Chinese Literature Podcast: Recent Episodes
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The greatest of Taiwan’s modernists, Bai Xianyong’s short story, “Winter Nights,” is a tale about history and how little we are able to change things. These revolutionaries of Beijing’s hot summer of 1919 reconvene in Taipei in the 1960’s having lost their cause and their country. Lee taught this story about protestors during the height of the pro-Palestinian protests in 2024, and he describes how his students reacted to the story.
This episode is different. I am first explaining the issue of Taiwanese comfort women, and then letting yall hear a speech that I gave to a group in Vienna on the only comfort women museum in Taiwan. Stick around for some interesting history and a discussion of museums.
This week’s podcast is on one of the earliest documents we have in Taiwanese history, a 1697 journey by Yu Yonghe into the wilds of Taiwan’s north, where he mined sulfur amongst the barbarians. Yu gets off on traveling, and this journey is deep into the heart of Taiwan. In this podcast, I discuss the history of Taiwan along with questions of race and racism in Chinese thought.
Links:
China History Podcast – Episode One of the 15-Part Series on Taiwan’s history.
Chinese Literature Podcast – Qiu Fengjia Episode
Chinese Literature Podcast – One of the Episodes on the Book of Poems
Macabe Keliher’s Translation of Yu Yonghe’s Small Sea Travel Diaries
The Original 1603 Article by Chen Di – Record of the Eastern Barbarians – First Chinese Language Article on Taiwan (in Chinese)
Love and amplifers is the topic of Ge Fei’s novella “The Invisibility Cloak.” Ge Fei uses a discussion of stereo systems to try to articulate changes in value system in China in the late 20th century. Turn up the volume for this exploration of one of contemporary China’s most acclaimed novelists.
Today, the podcast interviews one of contemporary Chinese literature’s extraordinary translators. Nicky Harman translated, along with her partner in crime, Liu Jun, Jia Pingwa’s recent novel The Sojourn Teashop. Nicky is well known in Chinese literature circles as a translator and promoter of Chinese literature to the broader public.
The novel, Sojourn Teashop, is available here, published by an excellent UK-publisher focused on Chinese literature, Sinoist, which is at the forefront of translating and publishing the best of contemporary Chinese fiction.
In today’s episode, the podcast is honored to have Ian Johnson, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, author and commentator who has spent decades living in and writing about China. His most recent book is called Sparks. In it, he follows a handful of China’s underground historians who resist the increasingly heavy-handed state by writing and researching events that the Chinese Communist Party would rather be forgotten.
If you want to buy Ian’s most recent book Sparks, get it here.
I would also highly recommend The Souls of China to anyone who is interested in religion in China today.
Wild Grass is a classic, a look at the lives of three individuals in a China that now feels like a different era. Get that here.
And finally, if you are interested in the works of different Chinese underground historians, Ian and others have collaborated to create the China Unofficial Achieves here.
Last episode, we talked about Jin Yong’s background. This episode, we dive into a relatively short text by Jin Yong, one of the last he wrote, “The Sword of the Yue Maiden.” This is the story of a King made a slave by a neighboring king, and his quest for vengeance. In it, he comes across a little girl with magical Kung Fu skills and a government official using his lover in a case of sexpionage. It is an action-packed episode!
Links Mentioned in Today’s Show
Check out the great talk on Jin Yong between Laszlo Montogmery and Alice Poon: China History Podcast – Conversation with Alice Poon on Jin Yong
Also, this is a great resource for anyone looking to get into Kung Fu fiction: Translation of Jin Yong’s Sword of the Yue Maiden
Script
My name is Lee Moore, and this is the Chinese literature podcast. In the last episode, I introduced Jin Yong, the man who pretty much single handedly invented the modern form of Kung Fu literature. The best selling author in all of Chinese history. 300 million books that he’s written have been purchased, though if you combine that number with the number of books pirated, it’s probably gonna be more like Billion books.
Again, that’s just a rumor that I’ve read. That’s the best data that we have on it. After I aired that last episode, Laszlo Montgomery over at the Great China History Podcast told me he was airing an episode on Jin Yong, an interview he did with Alice Poon. She herself is a Hong Kong fantasy science fiction writer.
The two of them talk about Jin Yong. Check that out. I’m going to link to it on the podcast page. It’s a really good interview. Laslo and I did not coordinate this. It was just , as we say in Chinese. It was really faded in the last episode when I talked about Gin Yung, I didn’t do a particular text that he had written This week’s episode, I’m gonna dive into a particular text, the Sword of the UA Maiden Yen.
The Sword of the Yue Maiden is a text that I taught last quarter for my Chinese popular culture class. I’m teaching it in about two weeks in my Chinese narrative class. This is a short story. Actually, I don’t know if you can call it that. I, I’m putting the word short in scare quotes. It gets kind of long.
My students complained about it being too long, and it’s a little bit longer than what I normally assign. The story is about this sword. 14, 000 words long in English translation, that’s, doesn’t qualify as a book. It’s kind of getting up there into novella length though. It’s a fairly long short story. But the reason I assign it is because it’s Jin Yong’s shortest work.
So if I want to do something on Jin Yong, I have to assign it. His full length novels are stunningly long and even more convoluted than this short story. That’s actually the reason that it’s taken me so long to do a podcast on Jin Yong. He’s long, I’m not a big fan of his style, but again, I can’t underline this often enough.
Jin Yong is the best selling author in Chinese history, full stop. So whatever I think of Jin Yong, it doesn’t matter. Whenever you hear me whining about how long he is or how difficult it can be to follow his plot lines, I want you to hear a cash register sound. A cash register sound effect in the background, the man sold books, something that I am starting out as an author only realizing how much work it is to sell books.
Okay, that’s enough about context. If you want more, check out the previous episode that I did, or check out that episode with Alice Poon at the China History Podcast. Let’s get into the Sword of the Yue Maiden. So this story was serialized, like so many of his novels, I think all of them. The story is serialized from January, 1970 in the Ming Pao Evening Supplement.
Ming Pao was his paper. He was the owner. This short story. is the last work of Kung Fu fiction that he publishes, but it’s surprisingly also the story with the setting that is the earliest of all the settings that Jin Yong creates for his novels. The story is set during the spring and autumn period. The spring and autumn period lasts from 770 to 476 BC in Chinese history.
This story takes place sometime in the 470s BC. There is an ongoing conflict between two states, the state of Wu and the state of Yue. These states are both in southern China. Jinyong’s story is actually the melding of these two different folklores that are coming together. First, there is this. Folklore about these two states, the state of Wu and the state of Yue.
These two states are beefing. They’re fighting with each other. They’re having a series of wars. There’s a long litany of things that both the King of Wu and his name is King Fuchai and King Goujian, who is the King of Yue. There’s this long list of things that they have been fighting. The two countries have been fighting for a while.
Jin Yong’s story picks up right in the middle of this King Goujian. of Wu has been on the losing end of these fights. King Goujian was captured and forced to be the slave of King Fucai for three years. King Fucai of Wu, in the ultimate boneheaded, naive move in Chinese literature, releases King Goujian, telling him, okay, I’ve shown you how powerful I am.
Don’t mess with me again. And then he gives King Goujian his freedom. But what he doesn’t know is that King Goujian has sworn that he will do whatever it takes, spend all of the money he has, waste as many years of his life as he needs in order to get vengeance on King Fu Chai for enslaving him. All of that is background.
All of that happens before the story begins. All of that is a legend well known to all Chinese school children. There’s actually a famous Chengyu about it.
It literally means something like sleeping on wood and tasting gall. And that is what King Goujian had to do for years in order to remind himself that he is going to seek vengeance on King Fuchai. The story begins as King Goujian is trying to figure out a way to get that vengeance. He spent years sleeping on wood and tasting gall.
He is scheming for how to get his vengeance. And in the opening scene, you have a sword fight going on, but as the story begins, it’s not actually clear what’s going on. There are just two groups of men fighting. As you read, it becomes clear that. They’re just having a, not a play fight, that’s not the right word, maybe some sort of fight competition.
The competition is between these two groups of the brocade clad men and the black robed men. King Goujian is asking them to fight. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that King Goujian is having the fighters from Yue fight the best. Fighters from the kingdom of Wu in order to prepare them to attack the kingdom of Wu.
Of course the fighters from Wu never realized that this is King Guo Zhen’s plan. They think they’re just showing off. They’re just flexing on the people. of Yue. Part of the reason that they think this is because King Goujian is super submissive to King Fuchai and others from Wu. King Goujian goes out of his way to make it clear that he wants to be submissive.
But again, this is all just part of Goujian’s plan to trick King Fuchai and the rest of the people of, of the kingdom of Wu into thinking that he is not a danger. Another reason that These fighters don’t get what’s going on is because they’re just all super cocky these fighters from Wu Think they’re bad mamma jamas.
They’re drunk They start talking crap to the people of Yue. The people of Yue want to fight them But again because King Guo Jian wants to be submissive. He doesn’t want to show that he is actually seeking vengeance So he’s very strategic and he also Orders his people, the people of Yue, not to fight the Wu foreigners, no matter what.
You have to be submissive. You can’t show that you’re seeking vengeance. So these fighters from Wu, they’re out there, they’re drunk, they’re strutting their stuff, picking fights with the locals. They need someone to fight. The locals have been ordered not to fight them, not to show their strength, not to show their anger, but the people, but these fighters from Wu, they want to fight, they need someone to kill.
They run into a little girl who has a goat and they slice the girl’s goat in half just like the bullies that they are. But then something unexpected happens. The girl tells those goat murdering punks that they can’t go around bullying people and murdering other people’s goats. The little girl’s parents are there and they’re like No!
No! No! Leave these mean men alone! Get out of there! But the girl actually Takes a bamboo pole that she has been using for herding and she’s obviously not gonna need it anymore for herding And what does she do? She goes and whoops all of them drunken cocky wool warriors She blinds some of them with her pole and gets kind of nasty and then you know what she does She actually taunts these goat murdering wool folks.
She goes, all right now How much money are you gonna give me to pay me to compensate me for my goat killing? that y’all killed. The girl’s name is Ah Ching. She is a shepherd from a poor family. She hates having to sell her goats for people to eat, but she has no other way of making money to buy food for her family.
One of King Gojin’s bureaucrats, his name is Fan Li. Fan Li is the poet. political genius behind King Goujian’s plot to take revenge on King Fuchai. Fan Li sees this fight, Fan Li sees Ah Qing whoop these warriors, and Fan Li says, Ah Ching, I will feed your family. All I want you to do, little girl, is to train our soldiers to kick butt like that.
And then finally ask, Ah Ching, where did you learn to fight like that? Who is your master? Ah Ching replies, I ain’t got no master. I just learned my moves from play fighting with Grandpa Bai. Who is Grandpa Bai? Grandpa Bai lives up in the mountains. He’s actually not a human, but a white Jinyong says Grandpa Bai is a white ape.
Of course, we all know that humans are themselves apes, but Jinyong got his PhD in Chinese history, not anthropology. So we’re going to give him a pass. Anyways, Fan Li goes up and tries to see Grandpa Bai. Fan Li actually starts fighting Grandpa Bai. And Grandpa Bai tries to kill Fanli, but Ah Qing ends up breaking up their fight and, and actually breaking the arm of Grandpa Bai.
What happens next? Ah Qing goes to the palace. She shows off her Kung Fu skills for King Guo Jian. She whoops all of the Yue swordsmen, not the Wu swordsmen, the Yue swordsmen who are working for King Guo Jian. A Qing is amazing at fighting, and these Kung Fu masters employed by King Guo Jian just cannot keep up with her, but a couple of them are able to pick up some skills just by watching her.
Then, A Qing disappears, vanishes. We don’t know where she goes. King Guo Raises an army, invades Wu, his men using the skills A Qing taught them. They stomp Wu. King Fu Chai retreats into the mountains. Then, Fan Li, that political genius, reconnects with Xi Shi. Xi Shi is famous in Chinese. literature as a beautiful woman.
She’s also famous as someone who’s dangerous. In this case, Xi Shi has been deployed by Fan Li as an agent of Sexpionage. That is, a spy who uses sex as an entree to be an influence agent. Xizhe has been sleeping with King Fucai, but also she’s apparently whispering secrets to Fanli, though that part is never discussed in the story.
That is just known from the historical context that Jinyong’s imagined reader would be expected to know. Fan Li reconnects with Xi Shi. They’re lovers, apparently. Though obviously not exclusive lovers, since she has been sleeping with King Fu Chai. Fan Li and Xi Shi talk about how much they have missed each other.
They’re having this moment of reconnection. It’s very pretty. And who should show up? A Qing, of course. And what does A Qing do? She tries to kill Xi Shi. Fan Li realizes that the reason A Qing, this girl with the goat, helped the state of Yue, it has nothing to do with her being patriotic. It’s entirely because she has a little girl crush on Fan Li himself.
When A Qing sees Xi Shi and Fan Li reuniting, that Breaks Itching’s heart. I’m not gonna spoil the ending, but even if I did want to spoil the ending, I actually don’t know how I could, ’cause the end is pretty ambiguous. I’m not sure what happens. It’s kind of weird. We were talking about it in class No one actually agreed on what happened at the end of the story.
I’m not gonna give y’all any more clues What I can say is that this story is a good entree for someone wanting to get into Jin Yong But doesn’t know where to start. This story is great for the following reasons Like I said at the beginning this story is relatively short compared with Jin Yong’s Other work.
It’ll take you probably two hours to read. It’s not super short, but it is the shortest that Jinyoung does. Second, the story is pretty exciting. I hope that came across in the retelling. I have, in my retelling, eliminated some of the more boring parts. Jinyoung has this tendency to tendency to be very discursive.
I didn’t talk about the history of the sword or the sword maker because I didn’t think that really added much to the story, but there are whole chapters dedicated to that. I’m not supposed to say this as a person with a PhD in literature who teaches Literature. You should feel free to skip those parts of the story.
The writer has an obligation to you, the reader. You, as the reader, do not have that much of an obligation to the writer. Maybe you have some obligation, but it’s very limited. I give you permission. Do it. Okay, third, the reason this is a good story to start with. is that this story shows how Jinyong incorporates earlier Chinese mythologies into his own modern fairy tales.
So we have the story of Goujian, the story of Xishi, and the story of Aqing, the Yue Maid. All three of these stories come together in a, in a story. Repackaging of earlier Chinese mythologies. And the fourth reason that this story is a good story to start out on is Jinyong’s story here has actually been translated and placed online on a website that I actually think is a fantastic resource.
I’m going to link to it in the description. the podcast site but that website is called wuxiasociety. com so that’s w u x i a society. com wuxiasociety. com has tons of translations of kung fu fiction that is wuxia fiction and they just happen to have translated the entire Sword of the Yue Maiden, into English.
I’m going to post that link in the podcast website, ChineseLiteraturePodcast. com, check the part under this particular episode, and I will put it into the show notes. I don’t always do this, but I’m trying to put a transcript of the show notes in, into those episodes as well, if you want to read through that.
While you’re on the The website, Chinese literature, podcast. com. If you wouldn’t mind, please pre pre order my book, China’s backstory, the literature and history behind today’s front page, China news. You don’t have to give a credit card, just give your email address. My publisher will give you occasional updates on the book and its publication.
Today’s Chengyu, no extra points for guessing. It is. Like I said, Before, it literally means something like sleeping on wood and tasting gall. But today the phrase is used to mean something like someone who’s willing to do whatever has to be done, enduring whatever hardships it takes to achieve that person’s goals.
This is actually a pretty good little chungyu to have. I’ve heard it used many a times. All right, that’s it for me. I’m Lee Moore, and this is the Chinese Literature Podcast.
This podcast, we take a look at the life and times of Jin Yong, along with the genre he came to define, modern kung fu literature. We explore Jin Yong’s path to becoming China’s best selling writer, putting out more books than JK Rowling. We also look at the January 17th, 1954 kung fu match that inspired him and others to turn kung fu into a phenomenon that would over take the world decades later.
Here is the link to the fight that started it all, the most important fight in the history of Kung Fu:
This week is the last in our Sima Qian series, but it is also definitely the best. We look at how Sima Qian lost his testicles while sticking to his principles. We consider the conflict between him and Emperor Wu that percipitated his castration. I also make a big announcement.
Here is the Transcript:
My name is Lee Moore, and this is the Chinese literature podcast. We are coming to the end of our Summa Chen series. Last week, we looked at Summa Chen’s discussion of the capitalists, Summa Chen’s defense of free market principles. This week, we are looking at one of the most famous Summa Chen works. And strangely, it might not even have been by Sima Qian himself.
This week we are talking about the famous Bao Ren An Shu, the letter replying to Ren An, the letter to Ren An as it’s sometimes translated. First we’re going to discuss the controversy surrounding the letter and the context in which it was produced, and then we’re going to dive into the letter itself.
So what’s the controversy? There’s actually a debate as to whether or not Sima Qian wrote the letter. The letter to Renan, despite the fact that This is the work that Sima Qian is most known for. It doesn’t appear in the shi ji, the records of the historian. The records of the historian is Sima Qian’s main work.
Why doesn’t the letter of Ren’an appear in that work? We don’t really know. Instead, it appears in the Han shu, the history of the Han, the book of the Han. The Han shu, is a work that appears almost two centuries after Sima Qian’s death. Now, the letter to Renan appears in that work and it purports to be by Sima Qian.
Did Sima Qian actually write this letter? It’s hard to say. There’s a book written by Li Weiyi, Michael Nylan, Han Venice, and Stephen Durant. They’re all stunningly good. Scholars, professor Durant’s a friend of the podcast has appeared on the podcast way back in April 17. They argue that this letter might actually be written by someone else, but they think it’s pretty much true to Sima Qian.
I don’t understand what that means if The letter is written by someone else, but true to him, I don’t, I don’t know. That’s a circle that I can’t square, but that’s fine. I just wanted to talk a little bit about that controversy. Is this letter by Sima Qian? We don’t know. Does it matter? Probably not, because for two millennia, it’s Chinese readers have been reading this letter and whether or not it was truly written by the real historical Sima Qian, it has become associated with the character of Sima Qian in the minds of so many Chinese readers.
Okay. Enough on the controversy. Let’s dive in to the circumstances surrounding this letter. Renan was supposedly a friend of Sima Qian. Renan is involved in a rebellion in 91 BC called the Liuzhou Rebellion. Renan is facing execution because he supposedly did not. display sufficient loyalty to the emperor during this rebellion.
Ren An writes a letter to Sima Qian explaining what happened. Ren An doesn’t think his execution is justifiable. Sima Qian replies to Ren An’s letter. Sima Qian essentially tells Ren An to suck it up, deal with it. And then he, it is this long disquisition. By so much in explaining what happened to so much in himself and how he dealt with the prospect of almost being executed by the emperor and how in the end so much in lost his testicles though not his life.
Let’s jump back in time a bit. So much in served Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty, Han Mu Di. Emperor Wu is very controversial. He institutes this new economic policy, something that we talked about in the last podcast. Emperor Wu also breaks with other traditions. So for about quite the past century, the Han dynasty largely kept the northern barbarians, that is the Xiongnu, in check.
And they had done this with a pretty simple diplomatic formula. They paid them and they married the, uh, Han Dynasty princesses off to the Xiongnu as a way to make sure the Xiongnu had skin in the game and knew that if they raided Han towns along the borderlands, they were going to get cut off from the stuff.
Essentially, the Han Dynasty was selling them goods and trying to get them addicted to the kinds of industrial goods that only a society like China could produce. And once they got used to these Industrial goods these luxuries they wouldn’t attack the Han because they knew that they could get cut off and they constructed this whole sexual dependency as well They the Han Dynasty argued that Chinese women were more beautiful than these barbarian women And you can’t get more beautiful Chinese women, unless you work with us, we’ll send you Han dynasty princesses.
If you don’t attack our villages and we’ll cut you off. If you do attack our, our towns on the borderlands, Emperor Wu stops all that. He is very frequently warring with the Xiongnu, those Northern barbarians. Emperor Wu says. We ain’t going to pay the Xiongnu any more money for peace, and we ain’t going to give them any more princesses.
It’s an incredibly expensive policy change. It’s also something that Sima Qian promptly criticizes in his, uh, Xiongnu Liezhuan, the biography of the Xiongnu, where Sima Qian seems remarkably sympathetic to the Xiongnu’s side, considering that his job, Sima Qian’s job, is the archivist of Emperor Wu. Sima Qian goes out on a limb there and really expresses Uh, a lot of sympathy for the Xiongnu.
Emperor Wu and Sima Qian have these philosophical differences. Sima Qian does not like Emperor Wu’s economic policy. Sima Qian does not like how Emperor Wu deals with the Xiongnu. There are other things that go on. Then this thing happens. During one of the wars with the Xiongnu, a guy named Li Ling. Goes and shoots his mouth off.
General Li Ling says he can destroy the Xiongnu with just a handful of troops. Initially, Emperor Wu is skeptical. He thinks General Li Ling is just talking trash, but Emperor Wu eventually gives General Li Ling his troops. General Li Ling marches on the Xiongnu. He meets the main body of the Xiongnu troops somewhere in the Altai mountains, in that region where modern Russia, Kazakhstan, Xinjiang, and Mongolia all come together.
General Li Ling is now regretting mouthing off. He’s surrounded by a much larger group of Xiongnu troops. General Li Ling and his troops fight bravely. In this passage, I’m going to read, Li Ling’s forces are surrounded. They’re running out of supplies. An officer from Li Ling’s army is insulted. He defects to the Xiongnu and tells The Xiongnu, that Li Ling’s troops are running low on arrows, so of course the Xiongnu push it harder.
Li Ling’s forces are in a bad way. The relief column did not come. The dead and wounded troops lay in piles. Nevertheless, Li Ling gave a shout to cheer up his army, and not a soldier failed to rise. He was crying, swallowing, tears running down his bloody face. Here is a translation. From here’s my translation from the passage that I’m drawing from an entire country surrounded them for thousands of miles They had to turn and fight turn and fight their arrows exhausted the roads of escape Used up the backup soldiers.
They had requested had not arrived the dead and the wounded soldiers Piled up, but Li Ling shouted to his army, and every soldier rose. Li Ling personally shed tears, and with his face bleeding, he drank his own tears. They drew back their empty crossbows, risking everything before the bright swords.
Facing north, they fought. To the death with the enemy emperor Wu was incredibly pissed You’ve got to imagine general li ling had been running his mouth for all this time and he ends up surrendering emperor Wu was angry And then sima qian comes back into the story. Sima qian had kind of known li ling They hadn’t had a beer together despite the fact that sima qian was not very close with li ling.
He still defends him He says li ling is a good guy. He says that li ling and I we lived in the palace together I knew li ling Even if we were never good friends. Sima Qian tries to argue that Li Ling was a brave man. Emperor Wu takes out his anger at Li Ling on Sima Qian. He orders that Sima Qian be executed.
But then, Emperor Wu rethinks what he has done. He grows a little bit less angry and he actually commutes Sima Qian’s death. sentence. The punishment that he gives him is the lesser punishment of castration. Now, you got to understand, this is the Han Dynasty. In the Han Dynasty, no self respecting man would live castrated.
In the Han Dynasty, they thought that it was better to die than to be unmanned. So, when Emperor Wu commutes that punishment from execution to castration, He’s not expecting Sima Qian to live on. Instead, he’s giving him an out. Emperor Wu is allowing Sima Qian to commit suicide through means of his own choosing.
He can choose a less gruesome death than the kind that he would have faced if he was executed. But the expectation is still that this punishment will result in Sima Qian’s death, even if it’s by suicide rather than an out. execution. According to the letter to Renan, Sima Qian makes a strange decision.
Rather than commit suicide, he allows himself to be castrated. This is difficult to imagine. Why would he do this? He asks himself this question in the letter. How could he go on living without his manhood? To have lost your manhood To have lost your testicles in the Han Dynasty is to really not be a human.
That’s how Sima Qian describes it. Sima Qian, in the letter to Renan, calls himself, quote, the leftovers of the knife and the saw. Here’s what he says in another passage. I may be an old horse that has outlived its usefulness, but I always hearken to the influence from my seniors. When I consider how my body has been mutilated, how fault has been found in whatever I have done, and how my desire to be of good benefit has brought ruin to me.
Instead, my heart burst and I have no one to tell. In another passage, Sima Qian says, quote, there is no degradation worse than castration end quote. Then Sima Qian goes on to list examples of how people have been ashamed of having just been around castrados in the Chinese past. He mentions Duke Ling of Wei.
Duke Ling shares a carriage with a eunuch. How does Confucius. respond when Duke Ling does this. Confucius actually leaves the duke. He does not even want to be around this man who has ridden in a car with a castrato. He goes through all these examples and then he ends this list of people who have been shamed by being associated with castratos.
Sima Qian says this, when a man of even middling qualities has business to conduct with a unit, he always feels So, if castration is so horrible, why does Sima Qian accept that fate rather than just facing death? The reason Sima Qian says he does it is because fame is more important than anything else.
Quote, the end of all action is becoming famous. The end of all action is making one’s name known. I’m talking about this passage with my students in a few weeks, and I wonder, in an age of TikTok and Instagram, how they are going to respond to this passage. For Sima Qian, the question of shame, of death, those things are less important than fame.
And the reason Sima Qian has to, has to stay alive, he says it’s because he has to complete his father’s work. He has to finish up this history that he is writing, the records of the historian. Interestingly, initially Sima Qian frames this in very filial terms, as a good Confucian. Initially, Sima Qian doesn’t say, I did it because I wanted to finish that historical work that I was working on.
He does that later on. Here’s the passage where he actually admits that the reason he’s doing it is because he personally has this investment in this historical work. Quote, the reason I bore through it in silence and chose to live At any cost, the reason I did not refuse to be covered in muck was because I could not stand to leave something of personal importance to me unfinished, because I despised perishing without letting the glory of my writings be shown to posterity.
In the end, it comes out, I wanted to do it because this is my history, and this is the thing that will live on down the generation. In the end, Sima It is only the act of writing that can save him from a fate of insignificance. Quote, in the cases like Zuo Qiu Ming’s sightlessness or Sun Zi’s amputated feet, these men could never be employed.
They withdrew and put their deliberations into writing in order to give full expression to their outrage, intending to reveal themselves purely through writing that would last into the future. In the last podcast, I talked about how Sima Qian’s writings function as a way to attack Emperor Wu and his economic policies.
This is where I was getting that from. Those of us who aren’t kings, those of us who aren’t emperors, all we can do when a ruler does something wrong and tosses us out, having us castrated or amputated for punishment, our only power left is the pen. Sima Qian sums it all up when he talks about death.
There are lots of people who are rich and famous in the past, Sima Qian says, but most of them have been forgotten. Quote, the number of rich and noble men in ancient times whose names have been utterly wiped away is beyond reckoning. The only ones who are known are the exceptional one. Those who are outside of the norm.
This is why Sima Qian decided to continue. This is why he decided to face the humiliating fate of being castrated. He says, Death comes for us all. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. It is not the fact that we die that matters. It is the way that we handle death. death that matters most.
Here’s what Sima Qian says, quote, Human beings truly have but one death. There are deaths that seem heavier than Mount Tai, but to some, death seems lighter than a piece of swan’s down. The only Difference lies in what is done by die. It is only in the way that we die, that the meaning of our life works itself out.
Chen’s life has meaning because he chose to live in humiliation and complete his master work, rather than do the easy and expected thing and simply commit suicide. Chen chose to face a more humiliating fate and put a dent in the universe that I think is one of the most. Amazing passages in all of Sima Qian’s work if we really believe that this is by Sima Qian Which of course I already pointed out.
We don’t we don’t really know. Okay, y’all can see how incredible this piece is It’s one of the greatest and most famous pieces of writing ever produced in China If you talk about this with a Chinese friend, they’re gonna know about it They all had to read it in school. Today’s Chengyu is To take history as a mirror or to look at oneself through history, to learn from history.
This is the dominant mode of history in China. History is understood in China, first and foremost, as a moral lesson. It’s a means for understanding the present. In China, history is more literary than in the contemporary Western world. In the West, we think of history and we expect it to be what happened.
In the past, we expect it to be objective. We don’t always expect it to have a moral message. Though, of course, history frequently does have a moral message in the West. For most modern Westerners, post Renaissance, history is about what happened in the West. In the past, but in China, there is still an expectation that history is ideological, that it has a moral point that it is trying to impart to the reader to take history as a mirror.
This is a very famous Cheng Yu. It’s originally written in the book of documents, the Shang Shu, but it’s used throughout Chinese history. Now, before we go, I have a big announcement to make on the podcast. Previously mentioned that I was working on publishing a book. It is happening. I’m proud to announce that I am going to be the first author getting to be published by this awesome new publisher unsung voices books run by amy rath and don russo The two of them have a combined five decades in the publishing industry and they chose me as their first book Don has been a listener to the podcast for a while.
The book itself is tentatively titled China’s backstory, the literature and history behind today’s front page, China news. The book tries to explain the literature and history behind for China related topics that are being discussed in the American media today, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese economy.
These are all incredibly sensitive topics. This is the kind of book that couldn’t get me castrated by Xi Jinping. All of these topics will make the authorities in Beijing want to reach for the knife and the saw in the book. I’m going to explain how those news stories came to be. News stories, taking the reader.
To the stories behind the news story, weaving literature and history into a narrative that helps people understand the background behind these topics, the things that are rarely reported on the history, the literature behind the story. What I ask of you. If you’re willing, dear podcast listener, I have posted the URL for the book’s preorder page on the website.
I would be very appreciative if you would go and show your love for me, the podcast, and the work I do, if you just go there and sign up for the preorder. So to preorder, you’re not actually preordering in the sense that There is no credit card information required. You don’t have to pay anything in order to pre order.
All you have to do is give Unsung Voices Books your email address. What you’re really doing when you pre order is you’re signing up to be updated about my book as it gets closer and closer to being published, which I think will probably be in 2025. Unsung Voices Books Is asking me to turn in the manuscript August 31st.
So I have been beavering away at the book. Some of y’all probably realized that something was up because I have been even slower than normal in replying to emails. If you are willing to support me, go to Chinese literature, podcast. com. Find the page that says, Pre order my book, put in your email address and then go tell your family, tell your friends, even tell your enemies, spread the word that this book is happening.
Okay. That’s it for me. You’re going to hear me in later episodes talking about the book. Again, I’ll keep you all updated on the status of the book as well. I really appreciate it. If you can go and pre order the book until the next episode, I’m Lee Moore, and this is the Chinese literature podcast.
Today, we take a look at Sima Qian’s Biography of the Capitalists, chapter 129 in the Records of the Historian. This chapter is Sima Qian’s two-millennia old defense of free market capitalism. The chapter is one of the most interesting his oeuvre because Sima Qian was condemned for it by later historians.
Today, in the second podcast in the Sima Qian series, we take a look at some of the first literary evidence we have for the Nan Yue, the People of the Southern Yue, the ancestors to modern-day the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi in China and the people of Vietnam. Sima Qian describes the Han Dynasty’s colonial conquest of the Yue in vivid detail.
Sima Qian is not only the first historian in Chinese history, he is also one of the greatest writers that China has ever produced. Today, writers of Kung Fu novels point to Sima Qian’s stories on fighters and assassins as the origins of the Kung Fu genre. Chinese business people point to his “Biography of the Capitalists” as the reason why Chinese people today are so good at business. He documents the Chinese colonization of the Yue, who once were an independent nation that straddled the border from Guangzhou to Hanoi.
Today is the start of a series on Sima Qian. The podcast will take a look at Sima Qian the man and the broader context of China’s early historiography.
Today, we do something different. We take a look at a children’s book that was originally written in English, and then translated into Chinese. Strangely, the translation into Chinese was done in a way that took the English and translated it into classical poetic forms that hark back to the Tang Dynasty. Journey with me to find out how deeply Chinese poetry has influenced the Chinese today.
Here is the podcast:
Here is the link to the book in English. I have not been able to find the Chinese version online, though here is a photograph of my daughters’ copy:
Also, here is a copy a transcript of the podcast. Keep in mind, this is experimental and generated by AI, so it may get somethings wrong. But I am doing it because several listeners have requested a transcript with each episode.
Transcript:
My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese literature podcast. Today, I’m not going to give you a whole big introduction on the texts that we’re looking at. Normally I start out by spewing a bunch of biographical historical information at you. Today, I’m just going to start and read it first in Chinese and then in English.
I know I don’t normally read in Chinese, but I think you’ll understand why I’m going to do this after I explained to you what I’m actually reading. Here is one of the poems we’re looking at today. In the morning, the rooster, um, uh, calls loudly, saying, good morning. In the farm, the animals get up early.
Have a delicious breakfast. Here’s the English. Early morning, the rooster, oh, oh, crows. In a loud voice, he says, good morning. The farm animals wake up. Delicious breakfast they eat until full. Did you hear the rhythm and rhyme in that, uh, original passage? Each line of the poem ends with a word that rhymes with owl.
And did you hear the structure? That structure is so common in traditional Chinese poetry. It’s called a qian jue ju, a seven syllable heptasyllabic line. I mentioned this last time in the. The podcast on Huang Zunxian. Each poem has a couplet where the first line in the couplet complements the second line in the couplet.
So in this poem, line two completes what happens in line one. So the rooster wakes up in line one and crows. What is he crowing about? We’re told about that in line two. So there’s this structure in lines one and two. Something happens in one and we’re told about it. about what it is in line two. Line four completes what happens in line three.
In line three, the farm animals all wake up. In line four, they are eating breakfast. This is all very typical in terms of Chinese poetry. If you were to read Tang Dynasty poetry, this would look very familiar. This is pretty much the same form as Tang Dynasty poetry. I’m guessing you already realized this, but we are not reading.
Poetry, what era is this from? Let’s take a look at another poem
in the shed, issues forth the sound of oo, who is it who lives inside? Take a look through the barn door and have a glance. This is a three line poem, but it’s pretty much that same structure. Each line has this 4 3 structure. So it’s a heptasyllabic poem that’s divided into the first part of the line has four characters, the last part of the line has three characters.
Very standard, very standard. If you were to look at Li Bai, Du Fu, you would see these kinds of poems. All over the place. This is not Levi. This is not Doofu. Have you figured it out yet? This is not a formal book of poetry. What I am reading to you is actually a children’s book. It’s a flip book where you have these pictures of life on the farm and you flip little things over and it will reveal something.
I’ll. I’ll try and find it online and put a link in the podcast on the web page. Uh, in fact, one listener has actually asked me to put more URL links on the web page if if I discuss a book. So I’m going to try and do that more. This book is fascinating and I wanted to do a podcast on it because I think a lot of times we forget that Chinese literature has this.
Long hold over China, much more so than I would say anything comparable in the West or really anywhere else in the world. I’m less certain of that statement in terms of India, but I think most places outside of China. You really don’t have the long hold that Tang poetry, that Song poetry has over China today.
How did I get this book? Uh, so I have kids, a close friend of mine and friend of the podcast, Brandon Foltz, actually donated this book to me when he was moving. It was his child’s book. And he was like, I can’t, I can’t take it with me when I move. So he, he gave me a bunch of Chinese books. The book is just called Nongchang, that’s just farm.
What I find so fascinating about this is that. This book, it was not originally a Chinese children’s book. In fact, it’s a British book called peep inside the farm published in 2015 by a use born publishing, and then it was translated into Chinese in 2018. So, think about this, this is not a book that was originally written in Chinese.
That would make sense if this, uh, rhyme was originally written in Chinese and, and they structured it in kind of a Tang Dynasty poetry style, but that’s not what happened. This is a children’s book that was originally written in English and translated into Chinese. So when they translated it, they went out of their way to translate it from English Ancient poetic patterns that have been with us for more than a millennia.
Now I have to admit these poems frequently break with that ancient poetic form. So you will have, uh, the writing in this children’s books. It’s sometimes written in this poetic form, which I mentioned is the heptasyllabic form, the qi yan jue ju. Uh, and then all of a sudden it will break from that form.
So it’s not like when the translators translated this book from English into Chinese, they translated everything into that poetic form. But I still do find it incredible that this English children’s book is being translated into Chinese using these ancient poetic forms. Let’s look at another poem. This one is written in a very simplistic three syllable or three zi per line form that was used to teach children the Confucian classics, particularly in the, the San Zi Jing, the three character classic.
If you’re going to milk a cow, you have to do it on a schedule, once in the morning and once in the evening. How about another one in that style, but this one’s going to be a little bit longer and in the middle it’s going to break that poetic form just a bit.
So, the tractor, it makes a loud noise. It softens up the ground and busily casts the seeds. Little seeds, they will grow big. They need sunlight and water. The wheat seedlings grow up fast. After you ripen, you will be ground up into flour and baked into bread. The tractor It is strong. I’m not going to bang on this too much longer.
The main point I had in bringing all this up is I’ve done a lot of podcasts on poems. I’ve talked about the structure of these poems occasionally. That’s something that I think a lot of translations don’t capture. I know to English readers, when you’re reading these translations, it can sometimes seem like something that’s not all that important.
What I want to say is that in Chinese poetry, it is important. These poetic forms still play a major role in how Chinese people hear their World, when they translate stuff, even a silly children’s book about being on the farm, they translate it into these forms. If you want to understand what China means to Chinese people, what forms of Chineseness keep popping up again and again throughout the decades, throughout the centuries.
What forms of being Chinese continue to be important to the Chinese people? It is These poetic forms, at least that’s one thing that’s incredibly important to Chinese people. It’s important enough that Chinese folks will translate a children’s book from English into these forms. These forms create patterns and that is how they Here the world these patterns are the grooves along which Chinese folks are inclined to think just as in English We’re inclined to think in terms of rhyme somehow if you say something in The form of a rhyme it makes it more true You can say the dumbest thing in the world, but if you say it in rhyme it will seem That is all just another way of saying culture, literature, these things, they never let go of us.
It’s incredibly difficult to escape the gravity. of culture. It pulls us in constantly. Culture and literature, they’re there with us. They cut grooves in our souls. When we are young, they are hard for us to break out of as we age. Today, I’m not going to end on a Cheng Yu. Rather, I’m going to end with the beginning of one of the greatest works of Chinese children’s literature.
It’s in that same style of those last poems that I covered. I mentioned it. It’s the three syllable classic, the sanji in pre-modern China. This was a poem that most kids started to memorize as they were studying the Confucian classics. This was the gateway drug to Confucianism. Essentially. Here it is
ing. In people’s beginnings, their nature was good. People’s essence is close to this, but it is by custom or practice that they get farther away from this. This formulation is one of the things that most kids in pre modern China would have memorized as their first Confucian classic. My first Confucianism.
Sort of a Fisher Price version of Confucianism. Okay, that’s it. I’m going to leave it here. It’s a shorter episode. If you have any thoughts on this, please send me an email at ChineseLiteraturePodcast at gmail. com If you want to support me, uh, financially, Show me some love on Patreon. I’m Chinese literature podcast at Patreon.
My name is Lee Moore, and this is the Chinese literature podcast.
Huang Zunxian, a diplomat and revolutionary of poetry in the late Qing Dynasty, visited Hong Kong when he was only twenty-two. His experience in the British colony was his first real encounter with foriegners, and it sparked an abiding interest in issues outside of China. In this episode, we take a look at two of the poems from his 10 poem cycle, “Ten Poems on Remembering Hong Kong. “
Poem #8:
Beyond the incessant stream of Hong Kong’s traffic,
painted boats skim smoothly over the ocean’s surface.
The British live here as if they were Buddhas in heaven,
even their Chinese servants take pride in their barbarian masters
People ride hydrogen balloons a thousand feet into the air
A hundred horses dash around the race tracks, fast as the wind.
Only when the police patrol the streets with their red billy sticks
does the racket of the market drop to a hush.
Original:
流水游龙外，平波又画桡。
佛犹夸国乐，奴亦挟天骄。
御气毬千尺，驰风马百骁。
街弹巡赤棒，独少市声嚣。
Poem #9:
Ships pointed towards north China
Arrive from the West just as when, of old, the horses from Central Asia came
Propellers beating the waves
Each day their cannon’s ring like thunder
Hong Kong is the point at which China and the outside world meet
Merch and money pile up in
Climb up the Peak and look out at the ocean
See how far away is the Chinese mainland.
Original:
指北黄龙饮，从西天马来。
飞轮齐鼓浪，祝炮日鸣雷。
中外通喉舌，纵横积货财。
登高遥望海，大地故恢恢。
Also, for those who want to learn more about the poem, here is an
https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%A6%99%E6%B8%AF%E6%84%9F%E6%80%80%E5%8D%81%E9%A6%96/5193432 “>encyclopedia link to them (in Mandarin). Also, I am trying something new. I am putting a transcript of my podcast online. The transcript is generated by AI, and it gets somethings wrong. Please bear that in mind when you take a look at it:
My name is Lee Moore, and this is the Chinese Literature Podcast. Today, way back in October of 2020, Rob and I discussed a poem that Huang Zunxian wrote on the 1884 election that he observed while he was working as the Qing general counsel in San Francisco. He observed this American election. He wasn’t satisfied with it.
Today, we’re looking at a completely different poem from a much earlier era in Huang’s life. Huang Zunxian is a. Poetic revolutionary, he helped change the topics Chinese poetry was written about. Let’s get into his bio. Huang Zunxian was born in 1848 to a Hakka family at that center of Hakka culture, May County in Guangdong.
And he died in 1905. He was from a family of scholar officials. He himself was a bit of a Confucian bad mama jama by Sansui and I should say this Chinese age, at least in the pre modern time period, is judged differently from how age is measured in the Western world. The reason I’m using Sui rather than the Western dating system is just because I was looking at some Chinese sources, so I don’t actually know how old he was in the Western age system.
In traditional Chinese, dating systems. You would measure a person’s sway, not their, the years that they’re born, but you would measure their sway from the day that they are conceived, which was understood to be about a year before they were born. And everyone grew a sway. Yeah, on New Year’s. So by the time that he was san sui, by the time that he was around two years old, he had encountered a poem called Qianjia Shi, the Thousand Family Poem, and by the time that he was probably around three years old, Huang Zunxian had actually memorized that poem.
Now, having had a three year old, I’m a bit skeptical of this claim that Huang was able to memorize a poem at the age of A three, but that’s the info that I’m getting from Baidu Baike. So whether or not it’s true, it is the accepted textbook version of Huang Zunxian’s life. That typifies one aspect of Huang Zunxian.
He was very much carved out of the standard Confucian mold in a lot of ways. But, and this is a big, but there was one very un Confucian aspect of his personality. He was very open to foreign things and foreign cultures. I want to make sure I’m not saying anything that’s, that’s too offensive. So I would argue that Confucian tradition itself is not inherently Antifa.
They’re very different readings of Confucianism that one can have, you can have a centric reading of Confucianism that it’s this. Very China centric religion, philosophy, whatever you want to call Confucianism. And then there are actually some ways that you can read Confucianism as very much open to foreign influence, open to thinking about foreigners and people outside of China.
in a way that’s not particularly jingoistic. But the thing is, the way that the Confucian tradition has developed, it has often been understood to be fairly anti foreign. And the way that Chinese folks have Embrace Confucianism has often been in a very jingoistic, pro China, xenophobic manner. So, there are different ways to interpret Confucianism, but the way that it is most commonly manifested is a bit xenophobic.
Therefore, throughout Chinese history, Confucians are often more resistant to foreigners, to foreign ideas, and they often justify this by pointing to Confucian texts. That’s not to say that Confucianism itself is inherently. Xenophobic. That’s just to say that the way it has manifested has often been xenophobic.
In other words, like any religion, dogma, whatever you want to call Confucianism, Confucianism can be interpreted in a variety of ways, but it does have this tendency toward sealing itself off from the world outside of East Asia. And I oftentimes have to remind people Confucianism is not just a Chinese phenomenon.
It’s something that is very important in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Back to Huang Zunxian. So, in the Spring of 1867, he passes the first level of the imperial examination, that is the local level. He’s not even 20. That’s pretty young. A lot of people end up taking this exam until they’re 50, 60 years old, trying to get into the imperial bureaucracy by memorizing and demonstrating their mastery of these Confucian.
text. In 1876, he gets a 141st place on the Jurin exam. That’s the second level of the exam. That apparently was not enough to push him to the top and final level of the exam. He’s pretty dissatisfied and then he does something that few Confucians would ever do instead of saying You know what? I’m gonna try and take this test again and do it until I’m 50 60 100 years old instead of saying that which is the Normal path that a good Confucian would take and it’s the path his family wanted him to take instead of doing all that He goes to Japan in 1877 he goes with Horu Zhang.
He is the first ambassador sent over to Japan, the first in the history of China. So, Kuang is a part of the first embassy to Japan ever done. In the millennium and a half, the two countries had been dealing with each other. China had never sent an ambassador to Japan. The expectation was that Japan would always send an embassy to China.
There was also this expectation, different from the way we think about diplomacy today, that Japan would not keep a permanent ambassador in China. Rather, embassies were temporary affairs. They happened once a year, once every three years, something like that. The embassy would come, have this kind of diplomatic intercourse, and then Go back home.
Huang Zunxian participates in the first ever embassy to Japan. This is a radical break with the past. This is China struggling to adapt to a modern world. Huang was the assistant to the Qing ambassador, and he was also one of the most effective members of the embassy. He interacted with Japanese society in a way that was very open minded.
You’ve got to remember, this is an era when most folks in China still think of themselves as the international top dog, the center of the world, the end all be all when it comes to civilization. That attitude is common amongst Confucianists, though there’s nothing inherently Confucian about it. Huang is mixing with these Japanese folks.
He’s learning how to get along in the society that many in China considered outside the pale of civilization until fairly recently. This is a pretty big deal. Huang demonstrates a kind of open mindedness that I think was rare at the time. In 1877, Huang arrives in Japan and he’s able to publish a book of poetry, That’s poems on random stuff in Japan.
That’s my translation. There are 154 heptasyllabic quatrains. So, Let me break that down for those of y’all who aren’t experts on poetry. A quatrain is just a four line poem. We have them in English. In China, they’re quite popular. Heptasyllabic, that’s less common in English poetry. All that means is that they have seven syllables per line.
In Chinese poetry, it’s common to either have lines that are five syllables long or seven syllables. Huang Zunxian publishes poems on random stuff in Japan. This book was extremely popular amongst elite Chinese readers who are thirsting for a knowledge of the wider world. That wider world is suddenly pushing in on China and Qing readers really want to know what’s going on out there.
Huang puts it in these poems. And lots of readers in China are fascinated, but it was not just Chinese readers who lapped up this book. Japanese readers also really liked it. Keep in mind, this is a Japan that opened up to Commodore Perry only two and a half decades before Huang arrived. The Meiji revolution is just a decade and a half old.
You still have lots of elite readers in Japan who are reading that is classical Chinese. So that book, Poems on Random Stuff in Japan, it’s published, it’s very popular. In 1882, Huang moves up diplomatically. He goes from being an assistant to the ambassador in Tokyo, to being the general counsel in San Francisco, which I mentioned earlier.
I suspect he was the first general counsel in San Francisco, but I’ve not been able to confirm that in the sources that I was looking at. He goes to San Francisco in 1882. This is the year. Of the Chinese exclusion bill, the 1882, 1883 legislation limiting Chinese immigration along racial lines. It’s a very important and sensitive position that he had.
He’s at the epicenter of the anti Chinese sentiment in America. And of course, he’s also writing a lot of poetry about San Francisco, which we discussed in that other podcast on the election. Huang Zunxian was also a leader of a revolution in poetry. He changed the topics about which Chinese poetry could be written, though he stuck quite fiercely to writing poetry using the traditional poetry rules.
He was different from his frenemy Liang who’s another. innovator, probably more innovative than Huang Zunxian. Liang Qichao wanted to change the way Chinese poetry was written. He wanted to change the very strict rules by which you have stresses and what kinds of tones you can use, things like that, the very technical aspects of Chinese poetry.
He wanted to change that. Huang was like, no, let’s keep those things exactly the same. The way we’ve been doing it for a couple of thousand years, Huang wanted to change what poetry was written about. So he wrote about foreign things. He wrote about London fog, about the Eiffel tower, about the Suez canal.
He has a poem about. Frederick B, a white Californian politician who opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act and tried to help Chinese folks in America. And like I mentioned before, he wrote poems on American elections. All of this discussion of foreign things in Chinese poetry was incredibly innovative at the time.
Something that was considered revolutionary in China. How do you write about foreign things that, that just for a long time, that wasn’t done. Well, I say it wasn’t done. In fact, that’s not completely true. Tang poets had long written about Central Asian dancers and other foreign objects. And though Qing poets knew about all of that poetry, they read those Tang poets who wrote about foreign stuff.
But they themselves had grown. Kind of stale. I think that’s fair to say. They had grown stale in the topics which it was acceptable to write poetry. So Huang is really the first important, respectable poet in a long, long time to say it’s okay to write about foreign stuff. It’s okay to write about these western barbarians, these Japanese barbarians.
He makes those non Chinese topics a central part of his poetic work. All right, I think that’s enough of me babbling on. Let’s get to the two poems that I want to discuss today. Both of these poems come from a short cycle of ten poems written in 1870 after Huang went on a trip to the foreign colony of Hong Kong.
So when Huang was 22 years old, he traveled from his home in nearby. May County, Guangdong. He wanted to see Hong Kong, this land where China and Western barbarians rub shoulder to shoulder together. This was Huang’s first major encounter with foreigners. And he writes the cycle of poems called Xiang Gang Gan Huai Shi Shou.
Ten poems on remembering Hong Kong. I’m just going to read two of them, poem number eight and poem number nine. Here’s my translation of poem number eight. Beyond the incessant stream of Hong Kong’s traffic, painted boats skim smoothly over the ocean’s surface. The British live here as if they were Buddhas in heaven.
Even their Chinese servants take pride in their barbarian. Masters, people ride hydrogen balloons, a thousand feet into the air, a hundred horses dash around the racetracks fast as the wind only when the police patrol in the streets with their red Billy sticks does the racket of the market drop to a hush.
So I found poem number eight fascinating for a couple of reasons. First off, the Brits are. Presented as Buddhists, and it is their wealth that makes them Buddhists. Why is this interesting to me? First, I think it’s cool that Huang is kind of normalizing the Britts. You gotta think about it. This is 1870.
Most of his readers will never have met a foreigner. By this point. They will have trouble just imagining what a foreigner looks like by framing the Britts as Buddhas. He does several things first in this image of the Britts. positions the Brits in a fairly positive way. It paints an image of them as something that the Chinese reader of 1870 can visualize.
They know Buddhas, they know what the different Buddhas look like. That image of them normalizes them, but it also maintains that element of foreignness to the Brits. Buddha, of course, was not Chinese. Something that Chinese folks would have been very aware of. Even at this stage in Chinese history, Buddhism always maintained this on again, off again relationship with its foreign identities.
By comparing the Brits to Buddhas, you have this element of the familiar and the foreign all rolled up into a single image. I also liked poem number eight because of this image in the fourth line. Not only are the Brits like Buddhas, but there is the sense of surprise. Chinese people are their servants, and yet, despite that, they take pride in being the servants of these Buddhas.
Foreign barbarians. This is really something that if you read accounts today coming out of the PRC on the colonial experience You’re not gonna see that kind of thing. A lot of criticism of the colonial experience today Frames British rule in Hong Kong, and in fact, all Western colonialism in China. It frames it as if it was this entirely negative experience.
Those PRC historians who do talk about Hong Kong, and many of them just ignored Hong Kong, but those who do talk about Hong Kong do so framing it in a narrative of national shame as the territorial symbol of Britain defeating China, the end of Chinese dominance of the East Asian geopolitical cultural sphere.
They talk about the Brits as treating the Chinese horribly. That did happen. The Brits enacted a lot of incredibly vile racist laws in Hong Kong. As a part of their colonial rule, that’s not the full story. Lots of Chinese people took pride in working with the British. Not all of them. There’s a reason that Huang Zunxian says it with an air of surprise in that poem number eight, but it did happen.
And I think that looking at Huang Zunxian gives us a more comprehensive portrait of life in colonial. Hong Kong. I also like poem number eight because there is this real sense of wonder to the whole thing. You have this technological wonder, hot air balloons floating in the sky. You have these racetracks, this new way of recreating.
Hong Kong is a bustling, hustling place. And in the end, there’s only one thing that quiets the place down. That’s the red billy stick of the policeman strolling on his beat through Hong Kong. Again, this is pretty interesting. In general, Chinese sources today portray British imperial power as threatening.
But for Huang There’s nothing really threatening about it. It seems to me when I read this poem that the red billy stick is the one thing that keeps order in this very raucous place. That’s poem number eight. Let me read for you poem number nine in this 10 poem cycle. Ships pointed north towards China arrive from the west just as when of old the horses from Central Asia came.
Propellers beating the waves. Each day their cannons ring like thunder. Hong Kong is the point at which China and the outside world meet. Merchandise and money pile up. Climb up the peak and look at the ocean. See how far away the Chinese mainland is. I like this image. of line two in this poem, number nine, you have this familiarization of the British by pointing to another foreign thing that was common knowledge.
You have this simultaneous attempt to familiarize the British, but also to exoticize them. So these horses that he mentions, imperial China relied on. horses coming from Central Asia as a part of its war machine. They had to always buy these horses from Central Asia. Central Asia’s horses are much better than anything you could raise in China, just for geographic reasons.
China’s land was just ill suited for raising horses. There were never enough horses to provision its large armies. So they always had to buy horses from Central Asia. When Huang describes the Brits and the trade with the Brits, he again reaches back into Chinese history for this other foreign object, one that would be familiar to the Chinese and put these weird Western barbarians into simultaneously familiar and exotic context.
I also love this image of Hong Kong. It’s where China and the rest of the world meet. That’s how poem number nine describes it. That’s still very much how people in China and the West talk about Hong Kong today. It’s cool to see that this image goes back a century and a half. One of the last things I want to mention about poem number nine is the peak that he discusses.
The peak that this poem alludes to is of course Victoria Peak, which I think if you are a tourist and you go to Hong Kong, you’re pretty much legally required to go up to the top of it. If you haven’t gone to the top of it, you haven’t really visited Hong Kong. The thing I love so much about This last line in the poem, he’s sitting there at the top of Victoria Peak.
He looks out and sees China. And there is this sense of separation between China and Hong Kong. See how far away is the Chinese mainland. It is right there. It’s not that far away. The bay separating him from mainland China is about. Half a mile, maybe a kilometer at its narrowest point. It’s not that far off.
But in looking down and seeing how different Hong Kong’s bustling harbor is from mainland China, it seems like the gap is not a gap in terms of miles or kilometers. Instead, it’s a measure of historical time or civilizational time. That’s what Huang seems to be remarking on. To wrap it up, These two poems that I translated today are part of Huang Zunqian’s ten poem cycle called Xiang Gang Gan Huai Shi Shou.
Ten poems on remembering Hong Kong. It’s just one of the parts of Huang’s fascination with all things foreign. I think I’m going to end it there. As usual, you can find these poems in their original and with my translations on the website, ChineseLiteraturePodcast. com. If you want to show your support, I would love it if you would go to Patreon and show me some love.
Chinese Literature Podcast at Patreon. I’m Lee Moore, and this is the Chinese Literature Podcast.
Rob and I did a New Year Podcast, and I wanted to keep up that tradition. In this podcast, I talk about teaching and update yall on a few things.
Today, in our last episode of the year, we look at 1079 when Su Dongpo was tried for a poem. Bitter partisan fighting, liberals versus conservatives…except for the great poetry, this Song Dynasty fight might remind you of something closer to home.
Economist Article Mentioned in the Episode
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2023/12/07/giving-the-poor-a-wodge-of-cash-is-better-than-dripping-it-out
My Translation
Carrying [the government money] on walking sticks and leaves of rice wraps, they hurry away
In the flash of an eye, the cash is gone from their hands.
The only thing they got [out of these reforms] was their kids speak with pretty accents,
since they spent the better half of the year living in the city.
Original Poem:
杖藜裹饭去匆匆，
过眼青钱转手空。
赢得儿童语音好，
一年强半在城中。
Today’s episode is a joke. No really, we are looking at a joke that is making the rounds on Weibo. This is a joke that is very opaque, but that opacity points to how autocracy in China works today.
One of the world’s great philosophers meditates on the value of being useless with a parable about an old, ugly tree.
Did you know that in the 13th Century a Chinese emperor and a Tibetan monk tried to get rid of Chinese characters and create a universal script, one writing system to write every language in the world. Today’s podcast is about that writing system, Phags-Pa.
Hello everybody! If you are looking to do the survey on attitudes towards AI for teachers of language, look no further: https://msu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0x11h1zn6Dgn7QG
Today, Lee has a fascinating interview with Professor Christopher Atwood, of the University of Pennsylvania. He studies the Mongolian and Chinese Frontier, and he recently published The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources. Lee and Professor Atwood talk about the book and, more broadly, the early Chinese experience with the Mongols.
In this episode, a century-old Lu Xun story, Kong Yi Ji, has become popular again. The story reflects the struggles of youth unemployment in modern China. The story blows up on the Chinese internet. A rap song reinterprets that story, addressing contemporary issues like education and working conditions. The story demonstrates that Lu Xun remains […]
A Taiwanese lesbian begins using dating apps, finds the love of her life, and then realizes she is not the love of her life, but decides to marry her any ways. You won’t want to miss this week’s episode is a strange look at marriage and death. I would highly encourage you to read the story […]
Today, we look at the somber poem of a Foxconn worker, Xu Lizhi. His poem, “A Screw Falls to the Ground,” is a masterclass of how modern Chinese poetry is able to live up to the standards set by classical Chinese poetry. In this episode, I try to discuss what role the author’s biography plays […]
This is the first in a two-part mini-series on the screw in modern Chinese literature. Yep, that is right, the screw, the humble tool which binds the world. This week, I am looking at a passage in Lei Feng’s diary on how he wants to be a screw for the Revolution, with a capital R.
Earlier Lei Feng Episodes:
Dumptruck Poetry – Lei Feng
Mr. Close Enough…Mr. Cha Buduo. He never seems to get things quite right, but he represents everything China is about. This is his story, a short, sardonic piece by the scholar and UN Ambassador Hu Shi. In some ways, Mr. Close Enough echos Lu Xun’s Ah Q, in other ways it is the polar opposite of that story.
My Partial Translation:
你知道中國最有名的人是誰？提起此人，人人皆曉，處處聞名，他姓差，名不多，是各省各縣各村人氏。你一定見過他，一定聽過別人談起他，差不多先生的名字，天天掛在大家的口頭，因為他是中國全國人的代表。
Do you know who China’s most famous person is? As soon as you mention this person, everyone knows him, they have all heard of him, his last name is Cha, is first name is BuDuo, he is a native of a bunch of different provinces, counties and villages. You have certainly met him, you’ve certainly heard other people talking about him. Mr. Cha Buduo, everyday he is on the lips of people, because he is the person who best represents China as a country.
后来他在一个钱铺里做伙计；他也会写，也会算，只是总不会精细。十字常常写成千字，千字常常写成十字。掌柜的生气了，常常骂他。他只是笑嘻嘻地赔礼道：“千字比十字只多一小撇，不是差不多吗？”
Afterwards, he did accounting work in a banking house. He could write, he could count, but he could not do it meticulously. 10, he often wrote as a 1000, and one 1000 he often wrote as 10. The manager got angry and yelled at him. He would just laugh and pologize, saying “1000 and 10, there is only one stroke different in the character, isn’t it chabuduo?”
有一天，他为了一件要紧的事，要搭火车到上海去。他从从容容地走到火车站，迟了两分钟，火车已开走了。他白瞪着眼，望着远远的火车上的煤烟，摇摇头道：“只好明天再走了，今天走同明天走，也还差不多。可是火车公司未免太认真了。八点三十分开，同八点三十二分开，不是差不多吗？”他一面说，一面慢慢地走回家，心里总不明白为什么火车不肯等他两分钟。
One day, he had an urgent matter, he had to take a train to go to Shanghai. He leisurely walked to the train station. He was two minutes late. The train had already left. He vainly stared, looking at the smoke of the far away train and shook his head, saying, “I guess I will have to go tomorrow. Going tomorrow and going today, are they not chabuduo? But is the train company not taking things two seriously. Leaving at 8:30, is that not chabuduo as leaving at 8:32? He said this as he slowly walked home, and in his heart he could not figure out why the train had not waited two minutes for him.
有一天，他忽然得了急病，赶快叫家人去请东街的汪医生。那家人急急忙忙地跑去，一时寻不着东街的汪大夫，却把西街牛医王大夫请来了。差不多先生病在床上，知道寻错了人；但病急了，身上痛苦，心里焦急，等不得了，心里想道：“好在王大夫同汪大夫也差不多，让他试试看罢。”于是这位牛医王大夫走近床前，用医牛的法子给差不多先生治病。不上一点钟，差不多先生就一命呜呼了。差不多先生差不多要死的时候，一口气断断续续地说道：“活人同死人也差……差……差不多，……凡事只要……差……差……不多……就……好了，……何……何……必……太……太认真呢？”他说完了这句话，方才绝气了
One day, he suddenly came down with nasty sickness. He quickly got his family to go to bring the doctor Wang 汪 from east street. The family member rushed running, and momentarily could not find the Wang of east street. so he just brought the animal doctor named Wang from west street. Mr. Chabuduo was sick in bed, and he knew that they had found the wrong person. but his sickness was severe, his body hurt, his heart felt anxious, he could not wait, and in his mind he thought, “Doctor Wang is chabuduo with dr. wang, let him do a bit of an exam, who cares.” Then, the veterinarian approached his bed, and he tried to cure Mr. Chabuduo using the methods for curing cows. Within an hour, Mr. Chabuduo had breathed his last breath. As Mr. Chabuduo was dying, he haltingly said, “Living people, dead people, aren’t they all chabuduo. All things are chabuduo? Why do we need to be so meticulous?” When he finished this sentence, he just died.
他的名誉越传越远，越久越大。无数无数的人都学他的榜样。于是人人都成了一个差不多先生——然而中国从此就成为一个懒人国了
His fame spread far and wide, the more time went on the bigger that fame became. Numerous people all studied his style. Thus, everybody became Mr. Chabuduo. Then, from this China will become a nation of layabouts.
Xu Xu is a writer who was very famous in the 1930’s and 1940’s. He lived in China until 1949, he was one of the country’s most important writers during this period. Then, after the victory of the CCP, he, fearing for his safety, left for Hong Kong. He continued to write but drifted into obscurity. Professor Frederik Green at San Francisco State University published a translation of his work with Stone Bridge Press. The book is titled Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic Today’s podcast is a fantastic interview with Professor Green.
Liu Xijun was a princess. Her father and mother were executed when they rebelled against the emperor, her great uncle. Liu was sent to marry a king of the distant Wusun, a group of Central Asian herders that the emperor was trying to curry favor with. This is her poem.
Today’s poem is by Li Bai, and its title is fairly long in English: “Going Down Zhongnan Mountain with Mountain Man Husi, Staying at His Place and Hitting the Bottle.” It involves questions of one’s role in the social world and drinking. It is one of the top 300 poems from the Tang Dynasty and was included in the Three Hundred Tang Poems collection.
This week, the Chinese Literature Podcast goes where few literary scholars have gone before. We take a look at some poetry by sex workers in the city of Dalian. In the podcast, I use the poem to tackle issues of gender in China. Be forewarned, there is some explicit language in this poetry.
Anonymous
I Enter the Room All Smiles Smiles
I enter the room, all smiles smiles
I sit down with you like we are husband and wife
but as soon as I get your money in my hand
I’m like “Fuck your mom’s cunt.”
进门笑嘻嘻
坐下像夫妻
消费一到手
去你妈了个屄
This episode, we go to a small island off the coast of Victoria, Canada. Shortly after he was exiled from Qing China, Kang Youwei, the rockstar amongst late Qing intellectuals, found himself on Coal Island, just north of Victoria. In this episode, I look at 1.5 of the cycle of 19 poems he wrote while there.
This week, Lee interviews Kyle Anderson, who has just published the first volume in a young adult series titled MountainSea Scrolls. This first volume is called The 9 Tailed Fox. Dr. Anderson describes the series as Narnia meets China. Dr. Anderson has also worked in translation and academia, and his work includes the translation of the fascinating Forget Me.
You can find Dr. Anderson’s website here, and you can purchase the new book, fresh off the presses here or at your favorite bookstore.
On the previous episode, I went all the way to the beginning of Chinese literature. This episode, I explore a contemporary novel, Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum. It won Mo Yan the Nobel Prize, it has been made into a famous movie, this novel has been very influential. Let’s dive in!
Oracle Bones (甲骨文) are the oldest written Chinese texts that have ever been discovered. Today, Lee looks at what Oracle Bones are, how they were discovered in the 1890’s and reads out the translation of two of them in a podcast that takes it back to the very beginning of Chinese literature.
Our ‘traditional’ new year/end of the year podcast where we update listeners on what is happening with our lives and the podcast. This year, we sadly have to announce that Rob is no longer going to be a regular contributer to the podcast. Lee will be taking both reins, though Rob will come back on from time to time. In this episode, Rob and Lee discuss the podcast, its history and their lives.
This week we have a poem by Gu Cheng 顧城, one of the wonderboys to come out of the 1980’s. He left China, immigrating to New Zealand, got a teaching job and then murdered his wife with an ax. His poetry was as sharp and succinct as his ax. Check out the debate between Rob and Lee:
Here is Lee’s translation of Gu Cheng’s short poem:
A Generation
The Dark night gave the blackness of my eyes
But I use them to find the brightness
And here is the original:
一代人
黑夜给了我黑色的眼睛
我却用它寻找光明
In this week’s episode, we look at a series of three poems by Su Dongpo, the Song poet who was sent into exile multiple times. This series of poems is about his time in the crummiest of exiles, on Hainan Island. Drunkeness here is a metaphor for giving up on life in officialdom (though it was also non-metaphorical as well…).
This week, Rob and Lee look at a short essay where Ouyang Xiu talks about a Mei Yaochen poem that he finds woven into the fabric of a barbarian’s bag. […]
Bei Dao is one of the first great poets in the Post-Mao era, and this short poem demonstrates why.
This week looks a poem by Mao Zedong celebrating the communist defeat of a tiny parasite. “Shooing Away the God of Epidemics” was written in 1956 upon Mao hearing that […]
This week, we are looking at a poem in the news. We are airing on Saturday, October 15th, 2022. On Thursday October 13th, 2022, just three days before Chairman Xi […]
Today’s podcast is Rob-less, and it looks at the 1052 poem by Wang Anshi, China’s controversial economic thinker. This poem (probably) has little to do with Wang’s economic policies, but is rather all about his love for his father and elder brothers and his meditation on his own mortality. My translation: The traveler’s thoughts are […]
The last episode in our mini-series on Zhuangzi, we look at one of the most elequent passages in all of the Zhuangzi, even if it almost certainly was not written by Zhuangzi himself. Autumn Floods focuses on understanding how tiny we are in the universe.
He cuts the ox without dulling his blade because he uses the Dao to do it. He does not hack, but rather finds the spaces in between to seek out the path of least resistance for his cleaver. And he is one of the most important parables to come out of Zhuangzi. This week, Rob […]
I recently got the honor of getting to come back on the China History Podcast over with the head honcho at Teacup Media. Here are all the poems and prose text that we read on the Catastic podcast (other than Xiran Jay Zhao’s, and her excellent translations can be found here). If you see any […]
Today is part 2 of our accidental series onf Zhuangzi. We did not mean to do a series on Zhuangzi, but the book is just too fascinating to put down. This week, we try to get at what the meaning of Dao (not Tao, as we explain), at least, what it means according to Zhuangzi.
Death is tough to grapple with, but it is a reality we, all to often, face the wrong way. In this episode, we take a look at how Zhuangzi, the famed Warring States philosopher, mourns his dead wife.
Where did the Uighur name come from? It might seem crazy, but a poet in the 1930’s took Uighur as his penname, and the Uighur people may have taken their name from that man (well, it is a little bit more complicated than that, but those are the basics). Abdukhaliq Uighur called on his people […]
Xi Xi, one of Hong Kong’s most famous writers, pens a weird, postmodern portrait of Hong Kong. Rob does not like it, Lee does. Why? Take a listen as they tackle this weird and sometimes wonderful effort to deal with what Hong Kong is. Or, is it even Hong Kong?
This week, we tackle the biggest question in Confucianism: are people born good and made bad by their environment, or are they inherently bad and only made good through rules and punishments. We look at a passage in the Mencius, arguably the most important text in the Confucian tradition (yes, maybe even more important the […]
Today, we take a look at a poet who, astonishingly, was writing interesting poetry during the height of the Maoist era. His is the most underground of the underground poets, and today we look at one of the poems by Shi Zhi, “The Ocean and the Wave.” Rob’s Translation The Ocean – A Song in […]
Can Li Bai, China’s greatest poet, be translated into frat-boy-ese? Lee tried. It is not as crazy as it sounds. Li Bai is an alcoholic poet. Though he has long been translated into a highfalutin English that sounds like a stuffy Shakespere. But Li Bai is just talking about getting drunk. Does Lee’s translation work? […]
In this episode, Part Two of our two part series on Chen Qiufan’s first novel, Rob and Lee try to pivot away from the narrower discussions of what happens in the novel and more on a broader discussion of its place in Chinese Science Fiction. Whether or not they succeed in doing that…well, we’ll let […]
This is part 一 in a two part series on the novel called Wast Tide. This is Chen Qiufan’s first novel, its a science-fiction novel that touches on environmentalism and transhumanism. Join Rob and Lee as the struggle with this novel .
How many cats have been immortalized in poetry that we are still reading a millenium later? At least one, Mr. Five White. Here, we stand with Mei Yaochen as he gives Mr. Five White the appropriate send off after his death. My Translation Offering a Sacrifice to My Cat Since I got my cat, Mr. […]
This week, we will really be the last poem in our short series on wierd poems. Today’s weird poem is one written by an editor at the Xinhua News Agency, China’s state-sponsored answer to Reuters or Bloomberg. Chairman Xi visited Xinhua and told them that the news needed to support the Party. During the visit, […]
This week’s weird poem is weird in an unexpectedly weird way. Upon first glance, it is an anodyne poem published in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily, the official rag of the CCP. Until you see the political message hidden in the poem that caused a small controversy in the 1990’s. This is the […]
One San Francisco poet, writing in the early 20th century, wrote something that no other poet ever said in the history of Chinese literature (probably): having money is more important than having sons! This is a huge statement that runs against much of traditional Chinese thinking. But, this anonymous poet, though writing in a mixture […]
This week and next week, in honor of Asian American History month, we are interrupting our wierd poetry series to shoehorn in two poems by Chinese-speaking poets. This week, we look at a poem by an unnamed poet who was jailed by immigration officers in San Francisco and writes of his mistreatment. Here is his […]
The beginning of our weird poetry series, today we look at a crazy poem written by a Qing official to celebrate Empress Dowager Cixi’s 60th Birthday. What makes it strange: it is written in English, in the Scottish dialect, and it celebrates a leader of the Boxer Rebels who attacked foreigners and those Chinese people […]
Last week, we did Zhang Jie’s Song Dynasty poem, the “Water Dragon Chant.” This week, we look Su Dongpo’s response to that poem, his own poem with the exact same title, “Water Dragon Chant.” We explore why Su Dongpo’s poem is so much better. Here is Lee’s translation: It seems like the poplar flower is […]
Today, we begin a quick mini series on a pair of poems. Both poems are titled “Water Dragon Chant,” the first is by Zhang Jie, the latter by Su Dongpo. The latter was written in response to the first one. Both choose a specific kind of flower as their subject. This week, Lee and Rob […]
Today, we are looking at a science fiction short story, translated in Ken Liu’s excellent collection Invisible Planets. It is by Xia Jia, who is both a science fiction writer and a scholar of Chinese science fiction. Her story, Hundred Ghosts Parade, is a fascinating look at tradition, change and Chinese culture.
This week, we are honored to get Megan Walsh on the podcast. She is the author of The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why It Matters, an excellent survey of Chinese literature today that was recently published as a part of the Columbia Global Reports. Megan was kind enough to share her insights into the […]
In this last episode in our lengthy series on Lu Xun, we look not so much at Lu Xun himself, but the Lu Xun that has been imagined in the minds of Communist Party apparatchiks. Here we try to tackle the legacy of Lu Xun and how it is has been interpreted.
Today, we interview Professor Roy Chan. Professor Chan is not only one of the most interesting thinkers trying to tackle Lu Xun in the American academia, but he is also the mentor of both Lee and Rob. Professor Chan is the author of The Edge of Knowing, an exploration dreams in the work of Lu […]
What is a Zawen? It is complicated. In this episode, we try to tackle what zawen are and what they meant to Lu Xun’s career. Guiding us on our journey is Professor Andrew Jones of UC Berkeley, one of the most well-regarded scholars of Lu Xun in American academia. Professor Jones is the author of […]
On Today’s podcast, we have one of the best writers on contemporary Chinese youth, Alec Ash. Alec wrote an excellent book on Chinese young adults called Wish Lanterns. It was renamed China’s New Youth for the American book market. Alec joins us today on the podcast to talk about one of Lu Xun’s shortest stories. We debate how close […]
One of Lu Xun’s most trenchant stories, in this episode, part of our series on Lu Xun, we tackle a story about gender, rape and class. The story is brutal, one of Lu Xun’s masterpieces.
Blood and Bread. A national reckoning between two mourning mothers. Today, Rob and Lee interview Professor James Carter, Dean of the History Department at Saint Joseph’s University. The story that the three discuss is Lu Xun’s story “Medicine.”
Professor Carter’s most recent book is Champions Day, a book about the last gasp of old Shanghai.
Today, we are interrupting our podcast series on Lu Xun to celebrate the anniversary of Nixon’s earth-shattering visit to Beijing 50 years ago this week. In this episode, we take a look at the John Adams Opera, Nixon in China, tackling how the opera incorportates elements of Chinese Cultural Revolution opera and how some of the controversies surrounding the opera have played out in recent years.
Today’s podcast is an interview with Professor Carolyn Brown, author of Reading Lu Xun through Carl Jung. We had a great conversation with her about Lu Xun’s story “Soap.” This story, in Lu Xun’s collection titled 彷徨 (not the more well-known collection 吶喊), is too often ignored. Professor Brown shows that this story touches on issues of gender, class and modernity in a way that deserves more attention.
This week’s podcast is on one of the most important stories in modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun’s True Story of Ah Q(鲁迅 – 阿Q正传). Rob and Lee attempt to tackle the story that changed China and still echos down to the present.
Today, we have author, translator and teacher, Professor Bryan Van Norden, on the podcast to discuss Lu Xun’s short but fascinating story of Kong Yiji (鲁迅 – 孔乙己), the book-stealing scholar who Lu Xun imagined to be the symbol of the true state of China’s elite culture. Professor Van Norden, Rob and Lee walk through the symbolism of the story and discuss its wider importance. This is #5 in our Lu Xun Series.
Professor Van Norden is not only a teacher at Vassar College, he is also an author and translator. Please check out his work like his excellent Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy and Classical Chinese for Everyone. Also, Professor Van Norden is a prolific public intellectual on Twitter.
Here we are at what is arguably Lu Xun’s most important text. Rob and Lee discuss this text in terms of content, language and modernity.
In Episode 3 in our Lu Xun Series, we interview one of the experts in the field of Lu Xun studies (and advisor to both Rob and Lee) about the Preface to Lu Xun’s most important collection of short stories War Cry (Nahan). This preface has been the subject of numerous debates in China and in literary circles outside of China. We tried to break down some of the most important parts of that debate in our discussion.
Today, we have our second installment in the Lu Xun series. This week we are joined by Professor Theodore Huters, Professor Emeriti in UCLA’s Asian Languages and Cultures Department and Chief Editor, Renditions, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of several excellent books, including Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China and Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity, soon to be released by Cambria Press. Professor Huters was generous enough to give his time to talk about one of Lu Xun’s less-well known early works: “Towards a Refutation of Malevolent Voices,” published originally in 1908. Professor Huters convincingly argues that though this work is not well known, it is important for understanding the arc of Lu Xun’s work.
This is the first episode in our series on Lu Xun, and, for this episode, we are going to look at some of the earliest aspects of Lu Xun’s career, both his time growing up in Shaoxing, his time in Japan and his attempts to become a translator.
This week, we change up the format a bit. Instead of talking about a specific text, we catch on our personal lives a bit, talking about grad school, what we learned in finishing our Ph.D.’s and a few other things. The podcast is also a bit longer than our normal format.
A disturbing if sometimes trite story of a country girl who goes to boarding school in 1930’s China, gets treated like crap and is eventually pushed out of the school, all because she is low class and her hands, stained by the dye her family uses to put her through school, are ugly. Rob and Lee unpack this story of class and mistreatment for this week’s podcast.
This week, we look at one of the most famous writers in modern China. It is surprising that we have not tackled Shen Congwen before…he was in contention for China’s first Nobel Prize for Literature until his death in 1988. The reason we have not discussed him is, despite his importance to Chinese literature, neither of us really like him. Listen as we work through why Shen Congwen is really valuable to read, even if we don’t like him. Check out Shen Congwen’s Bordertown (沈从文 – 边城).
This week, we are discussing a story from Ken Liu’s Invisible Planets, a collection of science fiction short stories that he recently translated and published. Chen Qiufan’s “The Year of the Rat” is a weird story that may or may not be science fiction but is definitely worth reading for everything it tries to say about Chinese politics.
Part Two of our miniseries on Bai Juyi: this week we look at a poem of biting satire that is a good example of Bai’s more polemical poetry. Bai was eventually exiled for some of the poetry he wrote (not this poem, but an equally cutting poem). Listen as we try to work through Bai Juyi’s artistry and politics in this week’s edition of the Chinese Literature Podcast.
Here is Baidu’s version of the original.