A Poem Turned Into a Sword
A Mobius strip of Chinese women warriors, from my living room to the Spring and Autumn Annals and back again. Climbing Emei Mountain, Part II.
Maxine Hong Kingston is sitting in my living room, an event unexpected and yet somehow foreordained.
We have a history, of sorts. In 1976, my father delivered a rave review of her debut novel, The Woman Warrior, in the New York Times. They became friends. Near the end of her memoir, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, he is included in a column of names under the title “My Dead.”
I have now met her in person three times. Once, as a teenager, shortly after my father instructed me to read The Woman Warrior. Thirty-five or so years ago, in a random encounter in a computer store in downtown Berkeley, and most recently, this past June, in my living room, where she lent her gravitas to a literary salon/fundraiser for the independent publisher Red Hen Press.
The background for how this came to happen is mundane. A friend of mine works for Red Hen Press. Their Bay Area venue for a salon featuring Kingston and local author Andrew Lam fell through, and she asked -- without having any previous knowledge of my father’s connection -- if I would be willing to host. How could I refuse?
But as I frantically cleaned my bathrooms I sensed deeper currents at play. For starters, how strange was it that Maxine Hong Kingston should suddenly manifest herself in my life at exactly the same moment as I had embarked on a mini-research project exploring the history of Chinese women warriors, impelled by my curiosity about the proliferation of sword-wielding female heroines in the 1930s wuxia fantasy novel I have been reading for the last year?
As I mulled that oddity, I also contemplated the eye-opening possibility that my first serious introduction to Chinese culture may well have been when I read The Woman Warrior for the first time nearly 50 years ago. Was the course of my future charted at that moment?
Foreordained!
“The Woman Warrior” is itself anything but quiet. It is fierce intelligence, all sinew, prowling among the emotions. As a portrait of village life in pre‐Mao China, it is about as sentimental as Celine. As an account of growing up female and Chinese‐American in California, in a laundry of course, it is anti-nostalgic: it burns the fat right out of the mind. As a dream—of the “female avenger”—it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.
(The first paragraph of my father’s review of The Woman Warrior.)
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The most intriguing character in The Knight-errants of the Shu Mountains, (蜀山劍俠) isn’t even a teenager when we first meet her. Brave Jade（英瓊）is innocent, artless… and destined for great things. Unbeknownst to herself, she is endowed with natural abilities that make her a likely candidate for sword warrior ascension. In the endless warfare between the Emei gang (the good guys) and their many enemies, Brave Jade’s unrealized capabilities position her as a hotly sought after prize recruit. Whichever faction succeeds at enlisting her as a disciple will win the Shu Mountains lottery.
The bad guys don’t take any chances. At the tender age of eleven or twelve, Brave Jade is beguiled by a handsome young man who promises to teach her how to become a sword master, but who has in truth been ordered by his boss to kidnap her. With only the haziest idea of what is happening, she is suddenly zipping through the sky via the kidnapper’s flying sword towards the mountains separating Sichuan from Yunnan.
En route, Brave Jade’s abductor espies a battle taking place in the skies to the west that he recognizes as involving members of his own gang. He must come to their aid! He dumps Brave Jade in an abandoned temple, telling her he will be back the next day.
A curious lass, Brave Jade explores the temple and finds a chest containing a magic sword, which, it is later explained, was hidden in the temple decades ago by the now fully transcended founder of the Emei gang. Unfortunately, the opening of the chest triggers the emergence of four fearsome reanimated corpses and Brave Jade is soon in a battle for her life. But luckily, the sword, capable of independent action and quite bloodthirsty, doesn’t need much in the way of assistance from Brave Jade to defeat the zombies in short order.
Sword in hand, Brave Jade strikes out on her own. She makes her way to a mountain inhabited by a plenitude of bears and orangutans terrorized by a local giant. Brave Jade kills the giant; in gratitude, the leader of the orangutans presents her with an offering of magic fruit that only grows on this mountain. The fruit boosts Brave Jade’s natural powers. Other would-be transcendents normally require decades of alchemical self-refinement and immortality cultivation to achieve the same progress that Brave Jade manages over just a few days.
The orangutan leader also eats some fruit, gains the power of human speech, and swears himself to her lifelong service (and, eventually, manages to obtain two magic swords for himself!) Not long after, Brave Jade obtains the allegiance of a sentient giant vulture, capable of carrying both the orangutan and Brave Jade on its back, acquires as loyal retainers two Daoist adepts who were once evil but have returned to righteousness, and is accepted into the Emei gang.
Indeed, in the grotto-heavens of Mount Emei, the gossip among the younger generation is nonstop. Not only was the magic sword purposely hidden in the abandoned temple by the Emei gang’s founder to be found by Brave Jade (it was foreordained!), but the scuttlebutt holds that Brave Jade has the potential to be the greatest sword hero of them all!
Still a pre-teen, she boasts an entourage of four, wields one of the most powerful magic swords ever created, and has slaughtered zombies, a giant, and an alarmingly large number of human evil-doers.
If anyone is the main protagonist of The Knight-errants of the Shu Mountains, it is Brave Jade. But one of the more striking aspects to this novel is that she is hardly the only female heroine to fill its pages. I haven’t counted the words, but my strong impression after reading the first third of this epic saga is that considerably more ink is spilled describing the exploits of women than men.
This caught me by surprise, given not just the huge constraints imposed on women in Confucian China, particularly in the Qing Dynasty, which had fallen only a few decades before The Knight-errants of the Shu Mountains started being serialized in Chinese newspapers, but also in comparison to the comparative state of gender equity in Western fantasy. The Knight-errants of the Shu Mountains is occasionally referred to as the The Lord of the Rings of Chinese fantasy, but the two epics are not remotely in the same ballpark when it comes to their respective total of strong women characters. When I started reading fantasy in the 1970s, the number of women featured as protagonists – actual weapon-wielding, death dealing warriors – was vanishingly small.
There was a puzzle here.
“Of all the Tang tales about swordsmanship and knight-errantry, “Nie Yinniang” arguably was the most successful and influential…. While it may have directly influenced the general development of xia fiction, and not just the sub-tradition of female knight-errantry, in the character Nie Yinniang it established the actual ‘archetype’ of the swordswoman in an aesthetically and ideologically stunning manner.”
The Sword or the Needle: The Female Knight-errant (xia) in Traditional Chinese Narrative, Roland Altenburger
In The Sword or the Needle, Roland Altenburger makes a meticulous case that Chinese fictional treatments of female knight-errants enjoy a venerable history. The first appearance of the trope dates all the way back to the Eastern Han (25-220 A.D.) publication of the Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue. These annals regale us with the tale of the Maiden of Yue, a woman who perfects her fencing skills against a mysterious ape and proceeds to dazzle the King of Yue with her abilities.
Side-note 1: There is nothing at all strange about encountering sword-wielding apes in Chinese wuxia fiction. It’s a 2000-year old tradition!
Side-note 2: One of the last stories written by Jin Yong (aka Louis Cha), the grand dean of 20th century wuxia fiction-writing, was a reworking of the Maiden of Yue story (越女劍). I found it in a slim volume that also includes a selection of non-fiction essays written by Jin Yong, one of which expresses the author’s great admiration for the novel The Knight-errants of the Shu Mountains. And that reference, in turn, was the catalyst that inspired me to locate a copy of The Knight-errants of the Shu Mountains and start reading it. So, for those keeping track, a Jin Yong short story about China’s first fictional woman warrior led me to an epic 1930s novel about a whole brigade of bad ass women warriors, but this entire convoluted journey may have started when I read Kingston’s The Woman Warrior which is probably most famous for its retelling of the Mulan woman warrior legend.
We’ll get to Mulan in the next chapter.
Altenburger says the first true flowering of knight-errant fiction occurred in the latter half of the Tang Dynasty, fueled by a period of disarray.
It was not purely incidental that the first major xia narratives appeared around 800, shortly after the Tang empire was shaken to the roots by the An Lushan rebellion…. The rival warlords hired experts in the martial techniques whom they employed as bodyguards and assassins. The Tang literary image of the xia emerged from its background of a militarization of society and from a high valuation of martial skills.
This makes sense. But the plot thickens when we consider the emergence at this time of stories about female knight errants, most notably the swordswoman Nie Yinniang, whose tale has been told and retold multiple times over the last thousand or so years.
[Nie Yinniang] “tells the story of General Nie Feng’s daughter Yinniang who is abducted by a Buddhist nun at the age of ten. When she is returned to her parents, five years later, she offers a fantastic account of how the nun taught her a magic sword technique which enables her to assassinate evildoers in society.”
Altenburger suggests that the enduring popularity of tales about female knight-errants in China is due, at least in part, to their transgressiveness; their breaking of Confucian norms; the shock value, of say, a woman holding in her bloody hands the severed head of the corrupt official who did her family wrong. But when we take a closer look at the Tang dynasty – that one Chinese dynasty where women are reputed to have enjoyed more autonomy than ever since in the imperial era – we encounter something far more interesting than mere transgressiveness. We see real live-action role models for fictional Chinese women warriors.
End of Part II.
Next up: Princess Pingyang’s army, the tomb of the Xianbei women warriors, and the connection between the legend of Mulan and the reality of Empress Wu, the only woman to have ever ruled China under her own name.
