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ABSTRACT
This essay introduces readers to a Cantonese writer, editor, and director, Yam Wu-Fa/Ren Huhua (?-1976), whose creative life peaked between the 1930s and the 1950s among a Cantonese-speaking readership across the Pacific. Pertinent to our discussion is his crime fiction series, Chinese Killer King (zhongguo sharenwang). The Killer King, “Charlie Chiu”—not to be confused with Earl Derr Biggers’s “Charlie Chan”—is a Cantonese borderland hero who derives from various references, both fictional and historical, addressing a cosmopolitan yet Cantonese imaginary. Overlooked, Yam and his works represent more than the marginalisation that is commonly experienced by Southernly “popular fictions” in a histography under an elitist and Shanghai-Beijing-centric framework. Chinese Killer King challenges the kind of place-bound identity politics evident in today’s discussion on Hong Kong literature and Sinophone writings. The author hence explores the possibility of using “Cantonese literature” as a critical framework to historicise and theorise a Cantonese-ness and its border-crossing dimension and discusses how the series may be positioned among world crime fictions.
Special terms
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Dr Hazel Chen for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this article. She also wishes to express her gratitude to the editors and the reviewers for their inputs and suggestions.
Notes
1 Notes on romanisation: pinyin is used for all Chinese terms, except for terms that are meant to be pronounced in Cantonese/Taishanese, where Jyutping and alternative forms of romanisation are used, followed with pinyin in brackets.
2 Shang Wei believes (Citation2014, 258) that “plain writing,” instead of “vernacular,” is more appropriate in rendering the essence of the modern form of Chinese writing, which, in reality, does not bear intimate correlations between script and speech. While I agree with Shen’s view, I adhere to the more commonly used term “vernacular Chinese” in my discussion to refer to bai hua wen for convenient purposes.
3 See Note 2.
4 In order to highlight the difference between the “Cantonese” among “vernacular Chinese” in the writings, the author borrows Scots to render Cantonese. Translation of classical Chinese is highlighted in italics.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nga Li Lam
Nga Li Lam is an independent scholar residing in Scotland. She is interested in the studies of popular culture of republican Shanghai and colonial Hong Kong. She is one of the founders of the website Bilingual Database and Annotated Bibliography of Cantonese Popular Periodicals of the Early Twentieth Century (https://cantonpp.com/).