The Headwaters of Dragon Ball Z

An illustration from Jin Yong’s “Sword Stained with Royal Blood”

While eating breakfast this morning, I read an obituary of the Japanese manga writer Akira Toriyama, most famous around the world for the anime TV shows Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, which were adapted from his work. I was fondly reminiscing the many hours spent watching Dragon Ball Z on the Cartoon Network with my youngest child, Eli, in the early 2000s, but was distracted when I read the following sentence:

In the early 1980s, inspired by his love of Hong Kong kung fu films, particularly those of Jackie Chan, Toriyama created the Dragon Boy series, which tells the story of Tangtong, a young boy with martial arts skills who is tasked with escorting a princess back to her home country. 

Huh, I thought to myself. For the last six months or so, I’ve been spending an hour or two almost every night reading a kung fu, (more properly, wuxia) novel by Jin Yong, the writer whose 15 novels published in the 1950s and 1960s are widely acknowledged as enormously influential on the emergence of the Hong Kong kung fu film scene. The connection amused me. I texted Eli: “life is a circle!”

And then I had one of those moments when the preexisting plan for the day takes a sharp swerve. Jin Yong is no stranger to this newsletter; see The Cleaver and Xinjiang or Who Ever Heard of a Square Moon? But the anime intersection provoked an epiphany: If Jin Yong had indirectly inspired one of manga and anime’s most beloved creators, then that meant Jin Yong had played a role in my own career!

Because anime introduced me to the Internet.

In the summer of 1993 I was a staff writer at the alternative weekly, The Bay Guardian. One morning, my editor handed me a flyer advertising an upcoming anime convention in Oakland, and asked me to do a preview of it for the next issue. I knew nothing at all about anime, which, in 1993, had nowhere near the cultural prominence in the U.S. that it was to gain later. But I was game. I dug up a phone number for the conference organizer, met with him, learned about the mostly Asian-American otaku nerds who were the mainstays of anime fandom in California, and then asked him how I could get in touch with some of these otaku. Oh, he said, “they’re all on the Internet.”

The Internet? I did not have direct access to the Internet in the summer of 1993, but for reasons too complicated to explain here, I did have a Prodigy account which I almost never used. I logged on and quickly found a forum devoted to discussion of anime. Within minutes I realized that I had stumbled on an incredible resource for reporting. In just a couple of hours I learned much more about anime then I could have in a week of off-line research. I decided I needed to learn more about this thing called “the Internet.”

Within a month, I was trolling through FTP archives and clicking my way through Gopher menus via an Internet account I finagled through my wife’s status as a grad student at UC Berkeley. Six months later I wrote a feature for the Guardian about a new magazine that had just started up in San Francisco: Wired. And then I quit the Guardian and landed an assignment from Wired to write about Taiwan’s computer hardware manufacturing miracle. I even invented my own beat: CyberAsia. And in 1995, in what was at that point my career highlight, I wrote a big feature on anime for Wired, titled Heads Up Mickey.

That single question: where can I find some otaku to talk to, launched my entire career as a technology reporter.

The thread is fragile – from an anime convention to Dragon Ball Z to Hong Kong kung fu movies to Jin Yong novels. But I have decided that it is real.

Because sometimes I wonder why I am spending my evenings reading a Chinese-language fantasy novel set during the fall of the Ming dynasty. It seems a little eccentric, even it has proven extremely effective at accelerating my Chinese vocabulary acquisition.  But now that I see Jin Yong as the headwaters of my flow, I realize that when I read him I am returning to the Source. There’s nothing accidental or eccentric about it at all. It makes perfect sense.

I will end this perhaps excessively self-indulgent post with the lead sentence of an excerpt from an article I wrote for the Far Eastern Economic Review in the summer of 1995 titled A Hundred Pages Bloom. I have always been proud of this piece because I am pretty sure it is one of the very first English-language articles reporting on China’s initial embrace of the Internet, but I had forgotten until today that I had somehow managed to sneak references to both a Hong Kong movie and tequila into the lead paragraph.

Qing dynasty snuff bottles, World Cup Table Tennis results, the complete text of the Confucian Analects: Chinese culture is thriving in cyberspace, without apparent rhyme or reason. Web pages on terra-cotta soldiers from the First Emperor of the Qin dynasty are just a few clicks from a recipe for the "tequila slammers" downed by actor Chow Yun Fat in the Hong Kong thriller "The Killer."

Chow Yun Fat, incidentally, played the wuxia hero Linghu Chong in a 1984 Hong Kong TV series adaptation of Jin Yong’s novel, The Smiling, Proud Wanderer.

You see, life is a circle.