The Biography of Louis Cha
[GB Chinese Version]
|
Show, Hide, Remove the Index Pop-up The Biography of Louis Cha |
[Big5 Chinese Version] [GB Chinese Version] |
|
||
|
 , Louis Cha (6 Feb 1924 -- )This page is not a direct translation from the Chinese pages. The webmaster is endeavoured to translate these pages. If visitors translate these pages for the webmaster, your work will be put on this page with due credit. Read this page all at once |
|
Louis Leung-yung Cha, with his pen name as Jin Yong and born in Hangzhou,
he is native of Haining, Zhejiang province. He studied
at Zhejiang Province Jiaxing High School (presently
Jiaxing First High School) after graduation from primary school.
Upon graduation from high school, he was admitted to the Faculty of Foreign Languages of
Chunking Central University and then transferred to
the Faculty of Law of Dongwu University majoring in
International Law. He successfully obtained the job as English translator at Ta Kung Pao with the best score in English after graduation from college. He move to Hong Kong with the newspaper and worked as copy editor at Ta Kung Pao and Hsin Wan Pao. He took on the job as scenarist-director at the Great Wall Movie Enterprises Ltd. and Phoenix Film Co. in the late 1950s, focusing on play writing and Enchoulu movie criticism. He began to write swordsman fictions in 1955 and published Shujian Enchoulu, Bixuejian, Xueshan Feihu and Shediao Yingxiongzhuan. He started the business of Ming Pao Daily News with Shen Baoxin in 1959 and acted as director. Since 1966, he also launched Ming Pao Monthly, Ming Pao Weekly and Ming Pao Evening News. He established the Book Publishing House later. He had worked as executive member of the Basic Law Drafting Committee and Consultative Committee of the Hong Kong SAR since 1985 and resigned on May 20, 1989. He listed Ming Pao Group Ltd. on stock market in 1991 and acted as Chairman of Board of Directors. He sold Ming Pao Group Ltd. to Yu Pinhai in February 1993 and retired. He had served as Honorary President of Ming Pao Enter- prises Co. Ltd., panel member of Legal Reform Committee, the Association of International Press and academician of Modern China Research Centre of the British Oxford University. He was appointed member of the Preparatory Committee of the Hong Kong SAR in December 1995. He was awarded the title of OBE in 1981. He was awarded honorary doctorate of Hong Kong University in 1986 and invited to work as honorary professor of the Faculty of Chinese Language and Literature of Hong Kong University in 1989. He was awarded "honorary citizen of Jiaxing City" in 1994 and engaged as honorary professor of Beijing University in October of that year. In November 1996, he was appointed honorary professor of Zhejiang University and senior advisor of the People's government of Jiaxing City. His novels include Shendiao Xialu, Feihu Waizhuan, Xiao'ao Jianghu, Tianlong Babu and Luding Ji. He has published some other writings like On Yuan Chonghuan and Genghis Khan and His Family. He is also devoted to studies of Confucian and Chinese Go. He donated HK$1million for disaster relief in July 1991 and HK$3 million to build a library at Jiaxing School of Higher Education in 1993. In 1994, he donated HK$200,000 to the school's library to purchase books. The property of his family is estimated at HK$1.2 billion by December 1995. Interest: Playing Go Madam: Lin Leyi |
|
Louis Cha doesn't know how many books he's sold. Not to
the nearest 10 million, anyway. The 72-year-old Hong Kong
writer and journalist isn't being coy, though. It's just
that he's been able to sell legitimate versions of his
hugely popular martial-arts novels in his main market-China-only
for the last two years. That means he has no
idea how many pirated copies of his books have been published
illegally on the mainland. Cha does know that in 1984, when his books could finally be published in China after being banned for many years as ideologically unsound, he was told by the director of China's Bureau of Publications that an estimated 40 million pirated copies of his 15 novels were circulating in the country. "They accused me of being responsible for the lack of paper to print textbooks on," Cha laughs. Add to that number the one million legitimate copies that have sold every year for the last decade in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Then assume -- not unreasonably -- that he has matched his pre-1984 sales in China over the last 12 years, and the total begins to approach 100 million. And that's not counting the sales of his books that have been translated into Korean, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese and, soon, Japanese. Not bad for someone who hasn't written a word of fiction since 1972. It's still a little difficult though to equate the dapper man in the blue blazer and grey slacks relaxing in the opulent surroundings of his house at No. 1, Peak Road with the swashbuckling and often fairly bloodthirsty adventure stories for which the Asian reading public seems to have an inexhaustible appetite. Perhaps that's because in the 24 years since he last published a novel, Cha has devoted his time to making a name for himself in other fields. Journalism, for example, where he used money from his literary success to found the Ming Pao newspaper. Under his guidance the paper rose to become Hong Kong's most respected daily. He also wrote regular columns and editorials, though the paper's early drawing card was a the thousand-word excerpt it printed each day from the latest novel by Jin Yong, Cha's pen name. Or, latterly, politics, in which he has served as a senior adviser to the Chinese government during the drawn-out negotiations over the handover in 1997. Or even scholarship, where he has found time to publish a series of works on Chinese history and culture ranging from The Life and Times of Genghis Khan to The Concept of Materiality in Buddhist Thinking. Despite such accomplishments, Cha faces a problem much like that which confronted a writer he cites as one of his formative influences, Arthur Conan-Doyle, author the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Conan-Doyle became so exasperated with the public's infatuation with his detective that he killed Holmes off-only to be forced to bring him back to life after a prolonged outcry. Cha, too, is plagued by constant entreaties for new works, but he is able to meet such demands with an equanimity that Conan-Doyle -- who was always short of cash -- could not. Cha's novels and newspaper publishing have brought him wealth on a scale the impoverished Conan-Doyle could never even imagine. He recently sold his house for a reported HK$190 million ($21 million), for example, and his personal fortune is estimated at many times that. His wealth has allowed Cha to resist calls for more martial-arts fiction. But now that he has retired from journalism -- he sold his controlling stake in Ming Pao three years ago -- Cha says he is spending his time on historical research that might lead to a nonfiction book: "My ambition is to write a readable history of China; there are many histories of China very very good and very scholarly, but they are written in a very clumsy and hard-to-read style." Or he might decide to write a historical novel. The prospect of another Jin Yong novel -- albeit one which will "definitely not" be another martial-arts epic -- will surely be welcome news to the legions of Jin Yong fans. They range from eight-year-old boys, who can be seen on Hong Kong's subways labouring through Cha's often consciously archaic prose, to professionals, businessmen and even mainland academics. "I've read all his books, each one many times-like most people who read Cha," says Chi-shun Feng, a 49-year-old Hong Kong doctor. "Nobody comes even close. There are Chinese literary classics, but Cha transcends these. Everybody knows and loves them, but nobody reads them 10 times. But Louis Cha's books, it's easy to find people who have read them 10 times over the years." What is it in Cha's novels that causes such devotion? Critics and scholars say there is nothing exactly comparable in the Western canon; perhaps the Musketeer romances of Alexandre Dumas senior. The closest modern comparison might be Patrick O'Brian's historical novels that follow the adventures of an English naval captain in the Napoleonic wars. Cha's novels are sprawling, complex epics featuring the exploits of "dashing heroes and heroines possessing in varying degrees extraordinary prowess" in kung fu, the traditional Chinese martial arts, according to John Minford, an academic at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is coordinating an Oxford University Press project that aims to translate all of Jin Yong's works into English. "Kung fu, together with Chinese medicine, calligraphy, painting, playing Go and strumming the seven-stringed zither constitute the core of the Chinese cultural essence," Minford says. All these elements appear in the novels, and their placement firmly in the myth-shrouded past combine to produce a kind of "cultural euphoria" in Chinese readers that cannot be found anywhere else in modern Chinese literature. The historical settings and plots often seem designed to stoke that glow of cultural euphoria. As Feng, the Hong Kong doctor, notes, the plots of Cha's books "always involve so-called Barbarians trying to invade the Han lands. They're about how the Han Chinese try to fight back." For Cha himself, the core of his books' popularity rests on a simple quality: their storytelling. "My novels are full of stories and very exciting developments," he says. "People like adventures, they like to read adventure stories." But he also identifies that "Chineseness" of his works as an important element in their continuing success. "I think maybe the reason my books are so popular is not only the style but also because people in them are thinking and acting in a very Chinese way, without any taint of the Western influence, so readers think: ÔThis is we Chinese.'" Cha also sees himself as filling a vacuum created during China's turbulent emergence into the modern world since the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Following the revolution, "China was under the foreign aggressor very severely and the intellectuals tried to analyze the reason and they found many, many faults in traditional Chinese culture. So they knocked down everything. They thought a modern and strong China should copy the Western countries. So they copied everything, even the style of literature." That produced generations of writers like Lu Xun who, in Cha's opinion, produced Western novels and plays and poems that happened to be written in Chinese and set in China. He notes that even the Communist founding father, Mao Zedong, "wrote poems totally in the old style. People could remember his poems and recite them. But other new poems written in the Western style, people couldn't remember them at all." There was little or no attempt to draw on the traditions of the past and evolve a new style based on those traditions. It was the hunger created by that vacuum that his martial-arts novels have filled, Cha concludes. These days, of course, China is far from weak, and Cha -- who was renowned for his anti-communist stance during the Cultural Revolution -- has of late counselled a conciliatory attitude in dealings with her. He did resign as a senior adviser to China after the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, but this year accepted a position on the China-appointed committee that will supervise Hong Kong's handover in 1997. Cha remains discreet and publicly optimistic about the Chinese leadership and the future of Hong Kong under its new masters. But sparks of the old fire are evident when he expresses surprise at the widespread official and critical praise his novels have garnered on the mainland. "I was maybe a little surprised because my later novels have a strong taint of anti-Marxism and anti-totalitarianism," he says. "They are very much individualistic, anti the control of the individual and advocating freedom of thought and activity." |
|
The above articles are collected from the public Internet. Copyrights belong to original maker. |
.
Get your own Free Home Page.[ Previous 5 Sites | Previous | Next | Next 5 Sites | Random Site | List Sites ] |