#2 We could all use a little more Yi Qi
Smells like Righteous Team Spirit
Whether it’s having turned forty this year; or the wars and rumours of war; or dealing with a newborn which makes all writing time feel like stolen time, a compulsion to create and share bits and pieces from my notebook has overtaken habitual doubts and fears. This newsletter is another assortment of poetry and prose — algorithmic suicide if the Substack experts are to be believed — but I hope it will be interesting to some. If you like it, do comment / share / restack as you see fit: it helps others to see it and I would also love to know if it connects with anyone.
I don’t know why the Mandarin Chinese term yi qi popped into my head recently. I first encountered in when living in Taiwan, when friends extolled its virtue. It means something like ‘brotherhood’ or ‘esprit de corps’, but there also seems to be a shade of ‘honour among thieves’, the sort of thing that would be very much in the air between Robin Hood and his Band of Merry Men.
The individual characters 義氣 mean, respectively, ‘righteousness’ 義 yi (if you can imagine that term stripped of its Judeo-Christian connotations) and 氣 qi ‘breath’ or ‘spirit’, the same qi that has become fairly well known in the Anglophone world, much to the delight of competitive Scrabble players.
義 yi is an interesting one. The top part of the character is 羊, meaning sheep or goat. The bottom part is a compound character 我 meaning ‘I’ or ‘me’. (This 我 is itself composed of 扌(hand) and 戈 (spear), thus the concept of ‘myself’ is a hand armed for battle). The ‘sheep’ over the ‘I’, coupled with the religious-sounding English translation of ‘righteousness’ has led to the theory among some that the Christian Gospel lies prophetically encoded in this and other characters; in this case the (sacrificial) lamb covering a person and making them righteous. It’s a fun theory, but from my limited reading seems unlikely to be the case. The sheep element is present in a large number of early characters, more a reflection of the nomadic sheep-rearing societies of the North that formed part of the Chinese population of antiquity.
The fact that this term, literally something like ‘spirit of righteousness’ should have this band-of-brothers sensibility is a little counter-intuitive on the surface. But ‘righteousness’ is only the traditional rendering of yi 義 in English. Antonio S Cua translates it as ‘rightness’ and glosses it as something like the dynamic and reasoned judgement of what the right thing to do is in any given situation. Where rites or rituals (理 li) provide the moral tramlines for life (according to Confucian thought) yi (義) is the adaptive response to unforeseen situations — a kind of moral savoir-faire — and as such just a short hop to the honour-bound moral codes of criminal gangs or military groups. Incidentally, a Daoist satirical story includes the term amongst its ironic ‘five virtues of a thief’, defining it subversively as being the last one out of a room during a heist — see here for the full list.
I’ll bypass discussion of the second character in the compound (氣 qi (breath, spirit)), but if you’re interested in how this character came about, do check out this nerdy post on my website Seven Worthies.
This newsletter is loosely devoted to the spirit of yi qi, with a film review of the Taiwanese crime film Monga, an introduction to the Three Sworn Brothers of the Peach Garden from the epic work of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and an original poem, Oath. I hope you enjoy it. If you think others would like it, please do share.
(Film Review) Monga
The Taipei district of Monga is a mess of noise, of temples crowded by neon-illuminated shopfronts, of shabby snack bars, and the red glow of brothels. It’s a fitting metaphor for Monga the film, a bubbling hot pot of teen movie, mafia flick, romance, kung fu and melodrama.
Monga charts the career of Mosquito, an outsider who has always been picked on by classmates. But as everyone knows, you can push a man only so far, and for Mosquito the last straw is when the class bully steals his fried chicken. He takes it back, but later finds a group of thugs standing in wait for him outside the school gates. Eventually encircled by the gang, he surprisingly gives as good as he gets, impressing a local group of hoodlums with his innovative brawling prowess. They intervene to solve his bullying situation and from that point on, he will be the fifth member of their gang ‘cos it takes five fingers to make a fist.’
This is Mosquito’s introduction to the heidao (black way), the name in Chinese for organised crime. The chapter he joins has its own patch near the temple and they spend their days getting into scraps with other gangs, sleeping with prostitutes and generally hanging around in loose fitting shirts. Of course, nothing lasts forever, and soon the realities of heidao life begin to bite. The new generation is getting older, the younger generation is finding its teeth, and there’s new interest in Monga from Mainland Chinese gangs. The blood brothers’ oaths and their yiqi (a hard-to-translate term meaning something like loyalty or brotherhood), will both be tested.
In covering the different periods of Mosquito’s life, from school boy to fully-fledged gangster, Monga shoots for very different tones. The school days chapter is portrayed with the sort of awkward comedy seen in late 90s American teen movies, complete with soft rock soundtrack. The boys chat about their dreams in soft focus like members of a boy band on tour. Their street brawls, not exactly played for laughs, still have a sort of innocence about them.
Later when the boys enter adulthood, explicitly stated on a title card, the tone becomes far more serious and the violence becomes nastier. Even in this section, though, there are a lot of stories to tell and each one carries its own style. From the classic kung fu training section up in the mountains to an unlikely romance with a prostitute back in the city, the film felt at times like a smorgasbord of cinema, with filmic conventions picked up and dropped at the director’s whim. An example of this is the Guy Richie-style rapid editing we see at the beginning of the film, which we never really see again.
The film’s strength for me is its rootedness in the Monga district. The way that temple culture closely mingles with the heidao life is compelling and the tensions between rival gangs, different languages and different generations is evocatively told.
Yet the film feels overly-long, not helped by the mix of styles and tones. The thing that could have held it all together is a believable central character in whom we can invest. Unfortunately, Mark Chao doesn’t really deliver the goods here, particularly in the third act in which he gratingly bellows his theories about loyalty. I never really found him sympathetic or real as a character, not helped by the fact that in early scenes this tall muscular student with film star looks seems an unlikely victim of bullying.
As an introduction to an interesting district of Taipei and a particular aspect of Taiwan society, Monga is definitely worth a watch. As a film, though, I felt it tries to do too much, in too many different ways, to deliver the gut punch it wants to.
For more reviews of films from Taiwan, check out my website, Ilha Filmosa
(Article) Three Sworn Brothers of the Peach Garden
(Taken from my website Seven Worthies: original article here: Three Sworn Brothers of the Peach Garden)
The Han Empire is dying, beset by insurrection from marauding Yellow Turbans. Three noble men meet by chance and find common purpose in resisting the threat of tyranny and ruin. Amidst peach trees, the men swear an oath to unite unto death in the service of the downtrodden. So begins the celebrated Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the fictionalised account of the real life founder and generals of the Shu Kingdom.
It’s difficult to overstate the cultural importance of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms to Chinese culture. The plot, characters, battle scenes and values of the work are touchstones that have captured the popular imagination and spawned a huge array of novels, videogames, board games, films and TV series. But who were these three heroes who found common cause?
Liu Bei (劉備)
The man destined to rule the Kingdom of Shu was marked out for greatness from infancy. Those passing the garden of Liu Bei’s family home would find him playing beneath an outsized mulberry tree – the stature of the tree itself already having convinced the local community that this was no ordinary family. The precocious Liu Bei would compare the leafy tree to the feather-canopied chariot of the emperor and claim that he would one day ride in it. Coupled with a prophecy that the family would produce ‘an estimable man’, the mantle of authority seemed firmly on his young shoulders. In popular thought, the historical Liu Bei enjoys the reputation of being a benevolent Confucian ruler, largely thanks to his depiction in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Zhang Fei (張飛)
Zhang Fei bursts onto the scene in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms after he hears Liu Bei breathing a sign, and immediately challenges him. “You’re not out there serving your country, so what are you sighing for?” Zhang Fei certainly makes an impression: the novel describes his panther-head, round eyes, swallow-chin, tiger-beard, a thunderous voice and the force of a galloping horse. In the novel, Zhang Fei has a reputation for harshness among the rank and file, meting out draconian punishments. He is also a heavy drinker, which sometimes affects his judgement. Yet his martial valour and fighting prowess are never in doubt. One iconic scene from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms sees Zhangfei covering Liu Bei’s retreat by standing on the banks of a river and challenging the entirety of Cao Cao’s army to face him in battle. Cao Cao’s troops are suitably cowed and Liu Bei’s armies are able to get away.
Guan Yu (關羽)
Guan Yu would become one of Liu Bei’s generals, both in the novel and in real life. Celebrated for his military nous, Guan Yu passed into popular religion as a god of war. In The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, he is spotted by Liu Bei pushing a cart along the road, before entering the tavern where Liu Bei and Zhang Fei sit and demanding a drink on the house, since he’s off to join the army. Physically imposing, with a long beard, he is also described in the novel as having distinctly reddish colouring, with skin the colour of a dark date, red lips, and eyes like a red phoenix. This may account for the fact that he is often depicted with a bright red face in statues and opera. Guan Yu is often shown wielding a two-handed pole weapon known as a guan dao (關刀) that he is said to have invented, but this may well be an anachronism. Whatever the truth, Guan Yu’s guan dao had the distinctly cool name of Green Dragon Crescent Blade (青龍偃月刀).
This list is taken from my website Seven Worthies, where you’ll find a host of different lists from across Chinese history, philosophy and more.
(Poem) Oath
You found each other
when fruited trees dripped promise
and oaths found their words
— can it be said? — too easily:
Too easily for the branching futures hewn off
with each valorous swing of the blade;
Too readily for those whose stories
would never be legend —
only private tales hidden in an aching gasp of pain
beside a hearth fire
suddenly all too large for the room.
You found yourselves
in a peach garden entirely too small for the scale of your ambition
small enough yet for three hearts
to entwine like
tree roots
surging in soil
under the ardent soles
of feet not yet weary from the march.
Not yet living in the days when promises would lose all prettiness
and peaches long since rotten on the corpse-strewn grasses
would leave only gnarled tree trunks behind.
— Rhys Mumford