PixelVixen707

I won’t blow anyone’s mind here if I point out that the sword is a phallic symbol, right?

That makes Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars a story about emasculation. Our hero, the spoiled, soft rich boy Huang Lee, has come to Liberty City, America with a sword - the Yu-Jian, an ancient heirloom and a symbol of family honor. Of course, Yu-Jian is also just a trophy that Huang’s late father picked up in a card game. But honor is honor, whatever it’s based on, and Huang is charged with delivering the sword to his uncle - until gunmen meet him in the airport, nab the blade, and leave Huang for dead on the street.

So begins Huang’s journey through the Chinese criminal underworld in Liberty City. To get the sword back, he takes to the streets, working with sleezebags, Triad underbosses and corrupt lawmen. And in their own ways, all of them are emasculated too - bound to concepts of machismo and honor that none of them have the balls to live up to.

It’s a hallmark of Rockstar Games to “satirize” its characters and settings, and while most of their satire is as self-explanatory as toilet humor, certain themes hold up across Chinatown Wars. At the start of the game, Huang is just a boy. When he gets to Liberty City, he has almost no blood on his soft, weak hands, and he’s not used to scraping and hustling and hoodlumizing, until his uncle - Wu “Kenny” Lee, the man who was expecting that sword, and who’s on the outs with the Triad thanks to its loss - starts him on a life of crime. In each of his encounters with underworld figures, Huang has to work with a man who isn’t worth being called a “man.” (There’s also one female character, Ling, who’s smart and deadly and who I rather liked. She gets killed almost immediately.)

Uncle Kenny’s into sicko porn. Chan Jaoming is a feckless, spoiled bisexual. Rudy D’Avanzo turns out to be a crossdresser. (These last two are flat-out homophobic and juvenile, don’t think I’m condoning it, but that’s another post.) Wade Heston has marital problems so pathetic that he coughs up one cliched tragedy after another to explain them away. And the grotesquely obese Lester, P. I., can barely ride his own motorcycle and tries to convince Huang that he got crabs receiving oral sex. (The look on Huang’s face after he hears that little thinker is the game’s funniest moment.)

Hsin Jaoming, the elder Triad leader, has no obvious fetishes, but he is a weak old man: he spews sound bites about honor that all sound hollow, and as a potential mentor to Huang, he’s a bust. Hsin has spun himself dizzy chasing a rat in his own organization, until he’s ready to blame it all on Huang. After all, all this hassle started when Huang lost that sword - isn’t he the obvious candidate?

Gangster flicks are famous for a particular image of masculinity: the raw, uneducated, street-smart alpha man, who holds his gang - or organization, or empire - together through force of will and consistency of action, and who’s more likely to solve problems with his fists and his bullets than with subtlety and reason. These men have an almost sentimental appeal for us, because they’re simple. They have a predictable nature. Chaos sets in, their kids and followers let them down, the world leaves them behind, but they never bend. Call it a code of honor, or call it dumb stubbornness, but in a messed up, corrupt world, you can always count on it. They just don’t know any better.

Except that Chinatown Wars subverts the whole notion of honor, by bashing it in the face and grinding it under its heel. The Yu-Jian sword and the tradition and ancestory it stands for, is basically a fake. Every time an underboss drop the honor bomb around Huang, he calls them out on it, reminding them they sound like a bad movie. The characters’ motives are not only impure, they’re pathetic. Everyone takes the path of least resistance, gives in to their basest fetishes, and turns on each other out of sheer what-the-hell.

But what about Huang? (And you might want to skip the rest of this for spoilers, though I’ll try to keep them light.) By the end of the game, we learn what happens to Huang, Hsin, Kenny, and the sword. And no surprise, Huang gets the sword back before the credits roll. But does possessing the sword – the biggest, deadliest cock in the game – make him a man? The game leaves it vague, and I like that. Huang’s only friend in the game tells him he’s a pretty good guy, for a “rich kid.” That’s the nicest thing anyone says to him.

Compared to everybody else, he’s the only character to come out of this with a backbone. Whether he’ll keep it is up to him. We never find out what made all the other underbosses so soft. Maybe life in the new world was too easy, or too tempting, or too corrupt. Rockstar loves to “satirize” America, consumerism, the Statue of Liberty (aka “Happiness”) and all that jazz, but it’s not like they have any better ideas. So in this honor vacuum, will Huang grow up? Or will he end up as pampered, perverted, weak, and yes, unmanly, as everyone he whacked on his way to the top?

Too bad Ling couldn’t make it to the ending. She’s the one character in the whole joint who had a trade, did her job, and lived and died by her word. She could’ve made a man of him for sure.