Looking at Hong Kong: Jin Yong's Return of the Condor Heroes & Chang Cheh's Brave Archer and His Mate

Abstract

Although Jin Yong's martial arts novels are lauded as the common language of Chinese around the world, Return of the Condor Heroes and Chang Cheh's adaptation, Brave Archer and His Mate (1982) write a different discourse of Hong Kong identity that fragments Chineseness. Both the original serialization and the revised novel posit the beholder of power/knowledge as the object of the gaze. Instead of the gendered gaze is one that subverts social hierarchies. The film, apathetic towards identity politics, instead averts the subversion with an undifferentiated gaze. Father and mother absence in the novel and film further exemplify how Jin Yong's great reversal proposes an imagined China that boasts equality rather than familial hierarchy. Situated in debates over the placing of Jin Yong within axes of source/adaptation, highbrow/lowbrow, tradition/modernity, China/Hong Kong, the fragmentation becomes not merely of Chineseness, but also Hong Kong identity, and even the notion of the work.