"How did a person with a gentle disposition such as yourself come to write such hot-blooded martial arts novels?" the Japanese scholar Daisaku Ikeda inquired of Jin Yong.

The curiosity of Jin Yong's scholars and fans extends well beyond this. A host of questions arise, from the source of his creative inspiration and story plots to how he writes about feelings or history, to his experience in many different realms of life-cuisine, medicine, the martial arts, or such gentlemanly attainments as music, chess, calligraphy and painting. Jin Yong has answers to them all.

Being a novelist was something that Jin Yong accidentally stumbled into. When he was young, he aspired to travel the world, and he wanted with all his heart to become a diplomat. After graduating from high school, he tested into the foreign relations department at the Central Political University in Chongqing. Later on, he became involved in a conflict with some other students and was expelled. Subsequently, he took up studies at Shanghai's Soochow University, studying international law.

In 1947 he tested into a job translating international news for Shanghai's Ta Kung Pao. In 1948 Ta Kung Pao was resituated in Hong Kong, and Jin Yong moved there as well. In 1950 he had the opportunity to work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing. But the Ministry of Foreign Affairs first asked him to host visiting international tours and foreign dignitaries, duties in which he had no interest. He returned to Hong Kong.

At first he edited a literary supplement for the New Evening News. At the time, the supplement was looking for a martial arts story. Bolstered by the encouragement of his colleagues, Jin Yong began at the age of 33 to apply his free and uninhibited writing style to Book and Sword, Gratitude and Revenge. Readers responded enthusiastically, and from there his writing career took off. In 1959 a friend and he started Ming Pao Daily News, in which most of his subsequent novels were published.

From beginning to end

"For me, writing fiction is a tool to earn money and make a living. I don't do it for any lofty social purpose. But what I write does give me a great deal of happiness. I use quite a lot of imagination, and find it a delightful writing experience to spur on that cavalcade of gallants," Jin Yong says, frankly explaining his own creative motivations in his published colloquy with Japanese scholar Daisaku Ikeda, Compassionate Light in Asia.

He wrote in order to increase newspaper sales, but what people tend to notice are his familiarity with books both ancient and modern, his broad knowledge and his powerful memory. Certainly, these virtues must have a source?

Jin Yong, whose real name is Zha Liangyong (Louis Cha in English), was born into a family of literati. He recalls that in the forecourt of the large house where he lived as a child there hung a large wooden tablet. It bore the name of the clan hall, "Danyuan Hall," personally penned and bestowed to Jin Yong's forebears by the Qing Emperor Kangxi himself. Towards the end of the Qing dynasty, Jin Yong's grandfather served as a county magistrate in Jiangsu Province. His father ran a banking house, a silkworm hatchery and a silk-weaving factory, all with little success. Because his family were landlords, they could afford quite a large collection of books. When Jin Yong's elder brother was attending university in Shanghai, he often used his food money to buy books by such authors as Mao Dun, Lu Xun, Ba Jin and Lao She. By the end of his grade-school years, Jin Yong had already read quite a number of novels.

The books he loved the most during his youth were the Chinese classics The Water Margin, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Alexandre Dumas' books The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After.

Dumas, in particular, was a great inspiration for Jin Yong's writing. "The Three Musketeers seemed not so much like a Western novel as a traditional Chinese story." In his opinion, the quick-witted and fervid protagonist D'Artagnan is similar to Zhao Zilong, the hero from Changshan in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Porthos is stout and powerful like Zhang Fei. Athos is cultured, erudite and genteel, a montage of Zhou Yu (from Three Kingdoms) and Hua Rong (from The Water Margin).

In the last ten years, Jin Yong has converted to Buddhism and taken to studying Buddhist literature. But he has not received any lofty epiphany; it has been a nebulous and painful process.

In the book Compassionate Light in Asia, Jin Yong reveals that in 1976 his eldest son, then at Columbia University in the United States, suddenly committed suicide. This startling event came like a bolt from the blue. In a state of sorrow, Jin Yong also contemplated killing himself and traveling to the other world to ask his son, "Why did you suddenly turn away from life?" After that, he spent a year reading countless books that explored the mysteries of life and death, but he could not quell the doubts that remained in his heart.

Then he turned to Buddhist books in search of an answer. For several months he studied the Samyutta Nikaya Sutra, Majjhima Nikaya Sutra and Digha Nikaya Sutra. Through concentration and contemplation, he suddenly came to an understanding.

Study as you go

In his transition from suffering to contentment, Jin Yong relied upon thinking, questioning and study. And how did he attain such a deep mastery of genteel pursuits and the martial arts?

"Study as the need arises" is his motto. "People who don't know me think that I have a high degree of scholarship and a broad range of knowledge. In fact, my method is, if I need to know something, I immediately go research it, moving from not understanding to slightly understanding, and transforming myself from an outsider to a half-insider," he says. In writing fiction, one can write down what one understands and leave out what one doesn't. Eveything is controlled by the author.

At first, he was a stranger to the world of film, but because he edited a newspaper supplement, he had to oversee articles dealing with drama. Therefore, in a frenzy he read books on film and art theory every day, until finally in a short period of time he became a "half expert" on those subjects.

When he was 60 he began to study calligraphy. Because he often went on sightseeing trips to mainland China, every place he went they would always ask him to write something. When he went to the ancient home of Jin-dynasty calligraphy master Wang Xizhi, he was also asked to write some calligraphy. He felt like an amateur performing for an expert, but it also incited him to begin practicing calligraphy.

"Some of the names I use for kungfu forms are inspired by books," he says. "For instance, 'the Eighteen Fists to Subjugate the Dragon' was inspired by the I Ching. Some of them I thought up myself. I like to use special names, not the kinds of forms that often appear in your average martial arts novel, like 'the Black Tiger Steals the Heart.' That's too common. It doesn't arouse the reader's imagination."

Because of the wistful romances portrayed in Jin Yong's works, many people often query him about his views on love. When the hero Yang Guo and his female instructor Xiao Long Nu become husband and wife, is he revealing an Oedipal complex? What does Jin Yong feel about romances that break taboo? What is his own marriage like?

"At the time I was writing about Yang Guo, I didn't think about whether he had an Oedipal complex. Now that I'm thinking back on it, maybe he did. As for love, I hold no ethical proscriptions. The five different close familial relationships designated by law should not be joined in marriage, but besides that, it's all okay. Professors and their students can have love affairs. Nowadays, our views shouldn't be so restrictive." Jin Yong, however, was unwilling to answer questions about his own personal life.

Unending metamorphosis

Jin Yong mulls over his works again and again, constantly rewriting them. Scholars who have researched the evolution of various editions of Jin Yong's novels generally concur that his changes make sense.

For example, in Book and Sword, Gratitude and Revenge, the fourth highest member of the Red Flower Society was hiding in the "Iron Sphere Mansion." After the master of the house's ten-year-old son let the secret out, the man was arrested by soldiers. Chen Jialuo called out the company of heroes to find out who was at fault. In the old version, when the master of the house Zhou Zhongying learned the truth, he bade his son to speak forth if he had any wishes left unfulfilled. Then, commanding him to thank his mother for raising him with care, he delivered a blow to his crown. After the book had been published, Jin Yong revised it so that Zhou Zhongying, in a state of rage, recklessly hurls an iron sphere, killing his son. Jin Yong agrees with the viewpoint of scholars, that "killing one's own son is too cruel, so I changed it into a mistake."

On the other hand, some readers have expressed the wish that Jin Yong would not keep coming out with new editions, because they can't afford to keep buying them. Nevertheless, Jin Yong is still very concerned about his works, so he can only promise that in his stories, "the destinies of the characters won't change. The little snags still must be smoothed out, so that later readers will be a little more comfortable."

Jin Yong is dedicated to making his stories perfect, but he often has angry words to say about films and television shows based on his works that do not remain faithful to the original.

"At first, I sold the novels' copyrights to TV or movie producers in the hope that more readers would come to know about my stories. It didn't occur to me that the screenwriters would completely alter my stories." Jin Yong says he can understand shortening a story if it is too long, but they should not make changes to the plot, modifying the personalities of the characters.

For instance, the TTV production of Shendiao Xiaolu had Xiao Long Nu develop friendly feelings toward the Taoist practitioner Ying Zhiping, who raped her. And in the Hong Kong movie version of The Eagle-shooting Heroes, the pharmacist Dr. Huang had a pet cat. In traditional Chinese society, raising a dog was understandable, but rarely did anyone raise a cat.

Wandering off into distant lands

When he is asked why he hasn't written any memoirs, he merely says that his own life "isn't in the least astonishing or moving, nor is it spell-binding. A memoir would have no great value." He only wants to write one or two more historical novels for everyone to enjoy. He is highly interested in the degree of openness during the Tang dynasty, but he feels that the farther away from us an epoch is, the harder it is to write about, because one must spend a great deal of time researching and considering-when they drank tea, what kind of tea did they drink? When they ate, how did they eat? What kind of clothes did they wear?

Whenever scholars or readers offer him praise, he always thanks everyone, with an air of humility. At the International Conference on Jin Yong's Novels, one person used the term "Jin studies." The author replied with complete modesty that Jin Yong's fiction must never become an esoteric field of study. Li Bai and Du Fu were so great, yet there is no such thing as "Li studies" or "Du studies"! Jin Yong appears to make light of his own success-just like the historical figures he admires, Zhang Liang and Fan Li, who after rising in the world chose to wander off without a trace into the distant lands.

p.43

If he has time, Jin Yong, a newspaperman and novelist, wishes most to immerse himself in research, become an accomplished scholar, and write an historical novel.

p.44

Taiwan boasts a multitude of Jin Yong fans. In the last several years, he has often visited Taiwan. Last year, he and his wife went on a tour of Ilan.