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Enter the Xiaozi: Youth in the Hong Kong Kung Fu Comedy Film
© Luke White
Middlesex University, UK
Presented at the World Youth Martial Arts Mastership International Academic
Conference, 03-04 Nov 2017, Cheongju University, Korea
First, I’d like to thank Gwang Ok and the organisers of this conference for inviting me
to come to speak.
My own location within the burgeoning field of the study of martial arts is as a
cultural theorist, with an interest in the representations of the martial arts in film,
media and art – and I have a fascination in particular in late twentieth-century Hong
Kong cinema. I was interested to receive an invitation for this conference, which
focuses on the question of youth and the martial arts, since youth is clearly a central
concern throughout the history of Hong Kong martial arts films – although it is a
concern that in the critical literature is very much overshadowed by discourses around
ethnic or national identity or gender, which are generally taken by critics as more
central categories for analysis. I have just been writing a book on the history of the
kung fu comedy, a genre that exploded in the wake of the success of Jackie Chan’s
film Drunken Master in 1978. At the heart of this genre is a striking and reiterated
figure of youthfulness, provided in its typical hero, who is invariably a kind of ‘kung
fu brat’ – or in Mandarin: a ‘xiaozi’. The xiaozi of the kung fu comedy is unruly,
rebellious, selfish, lacking in respect for authority, and often close to amoral, with a
predilection for gambling, trickery, cheating and petty crime. He is nonetheless
replete with an unbounded energy, independence of mind and courage that are closely
linked with his potential for heroism.
In this paper, I will attempt to make an interpretation of the xiaozi as an image of
ideas of ‘youth’ by placing it within a set of historical contexts, with respect to both
the larger histories of ideas of ‘youth’ and the martial arts during modernity, and also
to the particular changing contexts of Hong Kong society in the 1970s. My analyses
of the genre will focus on Drunken Master itself. My hope is that these analyses in
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their turn throw light on the wider meanings of ‘youth’ within discourses on the
martial arts, and the ways that these have changed over the twentieth century.
Defining Youth
To start, though, I wish to step back to look briefly at the history of the notion of
‘youth’ itself, and its relation to modernity. Youth, in the sense we primarily
understand it today, as a distinct developmental phase between childhood and
adulthood is, in fact, a surprisingly modern concept, and quite possibly for everyone
else in the world a Western import.
1
The Youth is in its turn dependent on what has
been controversially called the ‘invention of childhood’, at around the time of the
European Enlightenment, in which childhood itself was increasingly recognised as
profoundly separate from adulthood, and the new image of the child was placed at the
core of the ideology of the new institution of the nuclear family.
2
‘Youth’, it seems,
emerged into cultural consciousness even later, and in particular with the urbanisation
of the industrial revolution during the nineteenth century. The figure of ‘the youth’ –
along with its correlate the ‘adolescent’ – emerged primarily as a concern both of
journalists and of the new discipline of sociology to mark anxieties about the lack of
control or discipline of the young urban poor, who – the middle classes feared – under
a lack of supervision became prone to crime and delinquency.
1
There are certainly other terms in other cultures that broadly coincide in various
ways (such as the Chinese term ‘bare stick’), but ‘youth’ as such, with all of the
precise connotations that it has taken on globally across the world today, belongs to a
very particular historical tradition, which grew up in Europe and America in the
modern period, and it is the influence of this tradition – though far away from its
original context, as it was transposed in China and had its effect there – that I want to
trace. What I cannot do in this paper due to limitations of time and space is explore
the ways that these Western conceptions of youth were transformed through their
collision with more ‘local’ terms and ideas. For the history of notions of youth, see
e.g. Robin M. Hartinger-Saunders, “The History of Defining Youth: Current
Implications for Identifying and Treating Delinquent Youth” The New York
Sociologist, Vol. 3, 2008 http://newyorksociologist.org/08/Hartinger-08.pdf; Gill
Jones, Youth (London: Polity, 2009); Johan Fornäs and Göran Bolin, eds., Youth
Culture in Late Modernity (London: SAGE, 1995).
2
See e.g. Phillippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962); High Cunningham, The Invention of Childhood
(London: BBC, 2006).
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However, youth did not only have such negative connotations. Parallel to sociological
and journalistic concerns, there also grew up a discourse of youth – linked closely to
Romanticism – which viewed youth, in its very rebelliousness, as a source of value
and of social and cultural renewal. Youth, signifying the new, was contrasted to an
‘old age’ associated with the traditions and rigid hierarchies of the ancien régime, and
so was associated with the enlightenment’s modernist project of social, cultural and
political transformation. Youth was associated with the ‘Sturm und Drang’ of
Romantic revolt, and with authenticity, energy, idealism, and the desire for freedom.
With youth understood in these ambivalent terms, as the twentieth century
approached there arose a series of phenomena – both radical and conservative – that
sought to harness its potentially creative, but also dangerous energies. ‘Youth’, for
example, found itself at the heart of the early development of modern art in what in
Germany was called Jugendstil. [Literally: ‘youth-style’.] Associated with nature and
physical culture, the proto-hippy Wandervogel movement, also in Germany, sought to
take young people out of the decadent city in search of spiritual renewal through
hiking and woodcraft, and through this to lay the foundations for a transformed world.
In contrast, youth was taken as an object of military discipline in the Scouting
movement, and mobilised for ideological ends in organisations such as the Hitler
Youth.
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Youth in East Asian Modernity
Youth also became a pivotal concern within non-Western cultures as they underwent
the traumatic encounter with European and American colonial ambitions. In such
cultures ‘modernity’ and ‘modernisation’ became essential values for the movements
that sought to counter Western imperial might by forging nation-states that could
compete technologically, economically and militarily in the new world order. Within
such movements, ‘tradition’ – though it offered an anchoring and empowering sense
of identity – was problematic in that it rooted culture in what came to be seen as an
3
See e.g. chapter 1, ‘Benjamin and te Idea of Youth’, in John McCole, Walter
Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993),
pp. 35–70. Benjamin was a part of the Wandervogel movement, and McCole argues
that his participation in this was powerfully formative in the development of his
philosophy.
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‘old’ order that could only hold back the changes necessary to resist subjugation by
Western powers or more-rapidly-modernising neighbours.
Youth, asserted in its Romantic guise, thus became an important aspect of
modernising nationalist movements. In China for example, youth was given an iconic
presence in the student protests of May 4th, 1919, against the Chinese government’s
acquiescence to the Treaty of Versailles. The flagship journal of the Chinese New
Culture Movement, founded in 1915, was named New Youth (Xin Qingnian). This
launched itself with a famous editorial by Chen Duxiu, entitled “A Letter for Youth,”
addressing the latter as the source of historical change, and calling on them to replace
“Mr Confucius” with “Mr Science” and “Mr Democracy”. Lu Xun’s famous short
story, “A Madman’s Diary,” (1918) went as far as to imagine Confucius’s Analects –
the very embodiment of tradition and authority – as permeated with an invisible
subtext urging its readers to cannibalise society’s young, providing a dramatic figure
for culture’s repressive force and the need of young people to escape from it.
Modernity and the Martial Arts in China
Such discourses of modernisation surrounded the revival and reform of the martial
arts in China during this period, and so unsurprisingly youth is also a core concern
amongst the meanings that surrounded martial arts practice. The reform of martial arts
took its place within the context of a larger ‘physical culture’ movement, largely
predicated around globally current ideas about the importance of forging the bodies of
individual citizens as fit and healthy in order to create a ‘body politic’ fit for the
modern world. As elsewhere, and as an educational project, this often focused on the
bodies of the young who formed the ‘future’ of the nation.
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The martial arts themselves often seemed, at the start of the twentieth century, a part
of the problem rather than the solution. They were tainted especially by the tragedy of
the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1900, which for the urban elite had become a figure of
the superstitious backwardness of a feudal past that held China back. However, by the
1910s, Japan’s reconstruction of a ‘samurai’ spirit, mobilised in order to foster a
4
The seminal source to consult for this history is Andrew D. Morris, Marrow of the
Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2004). I draw on Morris’s account for my own here.
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militant nationalism and renewed imperial ambitions, increasingly provided an
attractive model for emulation, and institutions such as the Jingwu Athletic
Association and later the Guoshu Institute sprang up to promote Chinese martial arts
as a path to empowerment. Such modernised martial arts remained perched between
values of tradition and modernity, and the figure of ‘youth’ – inseparable from the
modern – was thus taken up in all its ambivalence, too, as the raw material of physical
culture movements, and as a power that both promised strength and transformation,
but which was also fragile, easily corrupted, and which also needed the discipline and
management that the martial arts could offer.
Martial Arts Culture and Hong Kong Cinema
Alongside the reforms of the martial arts, there grew up a body of martial arts culture,
in literature, radio and cinema. Shanghai’s silent cinema of the 1920s saw a veritable
explosion of martial arts films, primarily based around the exploits of young heroes
and heroines, often already thematising their inter-generational relationship with older
teachers and mentors – a theme, of course, that has pervaded Chinese martial arts
cinema ever since. In the field of fiction, begun in the 1930s,Wang Dulu’s famous
Crane-Iron pentalogy of novels (on which the film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
was based) tells of four generations of doomed young lovers whose desires conflict
with the repressive conditions of Qing-era society.
In many ways, the thematisation of youth in this period – in both the culture and
practice of martial arts – is in a profound continuity with many of its later
representations in Hong Kong cinema in the ‘classic’ kung fu era of the 1970s.
Perhaps Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury (1972) is one of the clearest examples of this
continuity. Set in the era of early twentieth-century martial arts reform, Lee plays
Chen Zhen, a rebel with an ethno-nationalist cause, who combats foreign imperialism.
Lee’s youthfulness – not to mention his implicit link to the May 4th Movement and its
ideals – is highlighted by the ‘student suit’ his character wears in early scenes, a style
of dress favoured by New Culture Movement radicals. His muscular body,
furthermore, appears as a fulfilment of the Chinese ‘physical culture’ movement’s
goal of producing citizens capable of fighting back against foreign aggression and
restoring Chinese national pride and masculinity. The modernity and rebelliousness of
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his youth, however, is – as is ubiquitously the case in kung fu cinema – tempered in
his filial relation to his master, for whose death he seeks revenge.
In fact, the concern with youth seems to have intensified during the run up to the rise
of kung fu cinema in the early 1970s, and Lee stands as one of a wave of stars
emphatically promoted for their youthful masculinity – in particular also, for example,
Jimmy Wang Yu, David Chiang and Lo Lieh. Such stars – often taking on the roles in
films of troubled young outsiders in conflict with oppressive forms of authority or
power – made a marked contrast, for example, to the figure of Kwan Tak-hing, who
during the 1950s and 1960s had played the hero of Hong Kong cinema’s most popular
and long-running film series, Wong Fei-hung. Kwan was already in his mid-forties
when he first took up the role, continuing regularly to star in it right into his sixties.
Wong Fei-hung, rather than a rebellious, juvenile hero, was a figure emblematic of
maturity, tradition, uprightness and Confucian orthodoxy, a ‘master’ in his own right,
rather than a student such as Bruce Lee’s character Chen Zhen in Fist of Fury. Wong
seemed to stand as a figure of nostalgic desire for a lost, pre-modern world and its
values.
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As the kung fu craze boomed, he faded into the background as a hero, replaced by
younger actors and characters. In fact, where Wong does reappear in the 1970s, this is
often to reimagine him not as a mature master, but as the young man who will grow
into such a character later in life – as in, for example, Drunken Master itself, or Lau
Kar-leung’s Challenge of the Masters (1976). In other films – such as Yuen Woo-
ping’s Magnificent Butcher (1979) or Dreadnaught (1981), the elderly Kwan Tak-
hing reprised his role as Wong Fei-hung, but remains in the background as a distant
paternal presence, in stories that revolve around the exploits of his young students.
Youth, Kung Fu and the Counterculture
This increased interest in youth, however, signals a change in its meaning, as Hong
Kong society itself was transforming. The relation to a nationalist agenda became
increasingly complex, in particular in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, which
5
See e.g. Mastering Virtue: The Cinematic Legend of a Martial Artist (Hong Kong:
Hong Kong Film Archive, 2012); Stephen Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The
Wuxia Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 58–75.
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made China itself seem increasingly ‘other’ and threatening. An increasing portion of
the population had in any case been born in Hong Kong and never seen the mainland.
Rather than in relation to the national, Hongkongers increasingly identified
themselves with the local, and beyond that the transnational circuits of money and
culture within which they found themselves – and in particular the glamour of an
American-style consumerism.
Within this context youth had a double significance. First, Hong Kong was itself
becoming increasingly ‘young’, demographically speaking, with the coming of age of
the post-war ‘baby boomer’ generation making young people a core audience for
cinema and culture. Second, ideas of youth were transformed globally in the post-war
period by the growth – especially coming from America – of youth subcultures and
the growing counterculture which had culminated in the ‘1968’ revolts that swept the
globe. The new figure of the ‘teenager’ appeared, both as an object of excitement and
social anxiety, to much public debate. In Hong Kong, as Poshek Fu has argued, this
new figure was reflected in the genre of the ‘youth film’, which grew to prominence
in the 1960s. These staged as visual spectacle the glamour and excitement of new,
transgressive youth lifestyles, whilst at the same time containing this within narratives
that reasserted traditional values and offered moral condemnation of teenage
rebellion.
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In many respects the new martial arts cinema of the 60s and 70s also drew its
narrative and thematic contents from these youth films: stars of the 1960s such as
Connie Chan and Josephine Siao easily developed continuous personae across the two
genres. Similarly, the angst-ridden, young outsiders who make up the heroes of Chang
Cheh’s films of the end of the decade, such as The One-Armed Swordsman (1967),
The Assassin (1967), Golden Swallow (1968) or Vengeance! (1970), set as they are
against powerful authority figures and often bereft of paternal guidance, are clearly
modern ‘adolescents’ projected into China’s mythical past.
6
Poshek Fu, ‘The 1960s: Modernity, Youth Culture and Hong Kong Cinema’, in The
Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, ed. Poshek Fu and David Desser
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 71–89.
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Enter the Xiaozi
This history, then, provides a context for the arrival of the figure of the kung fu xiaozi
– the brat or ‘punk kid’ – who becomes increasingly prominent as a protagonist of the
Hong Kong martial arts film as the 1970s draw on. It is in particular with the arrival
of the kung fu comedy that he enters centre stage. These films, largely following the
box office success in 1978 of Drunken Master and Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, both
starring a young Jackie Chan and directed by Yuen Woo-ping, tended to focus around
rebellious, mischievous, undisciplined, materialistic and cynical young heroes, and
their relation with elderly vagabond (often alcoholic) masters, who seem to stand in
for a patriarchy in crisis. These new young protagonists in many ways fit into the
larger patterns through which I have been describing youth to be imagined, and they
seem to stage, in particular, the familiar confrontation with authority and tradition.
Echoing the concern of Hong Kong’s youth films of the previous decade about the
threat posed to social order by the ‘teenager’, the kung fu xiaozi is dangerously
undisciplined and lacking in traditional morality – though again, this is often
recuperated by the fact that he will end up, at the end of the film, fighting to rescue or
avenge a master or father – as happens in Drunken Master itself. One also has the
impression that these are films for, not just about the young.
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Chan’s role in Drunken Master typifies the genre’s vision of youth. To foreground its
concern with youth, the film makes the bold step of re-imagining as a juvenile
delinquent the iconic figure of Wong Fei-hung – identical in Hong Kong popular
consciousness (I’ve argued) with the traditional values of upright morality associated
with the dignified, mature martial arts master. In contrast to such a figure, in Drunken
Master the young Wong undermines the authority of senior students as they attempt
to teach a class; he sexually molests a woman in the marketplace; he engages in a
series of public brawls; he drinks to excess; he attempts to avoid punishment; he runs
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At this point, it is also worth noting what this paper does not explore, by dint of
space and time. As well as a set of concepts that might serve as alternatives to
‘youth’, Chinese culture also provides a set of archetypes of rebellious and
transgressive heroes (and opera clowns) on which these films draw, from the mythical
figure of Nezha through to Fong Sai-yuk, the hero of nineteenth-century cycle of
‘Shaolin Temple’ stories. How the Western notion of ‘youth’, and the literature and
cinema that surrounded it, might interact with these other Chinese (and even
specifically Cantonese) sources in the figure of the kung fu ‘xiaozi’ is a complex one,
which requires further research.
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away from home; he attempts to cheat a meal from a restaurant; and he even pushes
his elderly master into a vat of water where he may drown.
Though both are rebels, then, Chan’s Wong Fei-hung is nonetheless a very different
kind of protagonist to Bruce Lee’s Chen Zhen from Fist of Fury. Whilst the former is
a rebel with a cause, fighting for national pride and against imperialist oppression, the
latter, critics have noted, seems to have become separated from any politics, and
perhaps from any wider morality whatsoever. As typified in the Drunken Master, the
kung fu comedic hero is – especially in the early part of a film – lazy, cynical and
self-interested, motivated by pride and individual desire. Chan’s Wong Fei-hung
doesn’t train in ‘drunken boxing’ for the common good, to fight tyranny, or to expel
foreign colonisers, but, rather, so that he can defeat a fighter who has humiliated him.
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The emergence of this new kind of hero (or perhaps anti-hero) I think marks new
shifts in the social context of ideas of youth. As the 1970s drew on, the heady
idealism of 1960s countercultures seemed to wane globally, with ‘teenage’ cultures
increasingly more associated with modes of conspicuous consumption than political
challenges to the status quo.
Furthermore, Hong Kong society itself was undergoing significant change. The
shadow of the Cultural Revolution made radicalism appear increasingly dangerous
and unappealing. After the riots of the late 60s, the colonial administration
increasingly extended welfare programmes to improve conditions for the poor,
ameliorating anti-colonial unrest. During the island’s ‘economic miracle’, politics
increasingly became taboo under a consensus that saw prosperity and stability as
paramount values.
9
Some critics have thus read the xiaozi as simply expressing the values of this new
moment, a moment where globalisation and ‘flexible accumulation’ were being
pioneered. Chan Ting-hung has, for example, read the kung fu comedy as a ‘reflection
8
See e.g. Leon Hunt, Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger
(London: Wallflower, 2003), pp. 102–3.
9
Gary Ka-wai Cheung, Hong Kong’s Watershed: The 1967 Riots (Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press, 2009).
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of a modern competitive society in which only the fittest survive and the younger are
generally fitter’.
10
For Ng Ho, the ‘emphasis on individual achievement and an
outdoing of one’s own master parallels the ethos of capitalism’.
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Lau Tai-muk has
similarly proposed that Jackie Chan’s ‘slick and playful’ performances express and
endorse ‘the “virtues” of “adaptability” and “using the brain” in capitalist societies’.
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Youth, in such readings, remains aligned with ‘modernity’, but this is no longer the
nation-centred version of the modern that we met in the early twentieth century.
Rather, this is the decidedly capitalist modernity of globalised neoliberalism.
There is much truth in this analysis, and with respect to the argument that I have been
putting forward here, it certainly has an explanatory power in understanding some of
the shifting ideological function of notions of youth in the late twentieth century.
However, for me such arguments only offer a partial account of the kung fu comedy
and its young heroes, and they present film too much as a passive mirror of social
conditions. For me, the protagonists of kung fu comedies such as Drunken Master are
more complex and ambivalent.
I would argue that youth in these films still seems to offer something in excess of the
ideology of capitalist modernity. Youth is also activated in a ‘Romantic’ manner, as a
source of an authenticity that stands against the levelling of all values to economic
exchange-value, which might otherwise be the characteristic of capitalism and of the
brutal, materialistic, dog-eat-dog world that the films – in imitation of their times –
construct. Accounts that overly stress the cynicism of the films’ protagonists and thus
miss out the typical narrative progression in which the seemingly nihilistic hero is
drawn to a redemptive confrontation with real evil, fail to capture the dimension
10
Chan Ting-chung, ‘The “Knockabout” Comic Kung-fu films of Sammo Hung’, in
Lau Shing-hon, (ed.), A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film (Hong Kong:
HKIFF/Urban Council, 1980), p. 149.
11
Ng Ho, ‘Kung Fu Comedies: Tradition, Structure, Character’, in Lau Shing-hon
(ed.), A Study of the Hong Kong Swordplay Film, 1945–1980 (Hong Kong:
HKIFF/Urban Council, 1980), p. 43.
12
Lau Tai-muk, ‘Conflict and Desire: Dialogues between the Hong Kong Martial Arts
Genre and Social Issues in the Past 40 Years’, in Hong Kong Film Archive, The
Making of Martial Arts Films: As Told By Filmmakers and Stars (Hong Kong: Urban
Council, 1999), p. 33.
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whereby the very rebelliousness and independence of youth are profoundly linked to
the young hero’s ultimate humanity and the possibility of heroism itself.
Here, again, Drunken Master – the originary film of the genre, if such can be said to
exist – stands as a good example. In this, what seem to be Wong’s negative
characteristics are profoundly linked to his ‘unrestrained’ spirit, a rebellious youthful
energy that not only makes him immune to the proper rules of his society, but also, in
the end, offers him resources to transcend his opponents’ conventional pursuit of
money and power, and their instrumentalisation of others to this end.
Wong is thus contrasted to Thunderleg, his enemy in the final showdown of the film,
who is a mean-spirited mercenary who kills for money and to prove his dominance.
The relation between Wong and Thunderleg, established in their first meeting is set
up as explicitly inter-generational and in many ways as Oedipal in dynamic.
Thunderleg beats Wong in a fight and humiliates him, commanding him to call him
“father,” and repeatedly referring to him patronisingly as “hao xiaozi” (good boy).
In many ways, Wong’s struggle throughout the film is to develop a set of properly
human values that are offered neither by the violent and competitive world he lives in,
most clearly exemplified by Thunderleg, nor the harshly restrictive and traditional
regime of discipline of his father. The punishments Wong endures from his father,
who even goes as far at one point to want to kill his son for dishonouring the family
name, are, after all, brutal. Wong’s father’s patrician attitudes seem, like Thunderleg’s
macho, competitive individual acquisitiveness, only to offer an alienating inhumanity,
the two between them seeming to represent the two poles facing the rebellious youth:
on the one hand an ethos of modern capitalism and the other a staunch traditionalism,
neither more useful than the other to provide a source of liveable meaning or value. It
is ultimately only through his emerging relationship with the unconventional – if not
thoroughly disreputable – Beggar So, who lives outside both the regimes of economic
productivity and family reproduction, that Wong discovers something beyond these
options, and an authentic humanity can emerge. So’s position outside the structures of
society offers Wong a form of mentorship congruent with his youthful rejection of
norms and values, both capitalist and patriarchal, modern and traditional.
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In opposition to those critics, then, who read the hero of the kung fu comedy as
merely materialistic and self-interested, my analysis suggests that there nonetheless
remains something in his figure that retains the Romantic utopianism that has long
attached itself to the notion of ‘youth’.
Conclusion
The depictions of youth in the kung fu comedy, I have been arguing, on the one hand
continue the patterns by which youth has been imagined throughout the modern
history of the Chinese martial arts, and martial arts cinema. In these, ‘youth’ remains
an ambivalent concept, tied in to modernity. It remains at once a matter of social and
political anxieties around adolescence and juvenile delinquency, but also of Romantic
forms of utopian authenticity and revolt: even the materialistic figure of the xiaozi is
ultimately, I have suggested, a figure of spiritual renewal.
On the other hand, I have argued, such figures of youth also seem with the advent of
the kung fu comedy to have undergone quite significant transformations, and these
transformations, I proposed, in their turn respond to significant changes in Hong
Kong – and ultimately global – society. The ‘modernity’ that youth might figure in
such films no longer takes a nationalist form, and is no longer determined by the
politics of the anti-colonial movements of the early twentieth century, as these were
articulated around the Chinese martial arts in their period of modern reform. The
modernity at stake now, is, instead, the new modernity produced by the realities of
transnational capitalism, consumerism, flexible accumulation, precarious labour and
mobile identity, as ushered in during the 1970s. Certainly as instantiated in a film
such as Drunken Master, the young xiaozi, who was for a while central to the new
kung fu comedic genre, remains an ambiguous figure, at one and the same time
representing the energies of this new social, economic and political order, but also, I
have argued, pointing – as youth has done throughout the modern era – beyond the
status quo.