Guanxi and the Single Hero

[khiemtran]

It's also interesting how much of a role the concept of guanxi plays in The Water Margin. Guanxi is most often translated as "connections". It's sort of like the Chinese version of social networking - a network of mutual obligations and influence. It's not that The Water Margin is consciously "about" guanxi, I think it's more that guanxi is such an important part of the worldview that it can't help but have a huge influence on the story. At least as often as problems are solved by force or wits, they're resolved by guanxi. And most of the battles can be seen as struggles of influence as much as clashes of arms. Which of your opponent's supposed allies will actually turn out to be an ally of your own? Which favours can you call in? Which of the many competing obligations will each player honour and which will they publically honour? Which of the final compromises will turn out to be decisive?

With this in mind, my original concept for the story-at-hand is starting to change. My first idea was pretty much a universal story - a child is set upon a hopeless solo mission to recover his parents, along the way he meets and acquires magical allies, faces ordeals etc. It could just as easily take place in any setting, it just happened to be grafted onto a Chinese background. Now that I've sunk more into the world of the Water Margin though, the Chinese root stock has begun to take over.

Getting the "solo" part was always a niggle, especially while leaving the child's parents as connected as they needed to be to continue their profession. There are ways and means, of course, some more clichéd than others. But, more and more, I'm starting to see a different story. In the world of the Water Margin, a weak hero faced with overwhelming adversity does not necessarily charge in despite the odds (well, okay, some heroes do, but they're the ones who also tend to eat with their hands and charge into battle naked). They go instead to their contacts in search of help. Their contacts may weigh their various obligations and then call in favours from their contacts, who might wring their hands and mention the difficult position they are in with their existing duties and loyalties, but here's a way we might be able to help. Heroism is important too, but it's just as important for the guanxi it earns and the opposing guanxi of the opponent it may break, as it is for the immediate result (as illustrated in the Water Margin where Wu Song's fearsome reputation overpowers the guanxi Ximen uses to try to hide the nature of Wu Song's brother's death, in the chapter appropriately titled "Wu Song Offers Heads as Memorial Sacrifices".)

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a male Jin Shei... (<waves at anghara>)

More seriously - this whole concept of guanxi sounds very alien, but if you can manage to make it an integral part of your story, it will be immensely rich. It sounds as if you're really getting into the world now.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Strangely it doesn't sound very alien to me. Though the British version might be different, of course. There is, of course, the Old Boy Network amongst the middle and upper class. But even the lower classes did it. Traditional East End London gangsters worked through a system of calling in favours and would form alliances and webs of contacts. Likewise spy stories like Smiley's People are all about trading favours and doing deals and scarcely at all about charging in with guns blazing.

I tend to associate the lone hero with American movies/novels. They tend not to have families or connections and thus no responsibilities to anything other than fighting their one big battle. British fiction seems to prefer to encumber the protag with relatives and friends. That's a sweeping generalisation, I know, but it mostly applies.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Maybe it only sounds alien because my brain was definitely not in contemporary Britain mode...