I first heard about King Hu’s A Touch of Zen in 1980 when I was co-editing the Film and Theatre issue of the Australian Journal of Screen Theory. We had received an article from Hong Kong academic Vicki Ooi, “Jacobean Drama and the Martial Arts Films of King Hu: A Study in Power and Corruption”. She was a little uncertain of her English and I was asked to help out. In fact her English was fine, both in the draft and when she took me through taped copies of A Touch of Zen (1971/1975) and King Hu’s next film, The…