more Remade in Hollywood

***

***

***

***

***

Or, as Stephen Teo so correctly diagnoses, “the cinema catered to the psychic needs of the diasporic Chinese to identify, vicariously or nostalgically, with the motherland and its myths — even though many of the overseas Chinese would not have been born in China.” [...] In other words, despite the genre’s varied permutations and popular appeal, purists expect the genre to retain at its core a traditionalist, nationalist ideology of Chineseness.

***

In other words, can one ever make a mainstream wuxia pian for a global market without falling into the trap of self-exoticism?

Is that a challenge I hear, Kenneth Chan? Because I will take you up on it. I already have an idea for a long novel or TV miniseries involving 5 diverse Chinese girls who do martial arts in futuristic outer space and lead a revolution against their colonial overlords. I will take up this challenge.