Why the flying? WU XIA!

Rating: Null/10 (13 January 2001)

Have you ever stumbled onto your local multi-cultural tv station on a friday or saturday night? If so there's a chance you've seen some Wu Xia - chinese martial arts fantasy/romance movies - flying/leaping kung-fu masters, magic, fantasy, etc.
All those people asking about the flying - Think about someone seeing a western for the first time... "What's with all the stupid hats? How come everyone's wearing a gun? Couldn't that bar owner afford a real door?" Well guess what, you've just seen something for the first time. That something might be designated as Wu Xia. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.
I've taken the liberty of copying the following material
"Wuxia" apparently isn't usually translated exactly. Generally it can be called Martial Arts Fiction.
In a similar way, that Westerns refers to a particular genre of adventure stories with specific connotations of historical settings, types of action, and so forth.
Wuxia wraps into itself :
-historical settings
-machiavellian intrigue
-heroes and villains with superhuman powers and abilities at sword fighting
-kung-fu
-flying
-tunnelling underground
-healing
-paralysis touches
-and with liberal dashes of tragic melodrama.
Jin Yong is a recent master and the author of the wuxia novels that so many quite confusing HK films are based upon, eg, Kungfu Cult Master. "Wu" provides the martial arts part while "xia" more strictly means "picaresque romance" or something similar. Unfortunately, many wuxia novels are not strictly speaking picaresque romances. So martial arts fiction seems to be the most commonly accepted translation. Sometimes, as in this case, it is easier to simply lift the term used straight out of its language of origin and make it an English usage.
Wuxia seems to be an obvious Pinyin romanization. Presumably there is a Cantonese rendition. Don't know what characters this term is based on.
Also, I'm trying to remember where I saw the original reference. I know it was in connection with the fiction of Jin Yong (who is also called Louis Cha), a HK publisher, editor and writer who originally hammered out a whole raft of these wuxia sagas in the 1950's (??), 1960's through to the early (??) 1970's.