Brain FoodJianghu Hustle

Faithfully Representing Culture

This post is adapted from a tweet storm I put out a couple weeks ago. I don’t claim to be an expert at the sensitive portrayal of other cultures, but I think this kind of work is at least part of the puzzle.

I was brainstorming the RPG a couple weeks ago and I realized I just deeply, honestly love thinking about Chinese cultural/wuxia genre values and how to relate them to a reader. Child Kung Fu Movie Fan Eli, College Asian Philosophy Student Eli, and Adult Game Designer Eli were in synch that day. I wanna get into the weeds about this. So it’s clear: this is v0.0 stuff I’m talking about. Nothing is set in stone.

My idea for character attributes in the Jianghu Hustle RPG boils down to five values of the “xia,” or knight-errant character of wuxia stories:

  • xia (chivalry)
  • hao (gallantry)
  • li (ritual)
  • yi (propriety)
  • zhong (???)

On the wiki page where I found these values, zhong is defined as “loyalty.” The trouble is that loyalty is referred to elsewhere as a trait among all xia, but with my attribute mechanic you only pick 2 of the 5 traits available. So I ask: what does zhong actually mean?

I’m not looking for the definition in modern language, so I can’t just go to a dictionary. These terms were developed and defined long ago, sometimes more than a thousand years ago. Language changes, so there’s no guarantee the word as it is used today has the same meaning that it did when this literary framework was being developed. Also, note that the wiki page above doesn’t have Chinese characters, so I’m not even totally sure what word I need to research. A little wiki-fu leads me to a Chinese character:

I do not speak or read Chinese, but I notice that the lower half of 忠 (zhong) is a character I recognize from studying Confucianism in college, xin:

I remember the character because it was described to me as an image of a heart with the aorta and arteries around it. Xin translates succinctly as “heart-and-mind.” It’s a symbol about total dedication; not only do you commit your mind to a task, but your spirit too. We’re making progress! A little more digging and I learn the top half of 忠 (zhong) is its own character too:

This character is also pronounced “zhong,” (ah, the slipperiness of language!). This zhong translates roughly as “center” or “balance.” Looks pretty balanced, right?

This character is used in the Confucian take on the Golden Rule, the “Doctrine of the Mean.” I’m learning 忠 (zhong) is a very Confucian character! With that tip, I find what I’m looking for in the New World Encyclopedia. I see 忠(zhong) “defines one’s moral commitments to one’s surrounding social, cultural, and historical community as a whole.” And there’s another important tip in that encyclopedia entry: 忠 (zhong) is Confucian filial piety on a different plane: ruler-to-subject instead of parent-to-child.

Personal relationships are a model for universal relationships in Confucianism, so this isn’t just “I am loyal to my ruler.” Instead, the “ruler” in this relationship is an object of devotion because the ruler is a symbol of the community as a whole. So rather than just “loyalty,” we see 忠 (zhong) is about devotion to the community.

What’s more: 忠 (zhong) is deeply contextual, not universal. I don’t think it could be compared to, say, patriotism. It’s not loyalty to state, town, or neighborhood either. With an understanding of Confucian values, 忠 (zhong) becomes loyalty/devotion to the people you encounter in your daily life; in your field of experience.

So whereas I found a piece of data that told me “zhong” meant “loyalty,” after a little digging I learned that really a better single-word translation for our Western, Internet-age understanding is probably “community.” To tease it out a little more, 忠 (zhong) might be succinctly described as “commitment and devotion paid to the community of people who participate in making your life what it is: friends, family, employers, and the service workers in between these spaces.”

Two final thoughts:

  1. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I consider this a good (not great) amount of research for representing another culture with care. It requires a sincere effort on my part to understand the culture before it can be OK for me to present anything. I need to understand the concept as the culture understands it.
  2. This task–delving into history and meaning to learn what a word meant in a distant place/time to bring that word into modern English faithfully and with integrity–is very much like the project of another of the xia values above: yi (propriety). I’ll have to explore that later.