Read Part III.
This is a real thing that happened:
In the fall of 1935, a woman by the name of Shi Jianqio discovered that her sworn enemy, ex-warlord Sun Chuanfang, had become a leading member of the Tianjin Qingxiu lay-Buddhist society on Nanma Road. Shi made several visits to the society’s congregation site to learn of Sun’s schedule, and on the morning of November 13, 1935, she planned to take action. Sun was scheduled to lead the sutra-recitation session that day, but things did not seem promising for Shi at first. The retired militarist was late because of the rain. And, when Sun finally appeared, Shi had to hire a car and rush home to the British Concession to retrieve her pistol. She later told authorities that she had been reluctant to carry a gun across the borders of the concessions unless she was sure Sun would be there. On her return to the lay society, Shi finally met with success. She positioned herself behind the kneeling ex-military leader and shot him three times. While the prayer hall descended into chaos and terror, Shi Jianqiao maintained her cool and triumphantly declared, “I have avenged the murder of my father. Do not fear. I will not hurt anyone else, nor will I run away.” She then surrendered…
From Eugenia Lean’s magnificent Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China.
After the warlord Sun Chuanfang ordered her father brutally decapitated and publicly exposed, Shi Jianqiao plotted her revenge for ten long years. Following the deed, while waiting for the police to arrest her, she distributed to the shocked witnesses a poem she had written for that very moment.
I dare not forget the revenge of my father for a single moment; It breaks my heart to watch my mother’s temples turn gray. I am loath to let her suffer any longer, The opportunity should not be squandered. I cannot bear to look back to ten years ago. Things have remained the same, only the scenery has changed. I arrive at the Society not to find the Buddha, I seek death, not immortality.
During her ensuing year-long, headline-making, mass-media enthralling trial Shi Jianqiao explained that she had been inspired by tales of female knight-errantry.
More from Eugenia Lean:
It was telling, for example, that Shi cited as her primary source of inspiration Shang Sanguan, a female knight-errant whose eponymous story was immortalized in Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi. In Pu’s tale, Shang Sanguan is both heroically dutiful and virtuously chaste. A young woman of sixteen, she rejects marriage and leaves home in order to avenge her father’s murder.
Even Shi’s name is a nom de guerre chosen to evoke derring-do. The word jian (劍) means sword and the word qiao (翹) means to raise or be outstanding.
The knight-errantry tradition thus not only legitimated Shi Jianqiao’s decision to engage in extralegal actions to seek reprisal on her own, but also imbued them with a heroic flair… Shi Jianqiao was also no doubt attracted to the xia [knight errant] tradition because of the tremendous moral and political possibilities it offered women. Classical female heroines were at once subversive in their public lifestyles and orthodox in their embodiment of female virtue.
In my last installment I went to some length to track down some real-world examples of women warriors in Chinese history. But I do have to acknowledge that one of the reasons why tales of female knight errantry, of women with astonishing, even magical powers of kung fu and swordsmanship, are so enduringly popular is because they transgress the normal social order; they are, in the Chinese literary lexicon, “strange” and “unusual.”
And yet their narrative power was so great that they inspired real-world developments. Far be it from me to endorse acts of assassination but the influence of fictional narratives of knight errantry on Shi Jianqiao is a classic example of the power of representation.
This is also a real thing that happened: last night a fictional KPop band made their first live appearance on The Tonight Show.
KPop Demon Hunters is the most fun pop-cultural phenomenon I have witnessed in a long time. The global enthusiasm for Netflix’s s most popular film ever has been so over the top that the entire soundtrack has dominated the Billboard Hot 100 for months, while the song Golden is one of the world’s biggest smash hits in memory.
The song and movie have proven so popular that fantasy had to be made flesh. The artists who contributed their vocals to the fictional band HUNTR/X had never actually performed the song together in person; for the film, they contributed individual vocals that were mixed together in the studio.
But when you create a song that becomes a number one world-wide hit for ten straight weeks, the logic of capitalism is irresistible. EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami spent the last couple of weeks rehearsing together so they could perform as a real live band.
My guess is that The Tonight Show will not be their last live appearance. (Indeed, Bad Bunny announced this morning that he is inviting HUNTR/X to perform with him at the Super Bowl).
AWho can say what this literal act of reincarnation will inspire? Judging by the number of TikToks made by crying Korean-American women that have been popping up in my feed this morning… this act of representation carries real heft.
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When Netflix started recommending KPop Demon Hunters to me immediately after its debut in June my first reaction was negative. What kind of AI-generated juvenile clickbait bullshit was this? But the algorithm knew better than me. After all, I’ve been a big fan of anime for quite a long time. And of course for the entire past year I have spent a couple of hours every night reading a Chinese fantasy novel from the 1930s featuring female knight errants with magical superpowers fighting evil! I was obviously in the demo!
To top it off, in recent weeks I’ve been working on an essay for this newsletter series striving to grapple with what the enormous – greater than ever before -- popularity of fantasy in the world today. What does it say about contemporary existence? What are we trying to escape? Is escape possible? Is escape bad?
KPop Demon Hunters and Sword-Warriors of the Shu Mountains may not be directly connected (although I could make an argument that they are!) but they surely draw from the same deep cultural East Asian well. Due diligence required that I form an opinion.
So of course I ended up watching KPop Demon Hunters. And I love it. In fact, I’ve watched it twice. And I’ve listened to Golden more times than I can count.
Because right now, more than anything, we need joy. If that joy arrives in the shape of kick-ass women beating down demons, so be it.
Because the demons are real.
Fascinating. Now I have to check out another pop phenomenon to see what the fuss is about. !Both “Barbie” and the “Taylor Swift Eras Tour” movie were worth it; this sounds at least as fun—kind of a combination of both, only different…