Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

When I first heard about the publication of the English translation of this book and such translation is the first of its kind, I was shocked. I never bothered to check if there were English versions out there because I used to read them in Chinese for at least a dozen times. How could this happen? I am glad this classic can finally reach the western readers. The original book was written more than fifty years ago. So the English version is too late, but not too little. Disregarding Chairman Mao's Little Red Book that every Chinese had to own several copies for obvious reasons and thus was published a trillion times in China, it is no doubt that Jin Yong's fifteen martial arts novels are the number one selling books for the last half century in China. It is a rarity to find a Chinese who has never read Jin Yong or watched a movie/TV series adapted from his books. I personally grew up with it, and Jin Yong's martial arts literature has become a common part of the Chinese consciousness and psyche. The Condor Heroes are the first installment of the fifteen stories penned by Jin Yong, and is probably the most widely circulated among the fifteen. That's why I call it the foundational piece of the modern martial arts literature. Without it, there would be no Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan, no Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, or no Kung Fu Panda. Without it, several generations of Chinese would suffer a huge deficit of literary imagination. Jin Yong, like J R Tolkien or J K Rowling, are grand masters of building otherworldly worlds filled with mesmerizing plots and characters. I still remember the days when I begged my classmates in elementary school to borrow and have the Condor Heroes just for one night, and I burned the midnight oil literally because there was no electricity in the early 1980s. Those nights were the happiest reading days of my life. When I started working and received my first paycheck, one of the things in my priority list was to buy and own Jin Yong's full-set books. I took one star off because of the translation. I have great sympathy for the translator because many concepts in Jin Yong's world is so Chinese. For instance, "nine yin skeleton claw" just does not sound terrorizing as the Chinese original. Still the translator did a admirable and quality job.