THE NARRATIVE ARC
The One-Armed Swordsman
My heroes have always been swordsmen
There was a very important Chinese film that came out when I was eight years old. It was called “The One Armed Swordsman.” In it the star Jimmy Wang Yu played a swordsman whose arm is cut off by his enemies and he is left for dead. He recovers and learns how to fight using just one arm. He then goes on a seemingly impossible mission of revenge and redemption.
Like many Chinese swordplay movies of the 1960s, there was amazing fight choreography, ridiculous amounts of spurting blood and lots of mayhem. The film was a great success and was followed by two sequels, which were not as good.
On Monday nights the Kokusai theater in Seattle’s International District played Chinese films. My mother told us that was because most Chinese restaurants in the area would take Monday nights off, so their staff could go to the movies and gamble all night because that is what they liked to do. The theater had become a bit of a cultural institution for the working class of Chinatown.
Back then, there were few rules audiences had to follow. Food, drink and even smoking were allowed inside. There was a lot of chatter going on during the films as well. We would sit and watch the show surrounded by the wafting smells of Chinese take-out and watch through a haze of cigarette smoke. Young children would run up and down the aisles at play while their parents enjoyed their movie night out.
The theater had as strange habit of play a double feature but starting the first one half way through, playing the second one in its entirety, then playing the first half of the first film at the end of the evening. We think this was to get the audience to stay to the end of the program and buy more concessions or something. You had to stay to see the beginning of the first movie if you wanted to know the beginning of the story. Even though it was an old, musty and ill-kept theater, I loved the Kokusai.
The films I saw there as a boy told stories of a world beyond fantastic: flying swordsmen, buckets of spraying blood, Chinese ghost stories with terrifying white-robed spirits with long black hair that partially obscured their frightening faces. There were also tear jerkers about doomed young lovers or shattered families that were made specifically for their emotional impact.
It was a very different world than American films and TV, where there was usually an underlying sense of the rational and logical at work, even in horror and fantasy films. The Chinese films that came to the Kokusai were unbridled in their audacity and shameless in their melodramatic emotionalism and wild violence.
The melodrama was a large part of why “The One-Armed Swordsman” affected me so much: reduced to a bleeding, shattered cripple, he wished for death without his sword arm. His recovery and rehabilitation was hampered by intense self-loathing and despair. His shame at not being able to face the woman he loved without his sword arm made him bitter and cynical. After training under a sympathetic old sage, he developed a unique and devastating one-armed sword style and then slashed his way along a journey of vengeance towards justice, and finally redemption. He was my hero.
In his handicap I saw my own pimpled, bespectacled and geeky young self. I was also a bit ashamed of being alive like he was. I compared the racism I faced growing up to his own isolation and loathing. I hated my stiff, bristly black hair, my narrow, unlidded eyes, my weak, unathletic body. I hated being so different from “normal” boys. Puberty didn’t arrive until late in high school, and I used to avoid showering with the other boys for fear of humiliation.
I was as ashamed of my body as he was. He lived out the fantasy I could only dream of. Becoming the feared and respected One-Armed Swordsman was his destiny. What would be mine? Where would my vengeance come from? My redemption?
When I was ten, my parents took our family to live in Taiwan for a whole year. This was to give my brother, sister and I the opportunity to immerse ourselves in Chinese culture and language. Needless to say I was miserable, feeling as if I was being forced to be even more Chinese when all I wished for was to be more like the white kids.
We occasionally had dinner at the US military officer’s club. My father was working on a US government contract and he was connected enough to get us into the fancy club. One night, my father poked me on the shoulder and said: “Look over there. That’s Jimmy Wang Yu, the One-Armed Swordsman.” I was awestruck. There he was, my idol, eating a New York steak at a nearby table. It took me a moment to comprehend why he now had two arms.
Somehow my father arranged for me to go over and shake Jimmy Wang Yu’s hand. He was tall, strikingly handsome, generous and shook my hand with confidence and kindness. I was speechless. In my halting Mandarin I told him he was was my hero and that he was the greatest movie star who ever lived. He laughed, patted me on the shoulder. We took a picture, which has since been lost. He told me to believe in myself and to live without fear. I always believed that our meeting was a moment of destiny.
In the years that followed I often thought about my chance meeting with the One Armed Swordsman. When I thought of him, I also felt the presence of other mystical figures I had seen in Chinese movies. The Eight Immortals. Guan Yu, the half-lion god of virtue. Ji Gong, the tattered monk and defender of the common people. These characters were more than figures of mythology and lore.
They were part of a living community of spirits that wove in and out of my life as surely as the great dragon’s breath of the universe pervades all things. Like the One-armed Swordsman, those heroes understood the hopes and fears of being a stranger in a strange land.
After the advent of VCRs and DVD players, the Kokusai theater went out of business. On occasion I visited Chinatown as an adult for a meal and would walk by its boarded up facade and fading paint and feel a strong sense of of loss and nostalgia. The nights I spent as a boy in the Kokusai were treasured memories and have informed my love of story and film.
Finally the old movie house was torn down and replaced with a new building. All those memorable experiences were now shadows of the past. Speaking of shadows, the literal Chinese term for “movie” in Mandarin is “Dien Ying,” which translates as “Electric Shadows.” How true. The lost electric shadows of the Kokusai theater are still with me today. They will be with me always.
