun, moon and earth.
Two: Nur Waw a woman arrives on Poon Goo’s body and creates the six animals that serve humankind, then creates the humankind that populate the earth.
The child’s sex wakes up. At twelve the accumalation of experience and knowledge pumped into the child by the first trip round the 12 animals of the zodiac pops the child into a new state of being as Confucius plainly says will happen again and again, and if you live long enough again and again.
The 12 year old will see that the two stories are really one. Poon Goo is a man. Nur Waw his sister is a woman. If they weren’t brother and sister Poon Goo and Nur Waw wouldn’t be a creation myth. Man and woman, two parts of creation and two parts of the Taoist two part circle.
You are born into a world of war, you are born in war, you’ll die in war. Only your mother and father cared when you were born, and only your family will care when you die.
American whites rage Mao said “feeding the people was the first priority,” and snap, “Do any of your stories feed any people in war?”
“Yes,” I answer.
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THE RABBIT AND THE JELLYFISH
A memory of being a five year old girl
as told by
KYUNG-JA LEE
THIS IS THE STORY of the only fairy tale my father ever told me.
I grew up right after the Korean War. Everybody was so poor. Korea was still virgin to Santa Claus chocolate, banana, and chewing gum. And we didn't have any toys. This was the time when my father decided to sell roasted yams. He took an abandoned steel drum, and layered it with charcoal. And he put in three grills. The bottom section was for the least cooked yams. Middle section for little cooked yams. Top section for the yams that are already cooked. And he got himself a pushcart with two handles and two wheels on it. And he put the steel drum on it. He would push it around on the streets and he call out, "Roasted yams! Roasted yams!"
And it was a wonderful thing to eat in winter, because the roasted yams would warm your cold hands while you ate. You didn't want to eat it up because it felt so warm, but it's so great and so delicious.
I remember every morning, he got up before sunrise. He wore this all leather and sheepskin US paratrooper's suit. Very large. American men are much larger than Korean men. He must have been a huge paratrooper. My father couldn't even get a belt around his waist. So he improvised suspenders. He then put the large heavy leather jacket over it. Then he finished it off with the paratrooper hat. I watched him bury himself in this leather paratrooper's suit, lined with wonderful sheep-skin It looked like he was wearing a clown suit. Now he was ready to go sell yams.
While he was out selling yams at lunch hour we would have to stand in a long line near the relief center. You took the biggest bucket you could find at home and carried it there, and they filled it up with cornmeal mush and you carried it home and that was your meal for the day.
But we were happy because everybody was just as poor. Your neighbor's were poor. Your friend's were poor. Nowadays some people are so rich, and some people are so poor, and nobody's happy. But in those days everybody was happy being poor together.
So this was a happy thing to do: get in a long line with your bucket, get a bucketful of this cornmeal mush and come back and eat it with kimchi. And you couldn't believe how delicious it was. Kimchi is very spicy, pickled cabbage. If you haven't tried it yet, please, once before you die, try kimchi.
One winter day the snowfall was so heavy nobody dared go out. My father prepared to go out with that paratrooper outfit, and realized that even if he went out selling yams, no one would come out and buy.
We knew that day we could not go out and get our cornmeal mush either. So we knew that day, we were going to be hungry all day.
He wouldn't give up. He took off his hat. He took off his jacket. But he kept on his pants. So he was walking around the house with his paratrooper's pants on all day, hoping that by noon it would get a little warmer so he could go out. But it was still snowing.
My younger brother was three. I was five. And we got to crying and weeping because we were hungry. Then he put us on his lap. He was sitting on the floor. I was lying on his paratrooper lap, and younger brother was on the other side. He started a story.
He said, "Once there was a rabbit who felt that he owned the field where he lived. And he hopped all over the place to the mountains beyond and stuffed himself on grass endlessly. He was a happy fella who knew all the land, knew every corner, every ditch.
"One day the rabbit was bored with his routine life and surroundings. A jellyfish came up from the sea and asked the rabbit, 'Do you want to see the wonders of the ocean?'
"'Yeah! That would be great!'
"'Okay, hop on my back, and I'll take you down.'
He hopped on and went down under the sea, and was mesmerized by the wonders of the ocean. But, when they arrived at the Palace of the King of the Sea, he was suddenly grabbed and strapped down by fish soldiers.
The jellyfish said, 'We're sorry we have to do this. The king is very ill. The only way he can be saved is to have a live rabbit liver. That's why we brought you down here.'
"'Oh my god! My liver?' he said, thinking fast, "It will be my honor to die for the mighty king of the sea. However, on earth, whenever we animals have lunch, we take out our livers, and hang it on a tree. So when you came by I forgot to put it back. Believe me, I'd like to die for you. I can't think of a better way to die, than to be honored by the rest of the generations of my offspring.' He was in tears. 'Take me back to shore and I'll get it.'
"'You must be lying! Kill him,' the jellyfish said. As the fish soldiers closed on him the rabbit desperately plead, 'Wait! What if I'm telling you the truth? If you kill me then you wouldn't know where my liver is.
"The jellyfish thought for a moment. 'Hmmm....You have a point there. Okay, Let's go and get it.'
"'Yes, let's go right now.'
"The jellyfish took him to the shore. But when they reached the shore, the rabbit leaped off and said, ' What fool hangs his liver on a tree? Boy, are you stupid!' Then he hopped away."
That was the story my father told me. And I forgot my hunger. And I felt the old leather of the paratrooper suit. All riddled with cracks, and I thought for sure, the texture was exactly the same as the turtle's skin. And then I looked out the window, there was the push-cart covered with snow, with these two handles sticking up just like rabbit ears.
•
Luo Guanzhong was born under the hooves of the Mongol Yuan. His ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS was written at the beginning of the Chinese Ming to arouse a sense of China Chinese would fight for. Or over. The Chinese of the Ming were extraordinary cowards. If the chicken Ming wouldn’t fight, the people would. Martial arts families, started martial arts clubs. The clubs started publishing theories and strategies.
Luo’s THE ROMANCE THREE KINGDOMS, and THE WATER MARGIN both begin in war and end in war.
Mulan already abroad the land since 550 ad as THE BALLAD OF MULAN. Xu Wen turned the BALLAD into a five hour play MULAN JOINS THE ARMY. He created a scene of Mulan challenged by her father to a match with wooden swords, that ends with him charging her with the defense of the family and bowing to her.
Xu Wen added a family name “Far” for “Flower” to Mulan, and it has stuck’
An anonymously published novel attributed to Wu Cheng en, about an ape named Monkey leading a priest of the bygone Tang Dynasty on a PILGRIMAGE TO THE WEST appears in the market. Given: the time MONKEY was written: science fiction fantasy, and anonymity was a strategy designed to keep the writer alive.
When the Manchus came and went through the open gates of the wall, as freely as the crows with more and more horses, the people looked up from the novels and said, “I told you so!” The Ming would not lower themselves army up. They were smarter, prettier, and all around better than the horsemen.
The next century saw the collapse of the Chinese Ming and the rise of the Manchu Qing. But the heroic tradition that began with the THE BALLAD OF MULAN cointinues with Qian Cai’s publication of GENERAL YUE FEI, in the first 91 years of the Qing. It is declared an insurrectionist work. The difference between the money and agricultural stay put Chinese and the nomadic territorial defines the Chinese heroic tradition.
This is the Chinese story of the Chinese children’s story’s sweep of stories into stories of the heroes of Chinese history, and the creation of novels of the heroic tradition that pervades all of Chinese writing.
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Kingdoms rise and fall, nations come and go.
The children’s story THE FOX AND THE TIGER STRATEGY enters the mind and develops into China’s first novels. The first novels establish the Heroic tradition. The heroic tradition are the novels written in the late Ming, when Luo Guanzhong adapted the language of the marketplace storytellers and the conversation between the audience and the opera that occurs during performance, wrote THE ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS and invented the “vernacular novel.”
The novels are the Chinese people’s favored versions of Chinese history that begins around 1000 BC at the beginning of recorded history with the story of the fall of the Shang Dynasty, THE CREATION OF THE GODS, also known as THE CANONIZATION OF DEITIES. Stories of history collected from the people and edited into today’s form during the Ming. China was ruled by Chinese and the Ming had the printing press to spread the news of Chinese writing.
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THE CREATION OF THE GODS
The Buddhists and the Taoists combine to bring down King Zhao of the Shang Dynasty (1766-1045 bc).
King Zhao is fresh to power. He goes to the temple of Nur Waw, the Mother of Humanity, as a gesture to the people. In the temple he is overcome with a gush of lust at the sight of Nur Waw’s life sized statue and assaults it. He leaves splashes of his gummy stuff on the statue, and flicks stuff off his fingers while stuff’s still wet and puts away his meat in front of his shocked court.
Tai Kung is the Prime Minister King Zhou inherited. He hopes to be dismissed after seeing this King Zhou boldly risk offending the Mother of Humanity and the people that love her just for the fun and yuck of it.
Nur Waw, the Mother of Humanity returns to her temple for the night and sees the splashes on her statue. If King Zhou has a taste for beautiful women, he will have beautiful women. She sends a fox spirit, wearing the decaying corpse of a freshly dead beautiful woman as a mask to old King Zhou to rouse his lust. The popeyed drooling King Zhou digs a deep pit, throws in every variety of poisonous snake found in the kingdom, adds several of fathers of ugly daughters and tempts his beauty with their fruitless cries and wails.
The Taoists seal their deal with the Buddhists to wipe the Shang off the world, by giving their Immortal of Merciful Navigation, a man, to the Buddhists to turn into a woman and rename Kwanyin, the Buddhist Goddess of mercy. A graceful figure of a standing woman looking especially feminine as glazed white poreclain. A vase in one hand. Eyes downcast. A child by each foot of the larger porcelain statues. Chinatown curio shops have their Kwan Yins of different sizes in military formation on the display shelves. You break. You pay. Watch your children!
In the novel characters from the Taoist and Buddhist military and civil orgranizations meet, deal and clash with each other and spark tales tall and short that have become separate and whole children’s stories, and symbols in their own right. For instance, Nah Jah, a Buddhist story from India that evolved into the Chinese story of a boy born out of a lotus who goes against his father, the commandant’s orders and fights the Dragon king who dines on children, under his father’s command. NAH JAH is a children’s story told in children’s books, and figurines of a boy with three heads and six arms on sale today in a Chinatown curio shop.
Tai Kung the old Prime Minister retires from King Zhou’s service moves out of the capital and disappears into oblivion with his bamboo pole.
Shoppers will find among the figurines an old white bearded fisherman with a line and a pole and no hook. He wears a Chinese straw hat. This is Tai Kung in oblivion.
The man who would be king stops at the sight of an old man fishing without a hook and asks, “Why?”
“I’m fishing for a man not a fish,” Tai Kung responds.
“I fish for a man who will be king.”
Tai Kung becomes the strategist for the man who will be King Wu, the founder of the Chou.
Nur Waw, the Mother of Humanity is a figure from the folk, from the low, not the high thinking Taoists and buddhists. She uses her fox spirit in the body of a bodacious corpse, that’s obviously dead in the noses of all except King Zhao, who breathes her stench and is in ecstasy. He ignores the business of the kingdom and turns his people against him to please the beautiful corpse.
King Zhou bankrupts the treasury, kills the fathers of ugly daughters, delights in creating new tortures of his people to entertain his lover with the cries and screams of people in pain in their evenings of love. His beautiful gore wants a palace made of nothing but pearls.
When Tai Kung now the strategist for King Wu the founder of the Chou, arrives to bring King Zhou down, the old man comes out of his burning pleasure palace of pearls with his sword in hand, and fights mightily. But he is brought down. The Shang falls. And the Chou rises. And the kingdom of Korea is created, but that’s another story. It is 1045 BC.
The rule of King Wu and the strategies of Tai Kung are cited by Confucius and strategists, like Sun Tzu and Wu Chi.
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BI SHENG’S INVENTION OF MOVABLE TYPE
500 years before Gutenberg
JUST IN TIME TO TELL THE STORY OF
“THE OUTLAWS OF LEONGSAHN MARSH”
A CHILD’S BLOODY CLASSIC
Bi Sheng invented movable type made of fired clay that enabled multiple printing between 1041-1048 AD, during the Northern Song. An industry was born. The Northern Song (Sung) was a period of one selfish, cowardly, arty emperor after the other. All of them more interested in art than the life art depicted, and all served by a corrupt court that outlawed the good and talented and confiscated their property and art. The clerks, teachers, officers, Taoists, Buddhists, the male or female martial champions of the families amount to 36 individuals who became known as the Heavenly Spirits when they were outlawed by the emperor and joined gangs of the crazy, the criminal, the blood lusting 72 Earthly Fiends.
They go into the marsh in boats when Yellow River is in flood and times the tide is in and establish a stronghold on Mt. Leongshan a mountain hidden in the maze of shifting waterways and quicksands of Leongshan Marsh.
Did Bi Sheng’s invention of movable type and mass printing help spread the legend of the 36 Stars of Heavenly Spirits, and the 72 Stars of Earthly Fiends who came to be the “outlaws of Leongshan Marsh,” or “The Water Margin?” Of course it did.
The first novels of the Ming were in print and distribution for two hundred years when finally, 500 years after Bi Sheng, Gutenberg got around to inventing printing in the West. His first printed book was a fictional version of the ethnically biased account of the distant distant past.
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THE FOX AND THE TIGER
YOU ALL KNOW what a fox is. Looks a little like a large house cat. Looks a little like a medium sized dog. Sharp-nosed. Sharp-eared. Bright-eyed. Bushytailed. It is a nice day. Fresh. The little fox is out for a little walk, through the woods, minding his own business.
Out of the shadows jumps the tiger. "All right, little fox, say Goodbye! to the world, for I'm going to eat'ya!"
"Now, hold on there, Tiger!" the little fox says. "You just can't jump out of the shadows with bad manners and threats! You can’t interrupt my pleasant nice little walk around the charms of my woods!"
"Your woods?"
"You don’t know that I am the King of the Woods?
"You! The King of the Woods?" The tiger laughs, "You? You? Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. You can't be King of the Woods! You have a teeny kitty cat body, and I have this beautiful, (Ooh, I love it so much) magnificently sculpted musculature! You have these little itty bitty kitty cat paws. Me, I have these magnificent ripping, terrifying claws. You have little toy teeth that can't get around one of my toes. And I have a mouth full of these pointed big teeth to puncture hide and muscles, break bone, and bite meat. Teeth that break! Teeth that gnash! Teeth….!” Suddenly the cat purrs, “! How can you be King of the Woods?"
"Tsk.Tsk. Tsk.," the Fox shakes his head, "Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.. I don't want to hurt you, Tiger."
"Hurt me?"
"I know you are just a big dumb guy. But I am willing to give you a chance to see for yourself."
"Huh?"
"I am going to walk down this road here.”
“You’re going to walk?”
“We are going to walk down this road here. And we’ll see how the first three animals we meet along the way treat me with courtesy and respect.”
“What?”
”If just one of these three animals talks bad manners all over me, or spits on me, or makes threats… I’ll let you eat me."
"Hmmm,” the tiger thought a moment, “You’re going to walk down this road?”
“Um hmm.”
“The first three animals we meet…”
“Un hmmm.”
“And if just one of them treats you with bad manners, spits, or makes threats, you let me eat you?”
“I’ll let you eat me.”
"Hmmm," the tiger thought a moment and said, “How do I know you won't just run away, Little Fox?"
"To make sure I don't run away, Tiger, why don't you just follow me as close as you can?"
"Hmmm," the tiger says, and thinks, "Hmmm.” And thinks some more, and says. “To make sure you don't just run away, I get to follow behind you as close as I want?"
"That's right."
"Sounds good to me, let's go."
The little fox rattles along on his little feet. And the tiger follows close behind with his big shoulders rising and falling and his big pads silently separating the grass and settling into the earth.
"A little fox!" A buffalo comes snorting and charging out of the grass, “Stomp! Stomp! Stompity! Stomp! Gonna stomp on a Little Fox!” The buffalo screeches to a stop. “Oh ho, Little Fox!” he shakes his huge head chews his cud. “How are you today Little Fox?”
“Fine Buffalo. How are you?”
“Fine! Fine! I was stomping along and saw you, and just had to stop and say it’s such a beautiful day, isn’t a beautiful day?”
"Yes, it is Buffalo."
"The birds are singing." The buffalo blinks and shudders a bird off his flanks. “And the bees are buzzing.”
“Yes, they are Buffalo.”
“Well, it’s such a nice day, I’ll just be stomping along. If that’s okay with you.”
"Nice seeing you, Buffalo," the little fox says, and walks on.
The tiger follows, and says to himself, "Hmmmm. Interesting."
They walk on, come to a river and walk by the river awhile.. Suddenly an alligator comes leaping out of the water and snapping its jaws toward the fox. "My, my, my …!" the alligator sees the tiger, "Ooops! …friend! My pal. Ahhh." The alligator smiles, "Beautiful day. My good friend, Little Fox.”
“Hello Alligator.”
“Have you noticed the sun is shining, the grass is so green.”
“Yes, I have noticed that.”
“The water sparkles.”
"Yes, it does."
"Yes, it does. I just had to say it to somebody.."
"Why, thank you, Alligator. That’s very kind."
"Yes, it is, isn’t it. Well, see you later."
"See you later, alligator," the little fox says and the alligator slinks back into the water. And the little fox walks on.
The tiger follows, saying to himself, "Hmm. Interesting."
Next a huge snake, a python comes dangling out of a tree and sticks its thin black forked tongue out and in, fast several times without licking its lips. "Haaaa, Little Fox say..." and the snake sees the tiger, "Hi-i-i-i! Say, Hiiiiiii there!"
"Hello, snake, how are you?"
"Oh? Oh, I'm just fi-i-i-ine, just fine thank you," the snake says. “Well…I mustn’t keep you. I’d hate to do thaaat.”
“Well, I should be going.”
“Yesss. Welll…” and the snake slips around a tree trunk and disappears.
The little fox walks on a few steps, then stops and turns to the tiger. He dusts his fur and asks, "Well, tiger, do you feel like eating me now?"
The tiger shies back and gulps and looks down at the little fox with awe, "Err. Oh, Little Fox. I lost my head. I obviously did not know what I was doing. You are, indeed the King of the Woods. With your permission, I'll withdraw now, and leave you to enjoy your walk alone."
The tiger back steps away, turns and disappears into the shadows, and the little fox walks on.
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THE HEROIC TRADITION
All the works of the heroic tradition were written during the 250 years of the Chinese Ming.
The Ming were superior and complacent. They depended on the Wall and lost touch with men and the art of war. The heroic tradition was written in a more accessible form and language to get the urge to fight for China into Chinese thought. The writers were right. The Ming fell in 1644. The Manchu Qing. The heroic tradition continued with a Manchu-baiting novel referencing all the previous tales of the heroic traditon in GENERAL YUE FEI.
The first and most popular novel in China, THE ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS, is the story of the Chinese fight for control of China at the end of the Han (220 Ad).
THE BALLAD OF MULAN— an anonymous children’s ballad published in 550 in the contentious limbo of the 5 Dynasties period (220-589) where the fragmented Chinese rule invited incursions of nomadic rule from the north, till the Chinese unified under the Tang (618-907). Later in the Ming, Xu Wen enlarged the BALLAD into a rousing bloodthirsty play including a scene of father Far and Far Mulan in combat with wooden weapons, Mulan winning and father Far passing the defense of the farm to Mulan. A scene that stunned the Chinese audiences.
The Tang begins to go bad and desperately changes direction to Buddhism parodied in MONKEY’S JOURNEY TO THE WEST attributed to Wu Cheng-en. The first science-fiction-fantasy novel that ended too early and missed the Tang’s fall to the totally corrupt Chinese rule of the Song (Sung) in the 9th century.
The Chinese emperors of the Northern Song (Sung) give up their capital to the invaders from the north and shift their capital and give up land and shift because they are cowards. They’ll shift so far, then quit the title to the north and become the Southern Song. But they like the stillness of Chinese art. The imperial court outlaws the people who have the land, riches and art they want.
The heroes of the nation are not the emperor and his government but the men the government outlawed and stole from, in the novel THE WATER MARGIN.
The outlaws ultimately fail because the first star of Heavenly Spirits, the county clerk who leads because he recognizes talent and is not jealous, refuses the pleas of the people to kick the emperor out and take over. He is too dogmatically Confucian. He refuses to rule. The Song amnesties the outlaws and kills them off one by one. Years go by.
The nomads take bites out of China, declare themselves a Chinese dynasty, the Jin (Gum in Cantonese) meaning “Gold” Dynasty, and have crept up to the northern banks of the Yellow (Wong) River.
Then a baby, Yue Fei and his mother survive a flooding Yellow River. A situation worthy of myth, but Yue Fei is a figure from history. His tomb is on the west side of Westlake in Hangzhao. Qian Cai, the “insurrectionist” author admits he took from fictional, legendary accounts on a solid spine of facts. Yue Fei and Mother Fei mother are washed up on the shore of another place.
Individual loyalty in war is the heroic issue in GENERAL YUE FEI. Does Yue Fei fight for the rights and possessions of his family, or does he fight for the right of Emperor to rule all under the sky, including his family and himself? Mother Yue solves the problem with the tattoos she lays on her son’s back. Or does she?
The sons of the sons of Water Margin and the sons of the sons of the sons 3 KINGDOMS seem to think so, as they drop by to fall to their knees and bow to Mother Yue before they mount up and defy imperial orders to stay away from Yue Fei’s grave at Westlake.
Yue Fei’s strategic mind was recognized by two women who were commanders, and became heroic novels in their own right, Liang Hongyu (the Liitle Drummer Girl) and Mu Gwahying (the Shantung gang leader who married the youngest Yang Famiy General ). Linked by Yue Fei’s big thinking they repelled the Jurchen invaders along the Yellow River, defeated the them repeatedly all along the Yellow river, in the mountains by the river Yue Fei humiliated the horsemen, and when the horsemen became boatmen Yue Fei humiliated them again. The celebration of multiple defeats of the Juerchins in a book was too much for the Manchu rulers of the Qing to bear. Everybody knew the 10th Century Juerchins were the Manchus that ruled Qing Dynasty China. The very titile of the book GENERAL YUE FEI was a provocation. It was a way of showing Chinese contempt for the Manchu capitulation to British Christianity, opium and guns.
The novel GENERAL YUE FEI was published in the Manchu Qing 18th century while Qian Cai lived and when the emperor he lived under died, he was already dead, but the incoming emperor banned the book. That showed the upppity author!
In the 19th Century the novel was available again and went through several printings in China during the first Opium War. T.L. Yang had a version by Qian Cai’s novel published during the Reign of Emperor Tongzhi (1862-1874) the period of the Second Opium War. T.L. Yang began translatiing the 79 chapters of his version of Qian Cao’s novel thirty years, ago through his law career and his seat as the Chief Justice (1988-1996) of the Hong Kong Supreme Court. Joint Publishing (H.K.) Co., Ltd. published it in 1987.
The name of Yue has risen from the low of an emperor’s contempt, to an Emperor’s apology and posthumous elevation of position in society to today’s high and one of the Yue’s has recently been accused of some kind of corruption the nature of which I don’t understand.
Yue Fei’s name spread among the middleclass with stories of his martial skills and strategic genius and his invention of a system of kung fu fighting with hammers and fists and further developed by his sons.
Now a Yue charged with corruption plus the unusual flurry of angry letters to the editor scolding the government for daring to suggest the hero Yue Fei be demoted from a “hero” to a “prominent person” indicates the meaning of the name Yue is still alive and rising and falling like China itself.
YUE FEI (NGAWK FEI) IN 2003
Los Angeles Times-January 28, 2003
By: Anthony Kuhn
BEIJING—“Give us back our territory!”
Yue’s blood campaign against northern peoples—who are now, in fact, Chinese citizens—doesn’t exactly fit with current officials’ desire to promote harmony among the nation’s 55 officially recognized minority ethnic groups.
So Chinese authorities have decided: Enshrining Yue as a national hero is no longer politically correct.
…indicates one way or another Yue Fei’s reputation will suffer a change.
Kuhn goes on to note:
But China’s deeply rooted folkloric traditions are not easily discarded.
Negating Yue’s status as a national hero “implies denying that wars between nations and peoples occurred in China’s history. Isn’t that absurd?” complained Zhai Ruofu in a letter to the Southern Metropolitan Daily newspaper.
Chinese children around the globe learn about how the young patriot Yue, born 1103, knelt as his mother tattooed the characters for “Repay your country with utmost loyalty” on his back.
Yue led the Song armies against the invading Jurchen tribes of Manchuria. He was on the verge of triumph when Prime Minister Qin Gui, who considered the war too costly, had him recalled to the capital, imprisoned and executed on trumped-up charges in 1142.
Kuhn describes Chinese doughnut based on the traitor Qui Gui, that in America are called “Yow jow gwai,” or “Oil fried ghosts.”
Qin has been despised ever since as a national traitor. He is figuratively boiled in oil and eaten every morning across China in the form of a breakfast dough strip that bears his name.
The long fried doughnuts that come doubled, are eaten with a thick rice soup, or juk. The doughnuts are called “yow jow gwai” or “oil fried ghosts”
Kuhn found in Canada, a university expert on Yue Fei in China:
“Over time, Yue Fei has become not just a symbol of Chinese culture—he has become a Chinese culture.” Said Leo K. Shin, a historian at the University of British Columbia who is writing a book of Yue.
He’s writing a book?
LEO K SHIN
Departments of
History and Asian Studies
University of British Columbia
The Uses of a Chinese Martyr:
Yue Fei (1103-42) in History and Memory
Comments and suggestions are most appreciated.
Outline
To even the most casual observer of China, the images of Yue Fei (1103—1142) loom large on the historical horizon. As every child in China would learn, it was Yue Fei the heroic general who led the Song-dynasty (960—1276) armies to repel the Jurchens and to rescue China from obliteration in the hands of the northern “barbarians.” In so doing, Yue Fei is deemed to have embodied the highest quality of courage and tenacity. But as every student would discover as well, it was Yue Fei the tragically-flawed minister who, on the brink of victory, allowed himself to be recalled by an cowardly emperor, imprisoned, and executed on the basis of trumped-up charges. As such, Yue Fei is seen to have exemplified the fundamental paradox in the Confucian ideals of loyalty and legitimacy.
That the story of Yue Fei is more complex is well known to historians. Yue Fei’s heroic image, scholars have argued, has been carefully cultivated both by himself and by observers of later times. Throughout his life, as Hellmut Wilhelm pointed out in an early study, Yue Fei “constantly and consciously worked toward producing an image of himself as a hero of mythological proportions, rigidly patterning himself after the myths of the past.” In part following Yue Fei’s script, scholar-officials of the Ming dynasty (1368—1644), who were themselves constantly concerned with the threats posed by the Mongols from the north, not only led efforts to construct and renovate temples dedicated to the Song-dynasty general but also attributed (falsely) to him the stirring piece “Redness All Across the River,” in which the author, with great poetic finesse, expresses his desire “to eat the flesh of the nomads” in order to “recover our old rivers and mountains.” Even Qing-dynasty (1644—1912) emperors, who traced their ancestry to the Jurchens, deemed it desirable to let stand in the imperial capital a temple devoted to Yue Fei, the one person who would no doubt have been their mortal enemy.
But even though historians have long recognized the significance of the uses of Yue Fei, they have left unanswered two central questions: how had such uses transformed over time, and how did the changing uses of Yue Fei reflect the shifting structure and dynamics of later imperial China? Although scholars interested in the practice and process of cultural transmission have focused on one aspect or another of the changing images of Yue Fei, a more complete and satisfactory investigation, this study argues, would need to take into consideration more broadly the intersecting worlds of politics, religion, literature, and lineage organization.
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Kuhn’s L.A. Times article on the reaction of the people to the gov’s demotion of Yue Fei appeared in March. In September the gov issued 3 stamps of Yue Fei. The first stamp portrays Yue Fei on his knees, offering his back to his mother, and his wife standing by.
2003-17 Yue Fei, a Famous Ancient General --- Commemorative Stamps
Yue Fei (1103 - 1142), alias Pengju, was a famous general of the Southern Song Dynasty. Born in a farmer's family in Tangyin, Xiangzhou Prefecture (today's Henan Province), he was diligent and eager to learn when he was young. Being adept in Kung Fu skills, he volunteered to join the army in the first year of Jingkang's Reign. It is said that before he left home, his mother tattooed "Loyalty to the Country" on his back, which was the principle he followed till the end of his life. As he was concerned about his men and set a personal example before them, his troops were highly disciplined and valiant and skillful in battle. During the war against the invading Jin army, he gained one after another victories and recovered lost territories, winning high esteem among the army and the people, and even arousing the admiration of the enemy. Later he was framed by the treacherous minister Qin Hui and executed in Lin'an (today's Hangzhou) on trumped-up charges. He has been and will always be respected and admired by posterity for his unyielding integrity.
China National Philatelic Corporation will release an FDC.
Technical Information
Serial number:2003-17
Date of issue: 25th Sep. 2003
Values in set: 3
Denomination: 3.60 yuan
Designer: Meng Fancong
Size of stamps: 30 * 40 mm
Perforation: 12
Sheet composition: 20 for Sheet I, 9 for Sheet II
Printing process: offset
Printer: Shenyang Post & Telecommunication Printing Works
(3-1) J Loyalty to the Country 80f
3-2) J Unyielding Integrity 80f
(3-3) J Remembered Forever 2y
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Where do the politics, religion, literature and racial lineage intersect? In the novel, a biased form of opinion commenting on and portraying moments in history, that, though convincing, should be approached with skepticism, not to be believed until proven, as Prof. Shin says:
By tracing and analyzing the political, religious, literary, and socio-economic processes through which Yue Fei became a national icon, this study aims not only to offer the first systematic and multifaceted account of its development but also to contribute to the lively debate surrounding the creation and transmission of beliefs and practices in later imperial China.
T.L. Yang, the Chief Justice of the Hong Kong Supreme Court, began translating Qian Cai’s novel GENERAL YUE FEI from Chinese into English shortly after the publication of Kingston’s THE WOMAN WARRIOR. She’d demoted Mulan from “The first poetic statement of male-female equality in war and peace,” to The victim of parental knives bloodying her back with ‘carved’ tattoos. I’m sure the beginning of the translation GENERAL YUE FEI the tattooed general in 1976, was a coincidence.
Sir T. L. Yang is retired and teaching at the University of Hong Kong now. His thoughts on Prof. Shin’s concerns would be a valuable contribution to the debate. Shin continues:
As such, this project should be of interest not only to scholars of Chinese studies but also to a wider audience interested in the relationships between history, memory, and cultural identity.
Ugh! Sounds like sociology. The only “science” based on proved fakes and fools. Margaret Mead of the U. Chicago was fooled for two weeks and her pioneer work on Samoa appeared. The girls confessed. They’d lied and laughed. What a hoot! Then Ruth Benedict got all of her “data” observiing the behavior of the Japanese animals held in observable community at Poston, a concentration camp where the Navy ran a study of what Ruth Benedict observed and wrote THE SWORD AND THE CHRYSANTHEMUM the book used as a manual of Japanese culture by the US Occupation Forces in Japan. No lit. Only whites have literature. I hope Shin doesn’t make the same white racist assumptions made by, S. Frank Miyamoto in his Master’s Thesis in Sociology “JAPANESE SOCIAL SOLIDARITY” ( He got his PhD from the U of Chicago after being a Jr-G Man camp spy on his own people.) Rose Hum Lee, who faked her interviews in her PhD Thesis. Her fake work drove her crazy trying to make it real. She committed suicide rather than admit her fakework. She used members of her family as interviewees, and palmed them off interviews off the street. I hope Shin’s not an alumnus of the illiterate church of the U. of Chicago. If sociology but not Shin rejects Chinese lit, I’d hope they’d count Jackie Chan, kung fu star as one of the folk taking and giving inspiration from Yue Fei, processinng Yue Fei in what the sociologists call “the folk process.”
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Jackie Chan starring in Yue Fei biopic
Posted on Tue, 23-Mar-2004
According to Monkey Peaches , Jackie Chan will star in and produce a biopic on Yue Fei, a legendary Chinese general.
Chan expects to begin the film shortly, with his son in the role of the general in his younger years. The script is almost complete.
Production is expected to commence in 2005, once Chan wraps his next feature.
"I think Yue Fei is a man with great sense of loyalty, so am I. I am blindly loyal to Golden Harvest,to friends and to my country", says Chan.
According to the site, During the Southern Song Dynasty, Yue Fei commanded the army against the invasion from Jin, a state established by the nomadic Nüzhen. He won great victories and recovered many lost territories. However, General Yue's war effort made him the enemy no. 1 of Prime Minister Qin Hui, who only wanted peace with Jin. The emperor was also afraid that two former emperors, captured by Jin, might be freed and take his throne away. Finally Yue Fei was jailed and later executed, with fabricated charges. Traditionally, Yue Fei is the most talked symbol of patriotism among the Chinese and he is one of the most popular heroes in many Chinese folklores.
Chan's also interested in doing a film based on "Genghis Kahn" - something Steven Seagal is currently working on too.
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KUNG FU IS A MARTIAL ART
Yue Fei lived as if he were a mythic hero and that’s the way Qian Cao writes him. Yue Fei’s example, his spirit, his story as told by Qian Cao, brings together descendants from Luo Guanzhong’s 3 KINGDOMS and WATER MARGIN, the Ming novels of the heroic tradition, in a Taoist circle of kingdoms rising and falling and nations coming and going.
An article on Yue Fei the martial art and not the man, tells me his fighting form was designed to contain the motion of opposites, in balance, was central to the kung fu he founded and furthered into styles by Yue Fei’s two sons:
the Yue-family Chuan [fist] is based primarily upon the principles of combining inner and outer bodies, theory and application. Its various tricks stem from its principal philosophy of the positive and negative and the five elements of the heart, liver, lung, spleen and kidney in the human body.
The five elements in the body have their counterparts in the Chinese five elements of Gum, mook, faw, sir, toe or Gold, wood, fire, water, earth. Yue Fei is a name in Chinese martial arts known for putting things together.
There are many styles of Chuan named after General Yue Fei of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279) These include Yue-family Chuan of Hubei, Henan and Anhui provinces, Yue-school fist plays of Hunan and Sichuan provinces, Yue-family martial arts of Guangdong Province, Yue Fei Sanshau and Yue-style chain of fist plays. These different Chuan styles have been influenced by local culture and practices as well as individual styles. Although it has combined the old and new Chuan theories and practices,
YUE FEI IS SO FOLKING DEEP IN CHINESE POP
HE’S BROKEN OUT IT COMIC BOOKS
In 1991 C.C. Low produced the Canfonian three volume edition of comic book novels telling the story of YUE FEI. Two panels of quickdrawn action, four lines of Chinese Four lines in English per page.
The first volume begins with line drawings and words that describe Yue Fei a baby in his mother’s arms, both of them inside a large largemouthed jar, being guided through the flooding river by his father whose fingers slip from the lips of the jar and is lost. Yue Fei becomes the favored student of one of the former 108 outlaws of Liangshan marsh, goes to a blow by blow description of Yue Fei’s killing of the emp’s son in a martial arts contest, the corrupt contest judge’s descision to kill Yue Fei being overruled by another judge who’s a respected veteran of a famous battle, the kidnapping of one emp after the other by tribal nomads from the north and the third emp summoning Yue to fight the invaders. Mother Yue steps in and tattoos Yue Fei’s back and his wife holds the candle. All of this told in, two drawn panels with four lines of captions in Chinese and English per panel per page, of the three volume 300 page long set.
On page 216 Yue Fei rides off with his spear blessed or cursed but powerful, dangerous and doomed because of his mother’s tattoos down his back. I turn back to the beginning before page 216. The tattooing sequence.
The visit from the pirate, and followed by the summons from the emperor climaxing with mother Yue tattooing her son’s back while Yue Feis wife gives her mother-in-law light with a candle leads me to suspect that each would have demanded loyalty. Loyalty to the pirates, or the emperor, or the Yue family. A reading of the novel might clear or satisfy my suspicions.
GENERAL YUE FEI by Qian Cao.
Translated by T.L. Yang
In the novel Yue Fei shows his stuff in a martial arts contest. The emperor’s son is set to win. Unfortunately Yue Fei kills the emperor’s son. An honest judge saves Yue Fei’s life. Yue Fei’s martial arts rep grows among the people he protects. People call on him.
Behind the walls of his private city the emperor is alone with his traitorous Prime Minister, his corrupt that seethes sympathy for his hatred of Yue in the silence the emperor’s active apprecition of his art.
The Juerchins a nomadic tribe on horses out of Manchuria has taken larger and larger bites of Chinese land. They’ve taken the emperor hostage, beyond the borders of China. His son takes over the throne, and the Juerchins ride in and kidnap him.
An incompetent effete grandson is the next chicken emperor of China under the influence of a traitorous Prime Minister, Qin Kuai. (Pronounced “Chin Kway”). Twenty years ago Qin Kuai was the judge that fixed the contest for the emperor’s son to win. Unfortunately for Qin, the Emp’s son was killed in spite of the hidden weapons on his Imperial person that all failed, and Yue Fei won. The new emperor moves the capital south and lets the horsemen take over the old.
Yue Fei is approached by a gang that occupies an old hideout of the legendary 108 Outlaws of the Water Margin. The Water Margin is a huge marsh with quicksands and mountains hidden in its waters and mists off the Yellow River. The new outlaws are fed up with chickenshift emperors. They want Yue Fei to lead them against the invading horsemen, and with Yue Fei leading them, the bandit army would attract the emperor’s soldiers to fight off the horsemen invaders at last!
Yue becomes blood brothers with the bandit, and as the brother, turns down the offer to be leader, and returns the bandit’s gifts as a brotherly gift to pay the bandits way home.
Yue will not become a criminal to fight the invading nomads from the north. But he will not offend the pirate’s good intentions.
He receives a summons from the emperor to accept command of an army to defend China.
He has been asked by criminals, and the third and youngest chickenshift emperor to defend China. His mother goes into action:
“So this is it,” observed the old Lady. Then she paused for a little thought and called, “My son, you go out and set up incense sticks and candles and put them on the incense table in the middle of the hall. I have a personal reason for doing this.”
“Yes,” said Yue Fei, and he went out, obtained the incense and candles, went to the central hall, placed the table in the middle, and placed a pair of candle sticks and an incense burner on it. Having arranged everything in its proper place, he entered to inform his mother that the incense table was ready and he invited his mother to go out.
Lady Yue came out with his (sic) daughter-in-law. There they burned incense and lighted the candles in front of the scared family shrine. They paid obeisance to Heaven and Earth and to the ancestors, and the Lady commanded her son to kneel whilst the daughter-in-law was told to prepare the ink.
The famously described and often drawn, painted and cartooned scene of mother Yue tattooing her son’s back should be read in a good translation by the Chinese boy who grew up with Yue Fei and became Chief Justice of the Hong Kong Supreme Court. That scene by the man who was that boy begins here at the bottom of page 247.
Kneeling down Yue Fei asked, “What command does Mother have for me?”
The Lady said, “I, your mother, saw that you did not accept the recruitment of the rebellious thief, and that you willingly endure poverty and are (not) tempted by wealth and status, this is of course extremely good. But I fear that after my death, there may be some unworthy creature who will come to entice you. And if you should momentarily lose your principles and do something disloyal, will you not have destroyed in one day your fragrant reputation gained in half a lifetime? For this reason, I have prayed to Heaven and Earth and to our ancestors, because I want to tattoo on your back the four characters ‘Utmost’, ‘Loyalty’, ‘Serve’ and ‘Nation’. I only hope you will be a loyal official, so that after your mother’s death, people going to and fro will say, ‘What a good lady, she has trained her son to achieve fame by serving his nation with the utmost loyalty, and so his reputation will continue its fragrance for a hundred generations’. I shall then smile even in my grave under the nine springs.”
Yue Fei’s mother tattooed her son’s back. She knew what everybody knew from martial arts: Only criminals wore tattoos. She tattooed her son as if he were a criminal, and wrote “the four words” that declared loyalty to the “country” not only a criminal offense to the emperor, but a capital crime inked down his spine. She wrote the word for “country,” the land, “Gawk” or “Kuo,” in Mandarin. In deference to the emperor she should have used the word Kwun in Cantonese, meaning “Commander” or “emperor.” The Kwun was synonymous with the “nation” no matter what the nation thought. Mother Yue disagreed.
Yue Fei however suggested, “The sage said, ‘One does not harm his body, hair and skin because all these he has received from his parents’. I shall of course accept and obey your solemn instruction. Please refrain from tattooing me!”
“Balderdash!” said the Lady. “If you should do something unworthy and are brought before the court under arrest, and if you should be beaten and knocked about, are you still to say to the official, ‘Having received the body, hair and skin from my parents I do not dare cause them any injury?’”
“What Mother says has reason. Please tattoo the characters” – thus speaking, he half-undressed himself. The Lady picked up the brush and wrote out on his spine the four characters for “serving the nation with the utmost loyalty”. Then she picked up a sewing needle and gave his back a prick. She saw the lord Yue’s flesh ‘gave a jump’ and she asked, “My son, does it hurt?”
Yue Fei said, “Mother, you have not even begun to tattoo me, so why ask me if it hurts or not?”
With tears in her eyes the Lady said, “My son, you fear that my hand will go ‘soft’ so you say it does not hurt.” So saying she bit her teeth, and started pricking. Having finished, she painted the characters with ink mixed with vinegar so that the colour would never fade.
Yue Fei got up and bowed to his mother in gratitude for her instruction. Each then returned to the room and nothing more need be said.
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The novel ends after Yue Fei’s mother has led the rebels born of the rebels of 3 Kingdoms and Water Margin that defined China and the Chinese out of the sequential history of dynasties, and took the Chinese across borders to be Chinese. She was escaping China when she refuged up out of the country. Behavior reminscent of the WATER MARGIN’s five Nguyen brothers leaving the 108 surrendering to the chickenshift Song, heading south and founding Siam. The enraged travellers from China to Cheuk Kwan’s CHINESE RESTAURANTS on TV that finds them in every country in the world. Most think of where they are as home, and at home they are Chinese. Some have created all that’s needed to keep the engines of Chinese civilization putt putting where they are. I find their relaxed way of saying where they are being home and Chinese very satisfying. I watch CHINESE RESTAURANTS, a series of 30 min episodes on Link Tv on the sattelite, as the only real Chinese on all of American tv.
Mother Yue is nowhere around the back jacket attracting the heroes of the old books to riding by her house. The writing is not punchy short phrases, but is mostly just the facts strict law clerk writing. Or a judge’s writing for control of his translation?
He [Yue Fei] was about to cross the Yellow River and make a decisve assault on the Jin Capital (called the Yellow Dragon City) when he was urgently summoned back to the Chinese Capital. In order to make peace the Prime Minister Qin Kuai was prepared to cede all the territories north of the Hua River to the Tartars. So impatient was he for Yue Fei’s withdrawal from the front that he despatched twelve decrees in the name of the Emperor. When Yue Fei arrived at the Capital Qin Kuai immediately had him arrested and incarcerated on a false charge of treason. Two months passed and there was no evidence against Yue Fei. Qin Kuai than handed his secret instructions to the prison guard. The next day Yue Fei was found dead. He was only thirty-nine. Qin Kuai’s crimes were eventually exposed. Emperor Xio Zhong (1163-1189) bestowed posthumous honours on Yue Fei, who has been loved and respected by people of the whole country as a national hero ever since. This book was written by Qian Cai, a scholar of the Reign of Emperor Kangxi (1644-1731). The translation was made by T.L.Yang, now Chief Justice of Hong Kong.
C. C. LOW THE SCHOLAR WHO TOOK THE HEROIC TRADITION AND MADE IT A COMIC BOOK
The comic book novel, came into being during the Tang (618-907 AD), as a “Script book” illustrating the staging, costumes, and faces of specific operas for the illiterate to use as guides for production.
Art or commercialism keeps the Chinese comic book companies going. Or is it idealism? Or passion?
C.C. Low, founder, owner, editor, and artistic director and artist of Canfonian publishers of Singapore has been publishing comic book novels of the heroic tradition for twenty years.
What sets C.C. Low apart from other yellows publishing comic books of the heroic tradition is he’s more than an interpreter of the heroic tradition, he is an activist, a player in the definiton of the Chinese heroic tradition, like the “scholar-officials of the Ming dynasty” that used printing and the novel to declare China was ruled by Chinese. They displaced the 100 year rule of the Mongol Yuan dynasty in 1368. They needed a hero stand for a China opposed to Mongol efforts to take China back.
The Ming built and renovated temples dedicated to the man most recently feared by the northern tribes Yue Fei. Leo K. Shin of the U. of British Columbia quotes Hellmut Wilhelm and joins his opinion that the Ming knowingly ‘attributed (falsely) to him [Yur Fei] the stirring piece ‘Redness All Across the River,’ [MAN JIANG HONG] in which the author, with great poetic finesse, expresses his desire ‘to eat the flesh of the nomads’ in order to ‘recover our old rivers and mountains.’
Yue Fei a character or a man shouted for blood to gush out every chew of the bite Nomad flesh he had in his mouth. Each book of the heroic tradition was more and more bloodthirsty till Yue Fei sounds raging crazy. That’s how snug in their smug high fallutin theory of walls the Ming was. It drove Luo Guanzhong to translate the strategies of Sun Tzu into lessons for the people, as it drove Qian Cai to create a pugnacious meat eater from an already provocative character. Government Chinese were hard to move, but were the people the heroic tradition was aimed at?
C.C. Lowe in 1991 scholar unofficial and a publisher of comic book novels, also attributes the bloodthirsty MAN JIANG HONG to Yue Fei, and prints the poem on the inside cover of YUE FEI, one of the “Pictorial stories of the great Chinese national hero in Chinese & English.”
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The Famous Poem of Yue Fei
MAN JIANG HONG
I am so angry my scalp prickles under my hat
I grip this rail until my knuckles turn white
Waiting for this pouring rain to stop
I stare straight up
And howl at the sky
Uh I am torn to pieces in my gut
Here I am thirty years old
And for me honour and fame are so much mud and dust
I have fought for this dynasty
Eight thousand miles under the clouds and the moon
And I tell you you can’t just sit here do nothing
What value are regrets when your hair goes gray
When are we going to make good the insult
The jin invaders gave us when they captured our emperor
When are those of us in power going to avenge
The disgrace of losing our dynasty [?]
We should take to the war chariots
And careen through the passes in the halen mountains
And grind the bones of our enemies under our wheels
We wought to be eating their flesh when we hunger
Drinking the bloood down to slake our thirst
We have to beat this war white hot again
Raise our banners in the lost territory one more
The old capital bainjing waits for us to rebuild it.
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C.C. Low has published volumes of dramatized histories of the Opium Wars of the 19th Century without a fiction to shape it but with documents to prove his account of events. He has logically extended the heroic tradition in time and history to include the invasion of the British and 2 Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion way beyond the novels. His documentary rather than fictional treatment of history pointed up the fact that the the Chinese haven’t written of their heroes as Chinese since the 18th Century.
The Revolution of 1911 realized Plato’s dream of creating a republic from scratch in Dr. Sun Yat sen’s Christian head and the heads of other Chinese who saw the same dream of founding a China started from nothing. In the name of their competitive dreams they all drove out all the artists opposed to their pie in the sky. Plato understood the artists power to rouse and persuade the people to action, without regard for the truth or the effects of their work. Control art then get rid of it. He liked Homer’s work mythologising the Greeks, but once he finished the ODYSSEY Plato would have taken him tho the border, heaped him with farewell gifts and said goodbye Homer.
Those that were kept were deballed and no threat to Plato’s Republic and their arts were servants of the state, 20 th Century Christians and Communists. Individuals, individualiity, personalities were gone, forbidden.
The Cultural Revolution erased the Chinese family, the Chinese children’s story and the heroic tradition as backward in the cities from 1966 to 1976.
In the tenth and last year of Cultural Revolution, 1976 the year of the big wipeout of that old time Confucius non-religous Taosim and Buddhism and all the children’s stories in China. That same year, by coincidence Maxine Hong Kingston’s THE WOMAN WARRIOR appeared boasting of exposing Confucius, and discovering tattoos on the girl warrior’s body. Shocking! How could a responsible publisher print such lies! What next, they find exactly those same tattoos on Joan of Arc’s body?
Maxine Hong Kingston boasted she took the tattoos off a man born till 500 years after Far Mulan, the heroine who stood as proof of female equality with men in the children’s chant that closed with the lines:
The he rabbit tucks his in his feet to sit.
The she rabbit dims her shiny eyes.
Two rabbits hopping side by side.
Who can see which is the he and which the she?
ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES
DEFINED BY CHINESE COWARDICE
Asian American Studies at San Franicsco State and UC Berkeley said Kingston was probably wrong about Mulan being tattooed but she was a womAN and should have her chance at white fame. What kind of chickenshit is that? Would the French give license to a Franco-American to change Joan of Arc to 255 lb man with a sex change operation for a chance at American Yankee fame?
The hero known as the tattooed general was a man whose allies along the Yellow River included women of history who’d grown up on THE BALLAD OF MULAN, but no matter, Kingston didn’t tell the whites, the readers that counted. Four American big name universities co-signed her racism and gave her four honorary degrees, and Asian American Studies awarded her awards named after her Woman Warrior. It’s was as if Leni Riefenstahl attended the Premiere screening of her TRIUMPH OF THE WILL at the largest moviehouse in Israel.
Maxine Hong Kingston admitted her Mulan was a fake, “I want to give you an example of myths that I've changed,” she said to Kay Bonnetti, “When the woman warrior has the words carved on her back, that's actually a man's story.”
She said it. And whites from the university AAS to Pres. Bill Clinton are deaf, dumb and blind to her:
“It's about a man named Yüch Fei who had a vow carved on his back by his mother. Now, I took that and gave that to a woman. I gave a man's myth to a woman because it's part of the feminist war that's going on in THE WOMAN WARRIOR.”
I likened Kingston to Leni Riefenstahl, the brilliant Nazi film maker who made the film that mythologised Hitler and his helmeted men wearing and carrying the swastika in TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. A film so effective it was banned from American screens until 1949.
“That’s unfortunate,” the editor of the only Asian American magazine available to AA scholars to make their publishing requirements, says enigmatically. Does he recognize the aptness of my comparison? I ask him to reprint the Bonnetti interview in his, the only excuse for an AA magazine that’s sort of respected. He gets mad in front of the whites and Chinese-American writer, and charges me with favoring the torture of women. The whites turn away from me. He obviously has not read THE BALLAD OF MULAN. I shut my mouth rather than wreck the dinner for another Chinese-American writer. He musters up all his cowardice and impresses everybody, by saving AAStudies, and refusing to publish Kingston admitting she lied about Far Mulan.
AAStudies across the country, is based on Kingston’s sacred word, and the chicken publisher is not about to use her own words saying her word on China is a joke, and her joke on the Asians.
As Riefenstahl appearing with her film in Isreal would signal the end of Israel, the AAS awards to a confessed white racist was the end of Asian American Studies as an intellectual study. AAS is Sociology which is Christianity, a religious dogma.
In 1997, Kingston’s racist contempt for Chinese culture was made US policy when Pres. Clinton awarded this brave woman a US Humanities Medal. Then China itself proved it had given up being Chinese by joining the white racist Kingston and Amy Tan in falsifying the Chinese children’s story and streamed them both to Fudan University in Shanghai. They were freed of any responsibility to Chinese lit by embracing white racist beliefs of America and their insisting they were not “Chinese–American writers,” but American writers. And American lit and media and bookfests reciprocated. It was as if Isreal had invited Riefenstahl to show her TRIUMPH OF THE WILL in every Jewish home.
Where have the Chinese stories gone? To Asian American Studies? No. Asian American Studies has turned its back on Chinese children since it’s birth for forty years ago. To the AA and CA press? No. The AA press has turned their backs on Asian and Chinese children and the children’s story since it’s birth.
The stories have gone to Singapore. To C.C. Low’s house, Canfonian PTE. Comic book novels drawn to the from of 5th century opera scriptbook drawings of full stage action. To Asiapac PTE’ that sees the same stories as shattered glass in the eyes of the beholder. Jagged, irregularly framed panels. Close ups. Extreme close ups. Close-up jumping out of the borders, out of the panel. To Hong Kong, to Taiwan, to Korea, to Japan and isolated storytellers America.
CHINESE DON’T NEED CHINA TO BE CHINESE
I detect a veiled criticism of China dumping it’s Chinese culture in C.C. Low’s online “Our Publishing Objectives”
However, among the younger generation, few have the patience or interest to read the original works which cover lengthy volumes. As a result, they never have the opportunity to absorb the quintessence of the valuable Chinese cultural heritage.
In his description of the three gods Fu, Lu, Shou, (Fook, Look, Sow in Cantonese) the teacher tips into the storyteller troubled by the white man’s concept of God as superhuman, invulnerable and one. He takes to reducing the word the whites applied to their translation of “sun” (in Cantonese) to “god,” and pleads for a white demotion to “mascot.”
Fu Lu Shou and Cai Shen (God of Wealth) are the most popular targets of worship. Not many people, however, know clearly their backgrounds. Based on the widely circulated folk legends, this book intends to give our young readers a brief account of the origins of these deities. It is presented, for the first time, in the form of pictorial series with explanatory notes in English and in Chinese. Today, with the development of science and culture, people generally feel the legends of these fairies are ridiculous. However, pondering from another aspect, they will feel that man-made sculptures of gods have added a sense of pursuit and hope in life. In various distinguished gatherings, such as Olympic Games, "mascots" designed to represent the auspiciousness of such events are always set up. Judging by this practice, a society regarding gods and deities as "mascots" in life should give no cause for much criticism.
This was to explain characters written for Chinese children. Kids, the 108 Outlaw Stars had it right. What whites call “gods” are really Stars. Stars like Mickey Rooney and John Wayne. Our 36 Stars of Heavenly Spirits, and 72 Stars of Earthly Fiends are the stars of a football team.
His working for a precision of meaning in the difference between “god” and “mascot” may take awhile to strike the non-Chinese. He counts on the Chinese children of Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Canada and the USA to understand.
Some of us cringe. He’s letting too much show. The fool thinks he can speak for all Chinese? And he dares say “Yes.” He’s right. The children’s story is digested and redigested history gone to legend, to myth, to children’s story.
The smell of Ming gone bad is in the air again. It reminds me of George Woo who said people were likening him to Kwan Kung behind his back. Where is George now? I have the itch to write a book about him, but ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS has been already written, hasn’t it. Hasn’t it?
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTERVIEW WITH MAXINE HONG KINGSTON. 1986. By Kay B Bonetti. PP 33-46 in CONVERSATIONS WITH MAXINE HONG KINGSTON. Edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin. University Press of Mississippi. Jackson. (1998)
CREATION OF THE GODS. Translated by Gu Zhizhong. New World Press. Beijing (1992)
TAI KUNGS SECRET TEACHINGS, in THE SEVEN MILITARY CLASSICS OF ANCIENT CHINA, translation and commentary by Ralph D. Sawyher with Mei-chun Sawyer. Westview Press . Boulder (1993)
THREE KINGDOMS A Historical Novel. Attributed to Luo Guanzhong. Translated from the Chinese with Afterword and Notes by Moss Roberts. Foreign Languages Press/U of California Press. Beijing/Berkeley. (1994)
THREE KINGDOMS China’s Epic Drama by Lo Kuan-chung. Translated and edited by Moss Roberts. Pantheon Books. New York. (1976)
ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS. San Guo Yan Yi. Luo Guan Zhong. Translated by C.H. Brewitt-Taylor. Kelly & Walsh. Shanghai (1925) Graham Brash. Singapore (1985)
OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH by Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong. Translated by Sidney Sahpiro. Foreign Languages Press Beijing. (1980)
WATER MARGIN. Written by Shih Nai-an. Translated by J.H. Jackson. Commercial Press Ltd. Shanghai. (1937)
JOURNEY TO THE WEST, by Wu Cheng’en. Translated by W. J. F. Jenner. Foreign Language Press. Beijing. (1982)
JOURNEY TO THE WEST, translated and edited by Anthony C. Yu. U of Chicago Press. Chicago. 1980
GENERAL YUE FEI. A novel by Qian Cai of the Qing Dynasty. Translated by T. L. Yang. Joint Publishing (H.K.) Co., Ltd. (1995)
Comic book companies that have printings of all titles and more
ASIAPAC BOOKS PTE LTD
629 Aljunied Road
#04-0,6 Cititech Industrial Building
Singapore 1438
CANFONIAN PTE LTD
Thomson P.O. Box 16
Singapore 9157
Film
CHINESE RESTAURANTS, Director-Narrator Chuek Kwan. 15 half hour episodes. TISSA FILMS, Toronto, Canada Tel: +1.416.804.1527 Fax +1.416.231.7532 E-mail: films@tissa.com
Frank Chin , by John Goshert. Boise: Boise State University Western Writers Series, 2002.
"Frank Chin Is Not a Part of This Class! Thinking at the Limits of Asian American Literature." By John Goshert. Jouvert 4.3 (May 2000): unpaginated article (39 paragraphs).
A parson named Mason Locke Weems published two biographies of Washington after his death. A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits, of General George Washington (1800) and The Life of George Washington, with Curious Anecdotes Laudable to Himself and Exemplary to his Countrymen (1806), Weems’s story of the cherry tree was debunked by biographers intent on the real truth of Washington's life. Some favored dismissing the myth from Washington’s record. Others, however, intended to portray the story as apocryphal. A woman who remembered the story from her school days was quoted as saying, "If the tale isn't true, it should be.” The woman’s quote anticipates the editor tearing up his notes after listening to Senator Jimmy Stewart’s tale of not shooting Liberty Valence, in John Ford’s, 1962 film, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALENCE. The editor says "When the legend becomes fact," the editor says, "print the legend."
