Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film

Notes

197 Notes Introduction 1. This list of adaptation scholars is by no means exhaustive. Some other very useful references include Robert Richardson (1969); a series of Chinese essays on adaptation published by the editorial department of Film Art (1992); William Ferrell (1995);Mikhail Iampolski (1998);Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan,eds.(1999);Corrigan,Timothy,ed.(1999);Martin Huang,ed.(2004); John Desmond and Peter Hawkes, eds. (2006); and James Welsh and Peter Lev, eds. (2007). Chapter 1: Wang Dulu and Ang Lee 1. Dudley Andrew. 1984. The Concept of FilmTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 97. 2. CrouchingTiger,Hidden Dragon not only won four Oscars in 2001,including the “Best Foreign Language Film,” and seventy-two other film awards, but it is also “the most commercially successful foreign-language film in U.S. history and the first Chinese-language film to find a mass American audience” (Klein 2004: 18). For further references, see StephenTeo’s interview with James Schamus (Teo 2001b); and Christina Klein (2004).The film has also received an unprecedented amount of critical attention. See, for example, Richard Corliss (2000),Felicia Chan (2003),James Schamus (2004),Andrian Martin (2005),Fran Martin (2005), Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar (2006), and L. S. Kim (2006), among others. 3. Although scholars have pointed out Ang Lee’s indebtedness to the Chinese wuxia cinematic tradition,pioneered by such masters as King Hu and Zhang Che in the 1960s and 1970s (Teo 2005a; Martin 2005), they have not studied Lee’s connection toWang Dulu (1909–1977).This is due in part to the fact that martial arts fiction has not had the same impact on the global market as martial arts cinema, the popularity of which is evident in the subsequent blockbuster successes of Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004), Chen Kaige’s The Promise (2005), and Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet (2006). Lee is rightly credited with helping reintroduce the wuxia genre to the world, but it is important to note that he has also helped redefine the collaborative relations between the two most popular “vernacular” forms of Chinese storytelling, martial arts cinema and martial arts fiction. 4. For studies of martial arts fiction as a narrative genre, see James J.Y. Liu (1967); Chen Yongming and Joseph Liu (1998); and John Christopher Hamm (2005). 5. Jen’s relation with her governess Jade Fox is sexually ambiguous. In addition to their intimate daily interaction—hair-brushing and undergarmentmaking —Jade Fox further proposes to bring Jen with her as she travels around jianghu—the anarchistic world of knights-errant and criminals.They will “keep each other company,” Jade Fox states several times in the movie. 6. Jianghu is a unique term used extensively in Chinese martial arts fiction and film. It literally means “rivers and lakes,” but allegorically it means a utopia (or dystopia, depending on the situation) that allows knights-errant and vagabonds to coexist. I will explain in more detail the full significance of the term later in the text. 7. The original novel was published in 1941 as part of a newspaper serial called Crane Iron Series (He tie xi lie). The series was later republished in five volumes by Shanghai’s Li li shu ju in 1948 (Sang 2005: 304).All of my citations are from the 2001 edition published byYuan jing, and the translations of Wang Dulu’s novel from Chinese into English are mine. 8. Given the extensive influence of Freudian theory on the works of Lee and Wang, it seems plausible to suggest that both artists interpret the notion of yi in a way that parallels Freud’s definition of the superego: both yi and the superego function as cultural authorities that exist to consolidate the power of civilization and police wayward, instinctual behavior. 9. There are many other specific associations of bao with the lady knighterrant ’s chivalrous moral function.The Tang tale “The Merchant’s Wife” (Gu ren qi) and Pu Songling’s seventeenth-century short story “The Lady KnightErrant ” (Xia nü) in Stories of the Strange (Liaozhai zhiyi) are two of the most famous. More generally, the notion of bao is often attributed to Sima Qian (ca. 145–86 BCE)—one of China’s greatest historians,who lived in the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE).In Sima’s Biographies of theAssassin Retainers (Ci ke lie zhuan), an assassin,Yu Rang, famously pronounces the meanings of bao as follows: “A woman makes herself beautiful for those who appreciate her...