Which is why CTHD is semi-important as a film. Hong Kong and Taiwan have for a couple of decades produced a lot of television shows that portray these stories, but they're mostly pretty cheesy like American soap operas. A lot of what goes on in them has a lot of cultural relevance and wouldn't be readily understood by certain people who have Western sensibilities. I find Chinese warrior mythology pretty interesting, and the problem is that these novels do not translate well. Who the hell knows, maybe once upon a time in China people could fly. Conventional medicine still has no idea how acupuncture could possibly work, yet a lot of doctors will accept it as a viable option. He then went to an acupuncturist and after two sessions the paralysis was gone. Hell, my father had a stroke that paralyzed half his face and went to four separate doctors. Millions swear by the benefits of acupuncture. If you don't understand that it's another culture's fiction/mythology and can't get over that it defies known physics and medicine etc., well, too bad. There's another type of martial art which involves transmitting "chi" (spiritual essence or whatever you want to call it) through your hands or fingertips and into the pressure points of others, either doing them harm, rendering them unable to move, or restoring some of their strength. I think the idea is that they're trained so that they progressively have less and less of a perception of their own weight, and thus they can run up walls and fly across rooftops in style. It's a skill that these warrior folk develop from a young age using various methods that make it so they can move as if they were light as a feather. One of the forms of transcendent martial arts is "chin guon", which translates to something like "the art of lightness". "Giang Hu" literally translates to something like "lakes and rivers", which kind of is a cultural allusion to the fact that most of these people wander a whole lot participating in great duels of swordsmanship and all kinds of tragic drama. The whole deal with the flying is this: In the stories, the world of "Giang Hu" mentioned in CTHD is the unconventional part of society in which the characters that practice high transcendent martial arts exist. I suppose the concept probably does seem ridiculous to foreigners. Having grown up reading a bunch of these stories of epic fantasy, I remember being surprised when I went to watch CTHD in the theaters, and saw the audience break out in laughter at the flying stunts. What people who aren't Chinese and who don't know much about Chinese culture fail to understand, is that the warrior mythology portrayed in films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero has its roots in a particular genre of fiction that has been around much longer than television or film.