The Mystery of the Returned Pearl
A footnote about an wuxia footnote
In my ongoing research into the roots of Chinese wuxia story-telling, I’ve been reading James J. Y. Liu’s The Chinese Knight-Errant, a history of representations, both nonfictional and fictional, of China’s longstanding tradition of Robin Hood-esque chivalric adventurers, first published in 1967.
I was delighted this morning when I reached the point in Liu’s narrative when he discusses The Chivalrous Swordsmen of the Szechwan Mountains, the as-yet-untranslated epic wuxia novel written in the 1930s that the legendary Jin Yong called one of his greatest inspirations and which has been my evening companion for several months now.
“Among contemporary writers of this type of fiction,” writes Liu, “Huan-chu-lou-chu (‘Master of the Pavilion of the Returned Pearl’) is probably the best. Although the incidents he describes are all wildly impossible, he endows them with a kind of logic of their own so that one tends to forget their absurdity.”
If you, like me, are puzzled by the twists and turns of the pen name “Master of the Pavilion of the Returned Pearl,” a sobriquet that testifies, once again, to post-Babelian communications chaos, well, oh happy day, there is a footnote!
“Rumour has it that he adapted this pseudonym after a favourite concubine named Pearl deserted him, in the hope she might return.”
“Rumour has it” is hardly the kind of bedrock on which one might dare to build peer-reviewable truth, but I don’t care. I love this! With a stroke of Liu’s pen/sword, obscurity becomes clarity. Babel is defeated!
Huan-chu-lou-chu, heretofore an enigma, suddenly becomes a real person with a beating heart, a man of passion and regret.
Everyone mourns when deserted by a lover. But all too few of us memorialize that moment with a 5000-page saga about flying swordsmen and swordswomen in the Shu mountains. I see you, Huan-chu-lou-chu!
And… a footnote to a footnote about a footnote: This is why I highly recommend digging sixty-year-old books out of the stacks of the UC Berkeley Library at every possible opportunity. On this path one finds enlightenment.
Hooray for libraries!