11/12/2023 0 Comments Huli jing storiesI pictured her pale skin glowing red underneath the canopy as she headed out of the forest to complete her celestial ascension. In “The Ninth Tale” the Huli Jing sets off on her journey and is excited and feeling happy, so I emphasized that with the scarlet leaves. Red is the only color that has two different and almost opposite meanings, as it can also represent jealousy and anger. The color also represents the summer and the element of fire. Chinese brides wear red to ward off evil. Think of the red envelopes handed out for Chinese New Year and on other celebratory occasions, and the “power” tie color businessmen wear with suits. It also represents celebration, vitality, and fertility in traditional Chinese color symbolism. Red or vermillion is a popular color in Chinese culture, symbolizing luck, joy, and happiness. But could I pull it off in a written story? I had to try. PAINTED SKIN, taken from one of the stories in Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, loosely adapted by filmmaker Gordon Chang, uses colors this way in his acclaimed film as well. Yimou had done it again but with the absence of color-genius. Then it hit me during The Black Cranes Skeleton Hour panel that every character in the movie is a shade of bad, or black, hence the monochrome hues. I felt dread and impending doom and not much else. Where were the colors? The lack of them made me suspicious of all the characters. So I was taken aback when I watched SHADOW this past year in its beautiful but bleak monochrome hues. Not until HERO was it so obvious and profound. It took me years and several of his movies to figure out what he’d done. Culturally, I grew up knowing that different colors symbolize different things, and Yimou had tapped into this ingrained knowledge visually. JU DOU was the first, and I was mesmerized by the story, but most of all by the colors that cued my emotional responses during different scenes (although I didn’t realize they were having that effect on me at the time). It wasn’t until my early 20s that I was introduced to Zhang Yimou’s films. I’m certain my curiosity began with the first stories I ever heard from my mom about powerful Thai female ghosts who’d enact their rage and vengeance upon their spouses.Īnother component I wanted to incorporate in the story was East Asian interpretations for colors I’d mostly seen used in movies. I’ve always been fascinated by the contrast between the reverence for, and fear of women in East Asian mythos compared to the treatment of East Asian women by their male counterparts throughout history. Her complete disdain and disregard for the practice along with her sympathy for the women forced or encouraged to do it sets a character trait I wanted for my Huli Jing in the story. So I placed the character, traditionally seen and feared as a powerful woman, and set her in a time when the sexist practice of foot binding was at its peak yet nearing its end with changes occurring in the country’s political climate. I knew I needed to take that and crush it. In Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, a collection of myths, fables, and stories written in the mid 1600s to early 1700s, the majority of the works about the Huli Jing, Songling depicted the demon, and all women for that matter, as villains and the explanation behind men’s troubles. Because of my mainly Chinese heritage, which I grew up knowing little about, I wanted to write a classic folktale-style story using the Chinese mythos versus the versions from other countries like the Japanese Kitsune, or Korean Kumiho. ![]() ![]() It’s never one thing that inspires me to write any story, and the same was true for “The Ninth Tale.” With the popular resurgence of a modernized Huli Jing, (Pinyin – húlijīng) or Fox Demon/Spirit portrayed in anime and video games with a blending of cultures and added superpowers, many of the original stories get muddled and lost to younger generations. Colors, Fox Demons, and Folklore in “The Ninth Tale” from Black Cranes Anthology
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