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A Story Is Always Born Twice

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A Story Is Always Born Twice Sandra Camacho RoCH: Fandom and the nostalgic return So it starts with looking back, it starts with a return. susan pui san lok’s (b. 1972) RoCH (Return of the Condor Heroes) Fans & Legends began with a wish of the London-born artist to look back at her Chinese ancestry; to relate to a culture that, simultaneously, was and wasn’t her own. To make this return she took not to history books, or to unpractised traditions and customs, but instead looked to what had always connected her – and the Chinese diaspora – to their past and to each other: the television adaptations of Jin Yong’s wuxia 1. Tere are many names a project can take: it can begin with its infuencing roots, its conceptual basis, and it can be modifed as the work is adapted or assumes diferent shapes – or lives. RoCH Fans & Legends took its name from two elements: the title of one of Yong’s most popular novels – Return of the Condor Heroes; and the fan community that surrounds it, that ardently discusses and is inspired by it, and transforms it into RoCH. Fandom is key to RoCH, as it is key to lok’s project, as it is key in understanding the work. But let us continue with the 1 Te simplest translation of wuxia – with wu denoting martial or military energies, and xia meaning a heroic or chivalrous individual – is as a genre of literature that primarily focuses on the tales of martial art heroes in ancient China (to whom the closest Western approximation would be that of the ‘errant knight’). Having began in literature, wuxia came nonetheless to encapsulate, from the early 20th century, flm and television genres. Sandra Camacho, RCH: Fandom and the nostalgic return issue of names for a moment. Originally writen in traditional Chinese, and published in serialised form from 20 May 1959 to 5 July 1961 in the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao (also owned by Jin Yong – but we will come to that), Return of the Condor Heroes is the second part of Yong’s Te Condor Trilogy. With no authorised translation of the novel in English, it was only with the publication of volumes 9-12 of the 36-volume Collected Works of Jin Yong (1975-1981) in 1976 that an ofcial English title was released: Te Giant Eagle and Its Companion. So how did RoCH come to exist? It is an explanation that can only be found in fan forums; and senior member bliss expresses it most eloquently: LOCH and ROCH came about from the TV Serials that most of us grew up watching and have ingrained in our minds. Legend of the Condor Heroes came frst, and is a somewhat free interpretation of the name Eagle Shooting Heroes Story. Ten, since the next one was the sequel, they probably just got lazy and called it Return of the Condor Heroes 2. So it was not the author that produced the name that has come to defne even the original text, it was the fan community and their appropriation, not of the book, but of the television adaptations. And it is through appropriation – of the novel, of the television and flmic adaptations, of the fan translations and their creative production, and of a collective archive – that lok’s project has come to exist. Lok’s RoCH Fans & Legends began as an element of a larger project – Our Ancestors – and had its frst public display as RoCH Fans in early 2013, as part of Te Global Archive exhibition in Hanmi Gallery, London 3. Here it occupied the forth four of the 2 ‘How did the titles LOCH and ROCH come about since it’s not original?’, <htp://www.spcnet.tv/ forums/showthread.php/11419-How-did-the-titles-LOCH-and-ROCH-come-about-since-it-s-not- original#.VrID5VIqK2w> [accessed 12 February 2017] 3 Te exhibition was curated by Marquard Smith, in collaboration with Emma Brasó and Nina Privedi, and ran from the 24th of January to the 9th of February 2013. Besides susan pui san lok, it featured the works of Young-In Hong (b.1972), Shezad Dawood (b.1974), and Tom Corby (b.1966) and Gavin Baily (b.1971). M. SMITH, ‘A Minor Juridical Disturbance in the Global Archive’, 140 A story is always born twice gallery: printouts of Google Image search results covered the walls from top to botom; a television set played excerpts from the 1983 Hong Kong television adaptation – subtitled with fan translations; multiple translations of the work’s title were writen on a wall (almost as if their were part of an enchantment that needed to be cast for these heroes to fnally return); colourful origami condors were placed in a circle on the foor; and a wing of a condor was drawn in black marker on the window, framing the building in front. It is this frst iteration of the project, and the issues it raises – on authorship, on fan communities and diaspora, on nostalgia, on the archive – that will be analysed throughout this essay 4. But perhaps we should begin at the origins; perhaps we should begin with Jin Yong, with Hong Kong and with displacement. Jin Yong: From Hong Kong to the World In 1948, before he came to be known by his pen name – Jin Yong –, Louis Cha (Zha Liangyong) relocated to Hong Kong to assist in the establishment of the local edition of Shanghai’s newspaper Dagong bao 5. Not long afer, in 1949, the People’s Republic of China was founded and Louis Cha, as many other Chinese nationals, chose to remain in the British colony. In the years that followed they were joined by thousands of others, with Hong Kong’s population growing from 1.600.000 in late-1946 to over 2.300.000 in the spring of 1950 6. A number of these people – MaHKUscript: Journal of Fine Art Research, 1 (1): 9, pp. 1-9, <DOI: htp://dx.doi.org/10.5334/mjfar.1> [accessed 12 February 2017] 4 Since this frst exhibition, elements of the project have been published as part of a special edition on the subject of the archive of the Journal of Visual Culture – S. PUI SAN LOK, RoCH Fans and Legends (Entries), «Journal of Visual Culture», December 2013, 12, pp.364-374. Te project has also been recently developed into RoCH Fans & Legends for an exhibition at Derby QUAD (Derby, UK) (19 September – 15 November 2015). 5 Born in 1924 in Haining, Zhejiang, to a family of scholars, Louis Cha initiated his career as a journalist in 1945 for Dongnan ribao in Hangzhou. During his frst decade in Hong Kong Yong also collaborated in flm reviews and editorials, screenplay writing, and flm direction. 6 J. CHRISTOPHER HAMM, Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts Novel, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005, p.43. 141 Sandra Camacho, RCH: Fandom and the nostalgic return susan pui san lok’s family included – continued their journey to setle in other countries – such as Taiwan, Australia, Canada, the US, and the UK 7. In their displacement, these individuals could be seen through the lens of the exiled, but perhaps a diferent terminology might be beter suited: Exile suggests pining for home; diaspora suggests networks among compatriots. Exile may be solitary, but diaspora is always collective. Diaspora suggests real or imagined relationships among scatered fellows, whose sense of community is sustained by forms of communication and contact such as kinship, pilgrimage, trade, travel, and shared culture (language, ritual, scripture, or print and electronic media) 8. Tese networked communities might not have been pining for home, but they continued to establish relationships between themselves, and with their origins. Part of what allowed them to do so was their shared cultural values – Jin Yong fction included. Perhaps, as lok mentions, «aspirations to setle and return may not be contradictory, and nostalgia may be understood in more complex terms than a backward gaze»9. Perhaps Yong’s works were particularly appealing to these communities – even if they were initially consumed through the television adaptations – because they ofered a mythical representation of China: «nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns towards a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality» 10. Jin Yong’s stories were centred on noble actions, fantastical fght scenes, impossible romances, moments of confict from 7 In the 1950s the UK was a particularly popular destination, as it allowed Commonwealth citizens free access to setle. 8 J. DURHAM PETERS, ‘Nomadism, Diaspora, Exile: Te Stakes of Mobility within the Western Canon.’ in House, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place. ed. H. NAFICY, London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 17-41, p. 20. 9 M. SMITH, S. PUI SAN LOK, Journeys, Documenting, Indexing, Archives, and Practice-Based Research: A Conversation with Susan pui san lok, «Art Journal», Vol. 65, No. 4 (Winter, 2006), pp. 18-35, p.35. 10 S. STEWART, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham: Duke University Press, 1984, p.23. 142 A story is always born twice Chinese history 11, and heroes that start as outsiders until the moment they prove themselves worthy of belonging to the community 12. Tese were «lonely, homeless, fatherless [heroes], ceaselessly wandering on an endless journey» 13. Tey travelled a world that was always just on the margin of society, the world of jianghu – the world of Rivers and Lakes. Perhaps the nostalgia that was felt was not for the place that had had to be abandoned, but for a place that had never been.
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