A Wong for All Seasons
The Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-hung is the subject of well over 100 films, but who is he really?
This semester, I’m teaching a class called Serials, Series, and Franchise Films at Fordham. The first go-around is usually both the least and the most fun I’ll have have with a course. Building the syllabus, getting a handle on the material, organizing lectures and class discussions—it always demands two or three times the work of a class I’ve taught before, but it’s also a great excuse to educate myself on some film history that I don’t know a ton about.
A few weeks back, we did a unit on international approaches to film series, and I wanted to be sure we got outside my all-too-European comfort zone. We watched and discussed the first two installments of The Apu Trilogy—a pair of bangers from India’s Parallel Cinema movement—and for the accompanying lecture, I did some research so I wasn’t leaning too hard on, like, Dr. Mabuse’s various adventures of Parts I and II of Die Nibelungen as my examples.
That’s how I ran into this fascinating article by Grady Hendrix at Criterion, which sent me down a little research rabbit hole on Wong Fei-hung, a Cantonese folk hero who became a recurring figure in the cinema of China and Hong Kong. Wong was a real physician and martial arts expert who was born around 1847 and died in 1925. Given the fame he’d achieve after his death, his life story isn’t particularly dramatic. Wong trained a regiment of the Guangdong army and the Guangzhou Civilian Militia in Hung Ga—a style of Shaolin kung fu that he was, by all accounts, excellent at—but it seems he spent most of his time teaching acupuncture and selling medicine. Since there’s no real American analog, Hendrix has to resort to hypotheticals to describe him:
Imagine Benjamin Franklin spawning a franchise larger than James Bond’s that sprawls like the Star Wars empire: movies, TV shows, museums, books, video games, and music.
Sounds kinda awesome, right? Plenty of people think so, especially in southern China and Hong Kong. According to Wikipedia, Wong has featured in at least 123 different films—123! That means he’s showed up in roughly five times as many movies as Bond has. (It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison because Wong is a real person, not a copyrighted piece of IP, but still—123!)
Even though Wong was a historical figure—a real guy who really did real things—onscreen depictions of him shifted to account for political, cultural, and economic developments. The early films—of which the actor Kwan Tak-hing starred in 81!—portrayed the character as, in Hendrix’s words, “an unchanging avatar of Confucian virtue, a reliable patriarch in a tumultuous world.” The late ’60s and ’70s, though, weren’t exactly a high water mark for dour traditionalism in Hong Kong, the main producer of Wong movies. 1967 saw riots against the British colonial government that left more than 50 people dead and almost 5,000 arrested. It was a rebellious moment, the stories Wong’s onscreen adventures got more rebellious, too. A 1970s television show placed the character in the chaotic, politically-charged era that followed the collapse of 2,000 years of imperial rule and the founding of the Republic of China in 1912. It was an edgier show for an edgier moment. Two years later, a 24-year-old Jackie Chan took on the role for the film Drunken Master. This Wong was a different kind of rebel—irreverent, funny, sly, and somehow able to use booze like Popeye uses spinach.
The character’s evolution continues from there. In the anxious years between China’s 1989 slaughter of democracy activists in Tiananmen Square and Hong Kong’s handover from British to Chinese control in 1997, a more radical Wong rejected the authority of the empress. In more recent years, though, after a few decades of Beijing’s flexing, he’d morphed into a fervent Chinese nationalist. Whoever Wong may have been in life, he’s long since become a screen onto which different filmmakers with different motivations could project different ideologies.
A classic movie might be timeless, but it never stands outside of time. I know I beat this drum pretty hard—it’s kind of THS’ whole deal—but one way that history expresses its twists and turns is through art, through movies—even through goofy ones where Jackie Chan gets lit and kicks ass. No matter how original a filmmaker may be, they’re always operating within their given context. Their vision is molded by their moment, and they use their camera mold that moment in return. Grady Hendrix’s article goes into much more depth than I do here, so if Wong’s socio-cultural shapeshifting interests you, check it out.
Until next week!
Odds & Ends
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