Nomad Codes of Honor
On Jia Zhangke's 'Ash Is Purest White' (2018) and the Modern Jiānghú
The great Friedrich Nietzsche, in one of his more lucid moods, spoke of his concept of “The Untimely” as “acting in a non-present fashion, therefore against time and even on time, in favour of a time to come” — in such a way as this, every action or belief worthy of our lives is necessarily always in reference to an ahistorical cause, an acausal event that takes place within the bounds of our time, yet supersedes its moment and joins the ranks of eternity, of myth; the question then becomes, how do human beings, creatures of time, act in an Untimely way?
This paradoxical space lies at the basis of Jia Zhangke’s filmography — in the 21st century hyper-capitalist People’s Republic of China, contradictions are a matter of existence, not merely theoretical discourse. Two minds must exist in one body — the mind of the idealist revolutionary and the mind of the “pragmatic” businessman, and the question that China and its people face, the question which extends to the rest of the world, is how to be conscious of the causal necessities of historical materialism, the Marxist conception of progress from feudalism to capitalism to communism, while also holding to the Untimely agency of human beings to effect change regardless of precedent or logic.
Jia Zhangke’s career begins under the auspices of post-neorealist cinema — an obtuse naturalism, a socio-political focus on daily life, longer shot lengths, the existential alienation of the human being from the context that produces her — among Jia’s aesthetic models are Michelangelo Antonioni, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Abbas Kiarostami. His early works like Platform (2000) and Unknown Pleasures (2002) are documents of individuals who are completely overdetermined by their milieu — these are worlds which hold no transcendental values, everything is historicized into A plus B equals C, a cruel dialectic.
Yet soon into his work emerges a notion of the Untimely — 2004’s The World has Antonioni-esque wanderings throughout a cultural theme park interspersed with humorous animated segments that signify the abstract dream world of the downtrodden characters, and 2006’s Still Life has the journey of its displaced protagonists interrupted halfway through its runtime by the seemingly random presence of a UFO and a modernist building shaped like 華, a character meaning “the Chinese people/nation,” which obliquely turns into a rocketship and flies off — the film’s exploration of China’s rapidly changing industrial landscape via the model of the Three Gorges Dam’s effect on Fengjie and the Yangtze River is given a metaphysical, even paranormal dimension, as if quotidian reality itself has become unmoored from its foundations as the Three Gorges Dam inexorable alters millions of lives through its instantiation.
If the earlier works are still held in the grip of sober consensus reality, and the developmental works indicate an interest in the imaginal substrate of China, Jia’s most recent films, capped off by 2018’s Ash Is Purest White, are explicitly mytho-poetic, lying within the tradition of King Hu, John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, and John Boorman — yet refracted through a commitment to showing the historical dimension behind the contemporary moment, bringing that myth into everyday reality.
Ash Is Purest White’s Mandarin title, 江湖儿女, or Sons and Daughters of Jiānghú, references the long-standing juxtaposition in the wuxia genre of Chinese literature and cinema of two types of realities: there is Miàotáng (庙堂), which is the world of the political system, the Emperor and his dynasty, the courts and officials, the standing legal powers within Chinese society, and then there is Jiānghú (江湖) , which is the “underworld,” the implicit community of itinerant travelers, criminals, gamblers, and other such individuals who possess a legality which is not determined by the explicit laws of the state — rather, they have a set of internal codes of conduct, secret codes, and chivalric discipline which serves as a counter-culture to the Miàotáng’s courtly culture. The Jiānghú is where the Wǔlín (literally “martial forest”) exists — the different schools of martial artists who gather together under certain masters or styles, and it is this portion of the Jiānghú which is often recognized prominently in Chinese-language martial arts pictures.
Jiānghú itself means rivers (jiāng) and lakes (hú), while Miàotáng means temple (miào) and hall (yáng) — it is this dichotomy that creates metaphysical tension, a tension that Ash is Purest White explores. The Jiānghú represents a social life that is bound more by individual will and agency, which like the water of rivers and lakes can fluctuate in its intensity; the Miàotáng represents social life held together by the rule of law and decree, a hierarchy extended from the authorities down to the lowest rungs of the system.
WuxiaSociety elaborates on the origins of Jiānghú:
“There were two influential Chan Buddhist monks during the Tang Dynasty -- Mazu Daoyi in Jiangxi and Shitou Xiqian in Hunan. These two contemporaries are considered the founders of the Chan Buddhism, also known as Zen Buddhism. They were renowned through the lands and monks from all over the country would journey to Jiangxi or Hunan to pay respects to them.
Back then, it took a year or so to travel to Jiangxi or Hunan, hence they would visit many places along the way. This became known as traveling or wandering through the Jiānghú.”
Jiānghú has its inception in the idea of exiting legal society and entering into the extralegal society of travelers and itinerants: a society determined by character and conduct rather than by law. So naturally, the Jiānghú encompasses the “outlaw heroes” whose equivalent in Western cultures can be seen in figures like Robin Hood, Jesse James, or John Dillinger — the romanticism of life lived by one’s own code of honor is only possible in the Jiānghú, because the hardships of being a wandering vagrant require you to define your values in an immanent and pragmatic fashion, they become not a luxury of civilization but a way of constructing a way that you can freely exist in relation to other people, not to an abstract system.
Ash Is Purest White shows two diverging paths of modern Jiānghú: a couple, Zhao Qiao (Zhao Tao) and Guo Bin (Liao Fan), exist in short-lived harmony in their gambling house, smoking the same cigarettes, playing mahjong at the same table, Zhao Qiao’s female gender on the same playing field as all the male gangsters surrounding her. When a dispute arises between to members of Guo Bin’s gang, they refer to him to resolve it — impartially, he asks them each to admit their perspectives in regards to the trespass, and then has a statue of “Lord Guan,” a.k.a. Guan Yu, placed next to the two underlings — he asks again, and one of them recants their egotistic bluffing after being looked down upon by the statue; both men part ways after committing to dismiss their anger and work towards a resolution together.
Guan Yu himself was a real-life lionized heroic warrior prominently featured in one of China’s greatest novels, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, deified in Buddhist and Taoist traditions, and held as an exemplar of moral authority in Confucianism — temples and statues of him are a common part of Chinese culture, and he is notably venerated even by Triad societies or gangsters like Guo Bin. Guan Yu as a man has taken on many forms, being both a historical personage, a literary construct, and a folk deity — an intersected amalgam of reality and the mythic that Jia Zhangke takes full advantage of in this picture.
Notably, Guan Yu is paid tribute to by Danny Lee’s maverick cop in John Woo’s The Killer (1989), which, as a classic film of the heroic bloodshed (英勇的流血) genre, is in explicit dialogue with previous wuxia novels and stories — the central difference between heroic bloodshed and wuxia being that, while both take place in the Jiānghú, the temporal axis of each leads to noble heroism in an ancient time (wuxia) and a tragic Untimely collision of personal chivalry with a non-chivalric age (heroic bloodshed). Ash Is Purest White deliberately cribs Sally Yeh’s classic song “A Drunken Life” from The Killer’s soundtrack, a song which is synonymous in Hong Kong cinema with remorse, tragedy, and doomed romanticism.
The Jiānghú cosmos at the beginning of Ash Is Purest White is governed by this moral tradition that Guan Yu’s legacy and John Woo’s cinema represent: disharmony is made harmonious not by the arbitrary exercise of Guo Bin’s authority as leader of his gang, but by reference to ancient heroism embodied in a god-like man, whose example forces one to confront one’s own flaws and to strive to act in accordance with higher virtues like honesty and brotherhood, just like John Woo’s assassins and cops feel compelled to stick to a strict warrior morality even in a modernized Hong Kong of guns and cars — Guo Bin is a figure descended from this storied legacy.
Before Ash Is Purest White, such a traditional world has never been shown before in Jia Zhangke’s cinema — and it quickly falls apart. Guo Bin and Zhao Qiao are both sent to prison after a near-deadly confrontation, and both emerge as different people — Guo Bin, not being welcomed back or helped by his former friends, embraces cynicism and leaves Qiao and the Jiānghú entirely — “It’s not like the old days anymore.” Meanwhile, Qiao, who never considered herself to be fully a part of the Jiānghú, ventures forth to find and confront Bin, and in the process loses her money, her identity, and her lover. And yet after defending Bin against his attackers earlier in the film, she gains a sense of ethical duty and honor that only strengthens throughout her life. She later remarks to Guo Bin, after he’s been crippled by depressive alcoholism and self-pity: “In the Jiānghú, we talk about righteousness…you’re no longer in the Jiānghú, so you wouldn’t understand.”
The Jiānghú that Bin existed in and the Jiānghú that Qiao now inhabits are separated by the Untimely — Bin takes his position for granted, takes it as a static tradition that he’s a part of, and thus is crushed by the realization that no one else in his gang believed in it as much as he thought they did. Zhao Qiao, conversely, lives in the Jiānghú by will instead of habit, she uses her wits and her strength and her integrity to rebuild her life after imprisonment — while Bin sinks into a wheelchair of his own making. The Untimely makes the hero lose his sense of chivalry, while it also makes the heroine gain it — the difference being that Bin’s form of chivalry was taken as a given, while Qiao’s chivalry is intimately bound to her drive to survive the struggles that life places in front of her. Zhao Qiao helps Bin recover, but then Bin leaves her in the film’s ending, his disloyalty reaching a breaking point — Jia Zhangke ends the film on Zhao Qiao’s lone figure, smeared by a digital surveillance camera.
Ash Is Purest White is a curious non-periodic wuxia picture — it has the same plot structure as something like Chang Cheh’s The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) or King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (1971), the elliptical journey of men and women being tested by life in the Jiānghú, but this time instead of swords and flying leaps, we see guns, trains, boats, modernity-as-passage between two states of being. Like in Jia’s earlier Still Life, Zhao Qiao travels over the Yangtze River in the course of her search for Bin, and one imagines that she also lives somewhere in the background of a shot in Still Life, as if that and Ash are co-extant pieces of the same story, the Untimely collapsing the history between them and interweaving these films into a larger tapestry of storytelling instead of two discrete entities — Jia’s Untimely direction is expressing one project in several episodes, not isolated fragments. In this way, he is a symphonic artist, but spontaneously constructing said symphony by building on each previous element he’s created until the overall movement builds and builds into a dense hyper-object of art.
The earlier question that Jia poses finds a subtle resolution in Ash Is Purest White — how to account for historical precedent while respecting the absolute agency of the human being? Ash’s answer is that the tradition of Jiānghú life in China is no longer a literary construct or a select providence of outlaws — it is a moral zone that is encountered by every person. Bin treats the Jiānghú code of honor as if it was Miàotáng instead — that his brothers don’t follow it means that he shouldn’t follow it either, that a moral principle only matters if it is an affair of legal consensus. Zhao Qiao redefines what Jiānghú should rather be — Jiānghú isn’t about being a criminal or an outlaw, it is the part of the human experience that is Untimely, non-systemic, non-didactic: a place where the self’s desires and values are tested in flame and forged into something transcendental, just like the original Jiānghú monks who would walk the paths of rivers and lakes, seeking enlightenment. Zhao Qiao is able to change her life by adhering to the Jiānghú tradition inside herself, not the dead tradition which is being swept away by projects like the Three Gorges Dam.
The crucial thesis of the film is shown when Bin teaches Qiao how to shoot a gun; they slowly climb the dormant volcanic hill, and discuss what makes one a part of the Jiānghú or not. Bin affirms his belief that one simply has to pick up the gun and embrace a life where one may die at any time, that’s what Jiānghú is to him. His hand grips hers, and he helps her aim the pistol that will later save his own life, put him into prison, and ruin his faith in chivalry as an ideal — the gun, illegal to possess, is the Jiānghú in stasis, Jiānghú that can only express itself in relation to the political superstructure of Miàotáng, illegalism that needs a legalism to define what it values, purely reactionary. At the moment of firing the gun, Qiao looks away from both it and Bin — she comes upon her own ethical standards, her wish to embody the Jiānghú life without any of the macho gangster trappings that have calcified themselves around it — she becomes the integral female chivalric knight (侠女) of King Hu’s cinema, while Gao Bin descends into the tragic fatalism of Chang Cheh’s self-destructive Yanggang (陽剛) genre — staunch masculinity, at any cost, male pride curdled into solipsism.
In essence, Jia Zhangke redefines wuxia and Jiānghú not by “deconstructing” these genres of Chinese cinema, but by showing the serious expressions that they can take on in contemporary Chinese life, as well as life under the aegis of global capitalism — does one live by another’s law and morals, or their own code? This is not an intellectualized consideration, it is a Nietzschean imperative — each of us must decide whether we shall stay true to our own will, or whether we will acquiesce to the received wills of other people and their arbitrary systems. Living in the Jiānghú does not mean being a criminal (although one may become that) — it means holding fast to internal values like honor and compassion in a world which may or may not care for such things, precisely because this internal spiritual Jiānghú cannot ever be fully destroyed by the onslaught against the material world’s Jiānghú.
Jia’s alienated heroes and heroines are all cursed to be Untimely — to believe in ideals but be confronted by everything that destroys those ideals. The answer is to remain resolute — the practical struggle makes those ideals shine ever brighter, and the heat of the volcano burns rock into the purest ash. This is the cinema of immanent mythos — that heroism is not confined to the abstraction of past achievements or legacies, that it belongs to our moment and all moments.
"Once all struggle is grasped, miracles are possible."
—Mao Zedong | A guest post by
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