A Thousand Pieces of Gold

When Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came out, I was anxious to see it. I had heard some complaints about the special effects with the most common complaint being that the martial arts scenes didn't seem realistic. But I wasn't worried because I was "in" to Chinese movies, and it was directed by Ang Lee, who directed one of my favorite movies Sense and Sensibility. I didn't mind the special effects personally, but the ending was too enigmatic for me. I just didn't get it.

Recently I've been reading a book called A Thousand Pieces of Gold by Adeline Yen Mah. In it she confesses that when she was young, writing "kung fu novels" was her favorite past time. She talks about rereading the literature of her childhood with kung fu heroes "so limber that they seemed to have no bones, so silent that their footsteps sounded like sighs, so powerful that they jumped from rooftops like tigers, so agile that they scaled the walls like flies" (211). To me, her description suddenly gave context and meaning to the martial arts scenes in Crouching Tiger. Although I'm now accustomed to fighters flying through trees and running up walls, the first time I saw such a scene, I wondered if Lee was just getting carried away. I remember him saying that he wanted to bring Sense and Sensibility to martial arts. After reading Mah's words, now I wonder instead if directors like Lee were only waiting for special effects' technology to advance far enough for them to be able to portray kung fu heroes as they had appeared to them in their imagination. But then I'm not much of an afficionado on martial arts movies, so maybe this sort of thing was going on long before Crouching Tiger.

At any rate, such scenes no longer seem incredible to me. In fact, I expect them in martial arts films. Recently Dan and I watched The House of Flying Daggers, which was directed by another one of my favorite directors, Zhang Yimou. Before I go on, I have to say that the movie had too much sex and blood for me, but unlike Crouching Tiger, the ending was thought provoking without being mystifying. Mah explains that true kung fu heroes care about ethics, freedom, and chivalry and aren't tempted by status, money, or power. On the surface this movie seemed to be about a love triangle and the destruction that can be caused by a beautiful woman. But Mah's description takes me back to the movie, wondering if there's something more that I missed. The bandits were portrayed as Chinese Robin Hoods, robbing the rich to help the poor, and more interested in freedom than status. Power certainly was an element at play though. The power to know someone's true identity and true abilities. The power to choose your lover. I'm tempted to say that it was about the ownership of a woman, but that seems too simple. I guess I'm still puzzling it out, but I appreciate the fact that the movie gave me enough to puzzle out, despite my lack of knowledge about Chinese culture.