My planned next installment in the Climbing Mount Emei series has been embarrassingly delayed because it has unexpectedly expanded into an exploration of the significance of Daoist self-cultivation in the commercially exploding universe of Chinese online literature and gaming. This phenomenon not only has simply gargantuan implications for understanding how technology and culture are intersecting in the current moment but also, to my astonishment, is directly connected to The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains, the 1930s fantasy novel set in Sichuan that has been one of my chief obsessions for the last year.
I hope to deliver this relentlessly metastasizing installment in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, my research into Li Shoumin, the author of The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains, has unearthed some interesting nuggets that seemed worth sharing on their own.
Li Shoumin was born in Sichuan in 1902. His father was a government official, so Li grew up trained in the Chinese classics; he is said to have been an excellent calligrapher and well-schooled in Chinese poetry. After his father died, Li was forced to support his family. One of his first jobs was as as a secretary for the general Fu Zuoyi at his garrison headquarters in the northeastern metropolis of Tianjin. Although General Fu is said to have appreciated Li’s “imaginative powers,” the young poetry lover did not find military life congenial and quickly moved on to a job at the Tianjin post office. But the salary at the post was insufficient for Li to support his mother, so he found yet another job working as teacher for the family of a fellow Sichuanese native, Sun Zhongshan, the wealthy chairman of a successful banking company.
Plot twist! According to a memoir published by two of Li’s sons Li soon fell in love with the banker’s second youngest daughter, Sun Jingxun, and the feeling appears to be have been entirely reciprocal. This utterly outraged the father, to the point that he offered Li a cash payment to leave his establishment and never return. Li rejected the offer, was kicked out of the house, but managed to carry on a surreptitious correspondence with his lover for a few ensuing weeks or months. When the banker discovered the correspondence, he bribed the British foreign concession police to arrest Li.
Li was released from prison by the intercession of a powerful friend, and Sun Jingxun ran away from home to live with him, impelling the banker to have Li arrested for a second time, this time on the grounds of “abducting” his daughter.
The ensuing court case attracted great attention. Reporters from all of Tianjin’s papers attended.
And here is where I really started paying attention. The memoir by the two sons describes their mother as “a woman who was bold and decisive in action, exercised her own judgment, and would rather break than bend.” (My translation.)
These characteristics are amply illustrated by what transpired at court.
The prosecutor initiated public proceedings, and my father was about to answer the charges, when suddenly a woman’s voice could be heard from the side. “Qing deng yixia! (Please wait a moment!)”
The assembled crowd turned to watch, and Sun Jingxun came forward. In the glare of the public eye, she carried herself with the assurance of one who is convinced that justice is on her side. She addressed the prosecutor:
“I am 24 years old, I have been an adult for quite some time already, and I am fully capable of making my own decisions; Li Shoumin and I are exquisitely compatible, and we want to be together. How can this possibly be called an ‘abduction?”
Case closed.
As I have noted several times in this series, one of the more intriguing things about The Knight Errants of the Shu Mountains is its proliferation of strong and engaging female characters; a fact of literary life that wouldn’t be matched in Western fantasy until many decades later. I’ve now read 40 percent of this 5000-page novel and so far, the preponderance of the plot revolves around the stories of these women. And while some of them are paragons of serene virtue who also happen to be skilled warriors, others are willful and prone to impulsive action. All are decidedly mistresses of their own fate… much like Sun Jingxun.
With the court case over, Li Shoumin soon faced the responsibility of supporting not only his mother, but a new and soon to be growing family. Deliverance came from a friend who had recently taken over the managing editor job at Tianfeng Bao, a Tianjin newspaper. It was the custom at Tianfeng Bao to always have two different wuxia novels concurrently serialized in its pages. One narrative had just ended. Would Li be interested in writing a new one? The compensation, reportedly, would be decent.
And thus was born The Knight Errants of the Shu Mountains, a epic saga that begins with the arrival of a young girl and her father arriving in the Sichuan Mountains, after fleeing the disarray of the Ming-Qing transition. That young girl, Brave Jade, ends up becoming one of the greatest heroes of the age.
You could easily describe her as “a woman who was bold and decisive in action, exercised her own judgment, and would rather break than bend.”
You could even speculate, if you were a romantic like me, that the 5000 pages of The Knight Errants of the Shu Mountains, which Li labored over for seventeen years, only putting down the pen in 1949, when the victorious Communist regime banned the entire wuxia genre as feudal superstition, was just one really really long love letter.
End of Part IV.