One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

So no writing on women on wuxia yet, but I’ve been thinking that I’m going to eliminate Project A from the article.  Both The Young Warriors and Eagle Shooting Heroes are period wuxia stories, whereas Project A is turn of the century.  Plus, The Young Warriors has Mama Yang, which allows me to talk about motherhood and the relationship between mothers and kung fu like I was with Project A.

On a related note, I remember reading an article maybe by King-kok Cheung a long time ago on how writers like Frank Chin focused on the warrior Chinese legend as a reflection of Chinese masculinity, and completely ignored the scholar.  In my umpteenth watching of Red Cliff and reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I’m thinking of maybe writing something on masculinity and the strategist.  I polled my class, and while their favorite brother is Guan Yu, their favorite character is Zhuge Liang (mine too! it has nothing to do with the fact that Takeshi Kaneshiro playing him in the movie).  They like him because he is clever and I just wonder if this is the model of a different mode of Chinese masculinity, whereas one is a great man because you are smart.  Hmmmm.   Reminds me of a line from Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle, “You ain’t hard. Calculus is hard!”