The Gentleman Fences

Gentleman Fencing is the fourth installment in Yuan Bupo's CMFU Academy series, joining Princess Bubble Dragon, Prince Bumper Ball, Lady Flutter Fist, Lolita Lollipop, and Shota Ride-Horse to form a youth sports fiction collection set in a fictional academy. The protagonist, Minnie, is the nineteenth-generation heir of the Mi family of Mount Midang. Raised in isolation with her grandfather, she knows almost nothing of the world below the mountain. Armed with her grandfather's forty-year-old admission letter, she descends the mountain and stumbles through a series of comic misadventures that lead her to cross paths with Chu Zhuoran, president of the CMFU Academy fencing club. Chu Zhuoran is the academy's universally acknowledged "fencing gentleman"—well-mannered and elegant—yet utterly helpless before this rustic, stubborn girl. Minnie arrives at the fencing club with her ancestral Dragon-Playing Sword, and her Chinese swordsmanship nearly topples the club's finest fencers, wreaking havoc on a modern piste governed by rules and etiquette. Chu Zhuoran tries to reform her according to modern fencing standards, yet cannot deny the singular appeal of her pure, direct strength. Digging up the lawn to plant vegetables, treating a tractor as a convertible sports car, narrating fencing lessons as martial-arts sagas—a string of seemingly absurd antics throws the academy's meticulously ordered world into disarray and prompts a host of characters to reexamine themselves through laughter and tears. Written in a light, humorous style, the novel explores campus competition and youthful camaraderie, and amid its blend of passion and comedy, its true subject is the collision between tradition and modernity, between purity and worldliness.