Chinese Literature Podcast: Recent Episodes
Rob and Lee Moore
In today's episode, I got the chance to speak with Salih Hudayar, the Foreign Minister of the East Turkestan Government-in-Exile. We talked about Uyghur literature, Uyghur history and even American history.
In this podcast, we look at the novel that was, a little more than a week ago, awarded the International Booker Prize. Taiwan Travelogue is a novel that pretends to be a travelogue, where a Japanese woman from Nagasaki, an important writer in the Japanese empire. She travels to Taiwan to travel and talk about her writing, but she comes to have a sort of friendship with a Taiwanese woman.
This novel is an interrogation of Japanese and KMT colonialism in Taiwan. It may also be a romance, though that is never clear. An overall great novel that deserved the Booker.
I am sad to report that Stephen Owen, a professor at Harvard University who wrote about Chinese poetry, just passed away at the age of 79 in Massachusetts. This short podcast talks a bit about one of the giants of the field.
In this podcast, I got the chance to do a face-to-face interview with Professor Li Wai-yee, a Harvard scholar who is one of the most prolific scholars of Chinese literature. During our interview, we discussed her new book, The Confucius Chronicles, just released by Columbia University Press, along with the massive role that Confucius has played in Chinese history.
First off, I am dropping the podcast on the 10th Anniversary of our first episode. On April 9th, 2016, the Chinese Literature Podcast had its first episodes.
The first episode of the podcast's next decade is Morris Rossabi, the scholar who made the world rethink Kublai Khan and the Mongols. He wrote the first good English-language biography of the world-changing figure. We talk about Genghis, Kublai (Genghis' grandson) and the effect they had on China.
Today, we finish up the 3 part series on Tang Poetry Masters with a look at Du Fu, China's poet historian. The An Lushan Rebellion tore the Tang Dynasty in half and is one of the defining events of Chinese history. Du Fu is pivotal for our memory of that event, as his poems are often how the war is discussed, even today. In today's podcast, we look at two-ish poems that Du Fu wrote about the An Lushan Rebellion and try to better understand Du Fu's life.
Today, the podcast gets to Wang Wei and a Buddhist poem he wrote with the eye of a painter. Wang Wei is the least popular of the three High Tang poets, at least, since the Song Dynasty, but, back in the day, he was the most popular, more popular than Li Bai and Du Fu. We'll travel to his empty mountain and see if we aren't too disturbed by women doing the laundry to learn a bit about Chinese poetry.
Living in the Mountains on the Cusp of Fall
Empty mountain after a new rain,
The air is late, fall is coming
The bright moon shines amid the pines,
the clear stream's water flows over a rock.
Hubbub in the bamboo, the washing lady returning
the fishing boat pushing through lotuses.
And then it happens that the flowers of spring die,
Me, a hermit, I can hang here for a while.
山居秋暝
空山新雨後，天氣晚來秋。 明月松間照，清泉石上流。 竹喧歸浣女，蓮動下漁舟。 隨意春芳歇，王孫自可留。
Today is the beginning of a three part series I am going to do on the three big Tang poets, Li Bai, Wang Wei and Du Fu. In this episode, we take a look at Li Bai, often considered China's Greatest poet, and his relationship with the regions to China's West, modern day Xinjiang and the Stans. Li Bai has a strange relationship with the West; in fact, he was probably born in modern-day Kyrgyzstan, and was probably Persian, Turkic or maybe even Jewish. That's right, China's greatest poet may not have even been Chinese. Take a listen to the podcast to find out more.
Today, Lee gets to chat with Susan Wan Dolling, Hong-Kong-American poet, novelist and translator. She recently published her latest book of Song poetry translations, What the Cuckoo Said, but she has long been working on translating Chinese poetry into an English that does what is hard to do, that preserves the music that you hear in the Chinese original.
If you want to check out more of her translations, check out Hundred Tongues (volume 1 of her Song poetry translations), Superstars (volume 1 of her My China in Tang Poetry series), Floating on Clouds (volume 2 of her My China in Tang Poetry series) and Friends and Lovers (volume 3 of her My China in Tang Poetry series).
Also, my book, China's Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn't Want You to Read is out! You can purchase a copy of it here from my publisher:
https://unsungvoicesbooks.square.site/product/china-s-backstory-the-history-beijing-doesn-t-want-you-to-read-preorder/BXJSID5U6P4RVONS7V4HSZSH
Or you can purchase it on Amazon here.
If you are interested, check out the nice things smart people have said about the book here.
On this episode, I give a brief update on the book's status, which should be in your hands by mid-November. And also, Rob returns, joining the podcast from France to talk about what he has been up to and also to chat with Lee about the book.
Today, I get to speak with Professor Emily Mokros about her fascinating book, The Peking Gazette in Late Imperial China - State News and Political Authority. The book is about a media outlet in the Qing Dynasty that published discussions that the emperor held with his bureaucrats.
This episode, the podcast takes a look at a poem Mao Zedong wrote in February 1936, after he and his party had undergone the near-death experience of the Long March. Yet still, Mao has the gumption to imply in the poem that he would be the greatest ruler China had ever seen.
My Translation of the Poem:
Spring in a Soaked Garden - Snow
The north country scenery,
frozen over for a thousand miles,
snow floating for ten thousand miles.
I look inside and outside the Great Wall of China,
all that remains is boundlessness.
Up and down the Yellow River,
it has suddenly lost its surging vigor.
The mountains dance like silver snakes,
the plains gallop like white elephants,
I want to compete with Heaven and see which of us is taller.
I must wait for a clear day,
and look at the snowy landscape wrapped in red and white,
it’s really bewitching.
The rivers and mountains, this land, is so pretty,
it has brought out countless heroes to compete and serve the nation.
Pity Qin Shihuang, the first Chinese emperor, and Han Wudi, the greatest Han emperor,
their writing ability ain’t all that good.
Tang Taizong, the greatest Tang emperor, and Song Taizu, the greatest Song emperor,
they kinda lack style.
Those northern barbarian rulers,
like Genghis Khan,
all they knew how to do was shoot arrows at big eagles.
Those guys are all dead,
if you want to count the true badasses
look to today.
Original Poem:
沁园春·雪
北国风光，千里冰封，万里雪飘。望长城内外，惟余莽莽；大河上下，顿失滔滔。山舞银蛇，原驰蜡象，欲与天公试比高。须晴日，看红装素裹，分外妖娆。
江山如此多娇，引无数英雄竞折腰。惜秦皇汉武，略输文采；唐宗宋祖，稍逊风骚。一代天骄，成吉思汗，只识弯弓射大雕。俱往矣，数风流人物，还看今朝。
This episode is a special one. The podcast has a conversation with Fox Butterfield, the first correspondent for the New York Times after 1949. Mr. Butterfield set up the Beijing Bureau for the New York Times in 1979 and was the bureau chief from 1979 to 1981.
Mr. Butterfield started studying Chinese in 1958, and was a student of John Fairbank.
In this episode, I got the priveldge of interviewing Mr. Butterfield at his home. We talked about his experience with John Fairbank, his friendship with Senators John McCain and Joe Biden, his work on the Pentagon Papers and many other topics.
In today's episode, we look at a work that tackles the controversial topics of aborition and the One-Child Policy. Today's story, by Nobel-Prize Laureate Mo Yan, watches a father/government official after his wife becomes pregnant with a son. Their first child, a daughter, is not good enough for the official's dad, he wants a son. But the official is tasked with enforcing the One-Child Policy, China's draconian rule that each family was only allowed to have one child. We watch as the official forces his wife to get an abortion while explosions happen all around them.
"Folding Beijing" is one of the most talked-about science fiction stories to come out of China since Liu Cixin, Hao Jingfang's story is about a Beijing divided into three parts. First Space is for the rich, Second Space is for the middle class and Third Space is for the poor, who clean up after First and Second Space Beijing. The three spaces never exist simultaneously, but rather when First Space is open, Second and Third Space are folded up and put away.
A man, struggling to put his daughter through school, agrees to take up an illegal job to smuggle a message from Second to First Space.
This is a story that is fascinating because it is all about class, even though China has been run by the CCP for almost a century. Join the podcast as we get folded into Third Space and find ourselves in a new world.
Today, we are looking at a story involving Su Dongpo, who was the butt of the greatest fart joke in all of Chinese history. The story involves Su Dongpo, the Song Dynasty's greatest poet, and a Zen Buddhist named Buddha's Stamp.
Lock up your daughters and watch your wallet. In this episode, we are going to take a look at stories from the late Ming's most famous grift manual, a book by Zhang Yingyu. For this episode, the translators, Bruce Rusk and Christopher Rea have kindly agreed to come on talk about this text without stealing anything.
I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to make counterfeit silver, run a gang of that blinds and amputates children or just to anyone looking for some damn good stories. Purchase the book here, at Columbia University Press.
Today, we have an interview Joel Bigman, the author of The Second Journey. The Second Journey is a continuation novel of Journey to the West (西遊記). In this journey to the West, Tang monk travels ever farther to the west, all the way to modern day Israel. Bigman has written his novel with some of the same characters that you know and love, Tang Monk, Monkey and Pigsy, but he also has some new characters like Bear (the Second Samson). This new team travels through the Holy Lands, encountering Jewish monsters and some other characters.
If you are interested in buying his great novel, check out these book sellers:
https://www.amazon.com/Second-Journey-Joel-Bigman/dp/9888843702 The Second Journey eBook by Joel Bigman - EPUB | Rakuten Kobo United States The Second Journey by Joel Bigman, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®
It is that time of year again, the time when the Chinese Literature Podcast takes stock of the year and what has happened. In this podcast, Lee talks about his book and also about teaching Chinese Literature at the University of Oregon.
Today, we have an exciting and disturbing episode about Taiwan and prostitution. This is Number 6 in my series on Taiwanese literature, and the second episode on Huang Chunming, Taiwan's most famous nativist author. Last episode, the podcast looked at the story, "Drowning of an Old Cat." This week we look at a story from that same English translation. "Sayonara, Zaijian" is a story about a Taiwanese man forced to pimp out his own countrywomen to the Japanese. It is fun, it is disturbing, it is triggering. In other words, it is a great work of literature.
Today, we take a look at Huang Chunming, one of the most important writers in Taiwan's nativist movement. He is an author who developed this sense of a Taiwanese identity in his work.
Also, don't worry, no cats die in this story.
Today, Lee is talking with Professor Daniel Bell, most recently the author of Dean of Shandong, but also the author of the famous China Model. Professor Bell and Lee chat about his book and about his wider experience of Chinese culture and philosophy while serving as the first foreign dean of a university in the PRC.
Today, the podcast does something different. In this episode, we are looking at a film. And not just any film. It is perhaps the greatest film ever made. Yi Yi or A One and a Two is the magmum opus of Edward Yang, the Taiwanese filmmaker. We are going to explore the symbolism of balloons, sticks and condems in this amazing film.
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.
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.
Last episode, we discussed Jin Yong and his contributions to Kung Fu literature. This episode we take a look at his final work, the "Sword of the Yue Maiden." We encounter some ancient Chinese punks with swords and how their killing of a little girl's goat ends up percipitating their demise.
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.
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.
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.
Today, we look at Qiu Fengjia, a Taiwanese-born Mandarin, who, in 1895, upon hearing that Taiwan had been given to Japan as a part of the Treaty of Shiminoseki, wrote a poem expressing his sadness and confusion. We discuss that poem and Qiu's larger legacy.
Today, we have an interview with Professor Zhang Yanshuo, a scholar at Pomona College who studies a group of people that have existed on the peripheries of Chinese soceity for several millennia. The Qiang are a group of people who exist in China today, but also who have records discussing them as early as the Oracle Bones of the Shang Dynasty 3,000 years ago. In today's podcast, we discuss what a poem on a Qiang flute says about the relationship between the Qiang and the Han Chinese.
Today we have a great interview episode with Todd Foley, an adjunct professor at NYU and the translator of Wang Anyi's book, I Love Bill and Other Stories. Our discussion of this fascinating author was a deep dive into Wang Anyi's novella, I Love Bill. Todd's translation just came out.
The Book of Poetry is the earliest work of Chinese lyric poetry in existance. But it has a reputation as being a bit fusty. Today, we are going to explore the naughtier side of the anthology.
The third in the series on the Book of Poems, this episode looks at the mythological poem on the birth of the god of agriculture, Lord Millet.
Can Xue is the odds on favorite for winning the Nobel Prize in Literature tomorrow. Rob and I did a podcast on her way back in 2018, and I am rereleasing it in honor of her consideration. Whatever the choice of the Swedish Academy, Can Xue has already won in my heart.
Today is part two of the podcast series on the 詩經, the Book of Poems. This episode looks at Those Tender Peaches, a highly sexualized poem talking about more than peaches.
Today, we are taking a look at a poem from the oldest extant work of Chinese literature, the Shijing (Book of Poem) Today's poem is a poem about rats, but also a poem about government, and it is the first in our series on the Shijing.
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.
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 relevant, and the debates he sparked continue today. #KongYiJi #YouthUnemployment #LuXun
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.
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 in how we interpret their poetry.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Their discussion touches not only on the poem, but also on questions of the materiality of literature.
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 a county in Jiangxi had eliminated all their blood flukes.
#1
China’s green waters and the blue mountains are so numerous
but even the great ancient Chinese medical theorist Hua Tou is unable to take care of this little worm,
The thousand villages are covered in vines and peppered with their leaking shit,
the ten thousand homes are abandoned, only ghosts sing inside them.
He sits on the Earth everyday and walks 80,000 miles,
He roams through the heavens and looks out the distance at the thousand rivers.
China’s Orion constellation desires to ask the God of Epidemics about it,
happiness and hopelessness are all the same as time goes by.
其一
绿水青山枉自11多，华佗2无奈小虫何！
千村薜荔3人遗矢12，万户萧疏13鬼唱歌。
坐地日行八万里，巡天14遥看一千河。
牛郎4欲问瘟神事，一样悲欢15逐逝波5。
#2
A spring wind blows through a billion poplar and willow branches,
the 600 million Chinese of today live like the sage kings of old, Yao and Shun.
Showers of red petals, and our fulfilled hearts have been translated into waves,
the green mountain has been carefully transformed into bridges.
High up, the people are using their silvery hoes to dig canals,
down low, they are using their iron biceps to shake China’s three great rivers.
May I ask, Old Man epidemic, where will you go, now [that communism has solved all problems]
maybe you can use the light from the superstitious paper money the people used to burn to light your way out of here.
其二
春风杨柳万千条22，六亿神州尽舜尧6。
红雨7随心16翻作17浪，青山着意18化为桥。
天连五岭银锄18落，地动三河8铁臂20摇。
借问21瘟君欲何往，纸船明烛9照天烧。
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 a county in Jiangxi had eliminated all their blood flukes.
#1
China’s green waters and the blue mountains are so numerous
but even the great ancient Chinese medical theorist Hua Tou is unable to take care of this little worm,
The thousand villages are covered in vines and peppered with their leaking shit,
the ten thousand homes are abandoned, only ghosts sing inside them.
He sits on the Earth everyday and walks 80,000 miles,
He roams through the heavens and looks out the distance at the thousand rivers.
China’s Orion constellation desires to ask the God of Epidemics about it,
happiness and hopelessness are all the same as time goes by.
其一
绿水青山枉自11多，华佗2无奈小虫何！
千村薜荔3人遗矢12，万户萧疏13鬼唱歌。
坐地日行八万里，巡天14遥看一千河。
牛郎4欲问瘟神事，一样悲欢15逐逝波5。
#2
A spring wind blows through a billion poplar and willow branches,
the 600 million Chinese of today live like the sage kings of old, Yao and Shun.
Showers of red petals, and our fulfilled hearts have been translated into waves,
the green mountain has been carefully transformed into bridges.
High up, the people are using their silvery hoes to dig canals,
down low, they are using their iron biceps to shake China’s three great rivers.
May I ask, Old Man epidemic, where will you go, now [that communism has solved all problems]
maybe you can use the light from the superstitious paper money the people used to burn to light your way out of here.
其二
春风杨柳万千条22，六亿神州尽舜尧6。
红雨7随心16翻作17浪，青山着意18化为桥。
天连五岭银锄18落，地动三河8铁臂20摇。
借问21瘟君欲何往，纸船明烛9照天烧。
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 Jinping is supposed to be anointed for his third term, someone mounted the Sitong Bridge in Beijing and unfurled two banners. One had a poem which read:
We don’t want nucleic acid [tests], we want to eat
We don’t want the Cultural Revolution, we want reform
We don’t want lockdowns, we want freedom
We don’t want a leader, we want voting
We don’t want lies, we want respect
We don’t want to be slaves, we want to be citizens
不要核酸1要吃饭3，不要文革要改革
不要封城要自由，不要领袖4要选票
不要谎言要尊严，不做奴才2做公民
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 Jinping is supposed to be anointed for his third term, someone mounted the Sitong Bridge in Beijing and unfurled two banners. One had a poem which read:
We don’t want nucleic acid [tests], we want to eat
We don’t want the Cultural Revolution, we want reform
We don’t want lockdowns, we want freedom
We don’t want a leader, we want voting
We don’t want lies, we want respect
We don’t want to be slaves, we want to be citizens
不要核酸1要吃饭3，不要文革要改革
不要封城要自由，不要领袖4要选票
不要谎言要尊严，不做奴才2做公民
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.
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.
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.
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 and Lee turn to Butcher Ting.
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 and Lee turn to Butcher Ting.
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.
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 to rise up against the Chinese and become the Uighur people. We look at a poem that he wrote when he was facing execution in in Chinese prison cell.
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 Confucius himself). We are looking at the passage from Book 6 A, Passage # 6.
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."
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? Stay tuned and decide for yourself.
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 you decide.
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.
This week, we get back to our weird poetry series. 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, Pu wrote this poem, showing that he definitely supports the Party.
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 last of our weird poem series.
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 of Cantonese and Classical Chinese, is an American, so it makes sense. Join Rob and Lee for their look at this poem published in either 1911 or 1915 in San Francisco's Chinatown.
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.
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 who associated with them, particularly converts to Christianity.
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.
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 debate whether Zhang Jie's poem is a nasty poem about that uses flower petals as metaphors for sperm and skeeting (please do not google this term).
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 state of contemporary Chinese literature with Rob and Lee.
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 Xun and other 20th Century Chinese writers. Today, Professor Chan discusses one of Lu Xun's most enigmatic works, Wild Grass.
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 Developmental Fairy Tales, and is a contributing translator to the new collection of Lu Xun's zawen in a book titled Jottings Under Lamplight.
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 Lu Xun is to the narrator of the story and what it says about the China of the early 20th and early 21st Century.
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.
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 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.
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.
A seasonal poem? A meditation on death? What does one do with Bai Juyi's poem Autumn Thoughts (秋思)? Rob and Lee hash it out as they watch the leaves fall on two different continents.
Zhu Ziqing (朱自清) wrote a short, touching essay on his father. In the essay, Retreating Figure (背影), Zhu grows up a great deal by watching his father grow old.
We thought we were done with the Song, but we just cannot get enough of it. Now, we are going back to Ouyang Xiu with a poem that features in a translation of a late Qing thinker that Rob is working on. The poem is by Ouyang Xiu, and Rob and Lee disagree about how to read it...no surprises there.
It has happened again. For the second time this year, a billionaire has used a Chinese poem on social media in a newsworthy way. And you know we had to deal with it! This week, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, tweeted a Chinese poem about fraternal problems. The poem, which he titled "Humankind" (in English). It is not hard to understand the poem, but it is a little mysterious as to why Elon Musk is tweeting it. We tackle both problems on this week's podcast.
Seven Step Poem
One boils beans by igniting beanstalks
The beans in the kettle sob
“We were born out of the same roots
to fry together, why be this rash?”
Lee’s Translation
Original:
七步诗
煮豆燃豆萁
豆在釜中泣
本是同根生
相煎何太急？
We have another spooky story for Halloween, this time a story from Lu Xun. This story, "White Light," is not as discussed as it ought to be, but it has a skull, a suicide and a question of China's future direction.
We always come back to Pu Songling. This week, we are looking at his story "The Magic Sword and the Magic Bag," which actually has little to do with either, but rather is a story about love, prostitution and a ghostly woman...join us for a spooky episode of the Chinese Literature Podcast.
This week, we take a look at on of the great writers from Shanghai's 1930's modernist moment. Shi Zhecun is one of the New Sensationalist (新感觉派), and his story, "One Evening in the Rainy Season" follows the story of a man who is following a woman one rainy Shanghai night. Is he a creeper? Is he just a normal person in this metropolis? We stay inside the character's head, but we never really get a grasp on what is going on.
This week, Rob and Lee go back to the very first poem in all of Chinese literature. The first poem in the Classic of Poetry, "Guan, Guan Goes the Osprey" has been interpreted and reinterpreted so much that it has become a staple of the canon. Rob and Lee discuss this, though, of course, this cannot be done without a few Beatles references.
Today, Rob and Lee change the format and have a debate about China and innovation, with Rob defending China and Lee arguing that there is something in Chinese culture that does not value innovation. Lee references Huang Tingjian and Su (Dongpo) Shi. Su Shi, the famous Song poet they did podcasts on before here and here.
This week, we take our final look at the Journey to the West, fast-forwarding all the way to the end. Today, we will look at the last three chapters of the novel, Chapters 98-100, thinking about how this passage sums up the journey, and discussing questions of Chineseness in the novel.
Part 5 in our Journey to the West Series, Rob and Lee take a look at Chapters 59-61, one of the most important fights in the book. In these chapters, Monkey struggles to take the fan from the aptly named Princess Iron Fan. With the fan, he can extinguish the fire on the, again, aptly named, the Fire Mountians and continue his journey west. But there are lots of complications. Take a listen to Rob and Lee's discussion of the episode, gender and colonialism in this scintillating podcast.
In this third part of the series on Journey to the West, Rob and Lee discuss the characters in the novel other than Monkey (but they still end up mostly talking about Monkey...he is just that much fun).
By far the most well-known part of Journey to the West is the first 7 chapters. A quasi-divine monkey figures out how to get nearly limitless power, has a whole lot of fun with it, then starts a war with heaven. And almost wins. Join us for a discussion of one of the most beloved figures in all of Chinese literature: the Monkey King (Sun Wukong).
Today, we begin our series on on of the most influential novels in the history or China, really in the history of Asia. Today, we begin the Journey of the Journey by contextualizing the novel.
Today is the last in our podcast series on the Song (we think...). Our subject, Ouyang Xiu is one of the most famous literatis of the 11th century, and he helped inspire the turn towards antiquarianism in Chinese culture. He was obsessed with collecting old stuff, particularly epigraphs (writing carved into rocks or other medium). This is a short prose passage/poem where we see Ouyang Xiu beginning to develop this obsession. The passage is taken from Stephen Owen's Anthology of Chinese Literature.
Brandon Folse joins us in our next installment on our Song Dynasty series. Today, we are discussing what is definitely the greatest female writer of the Song dynasty and is possibly the greatest female writer in all of Chinese literature, Li Qingzhao. Some might even consider her the greatest poet in Chinese history, though this would be a controversial claim. Still, what is not controversial is that Li is one of the greats of the Song Dynasty.
This week, Rob and I are travelling, so we have decided to go back into the vault and dig up one of our first podcasts ever...the sound quality is bad, our explanations are even worse...but the story is great. A man falls in love with a very young boy and things take off from there. This story has everything: an execution, a castration and a spontaneously-growing vagina.
Did you know writing a poem could get you exiled? Well, it could and it did, in Su Dongpo's case. Join us in our ongoing accidental series on Song Dynasty poetry!
This is part of our accidental series on the Song, and this is also our second episode on the poetry of Wang Anshi (王安石). Today, we look at a ballad that Wang wrote upon the death of his wife and continue our debate about the merits of Wang.
This week, we decide, in the middle of doing the podcast, that the Song has so much interesting stuff going on during it that we have to make this series into a longer series. Today, we are going to tackle a single poem by Su Dongpo. The poem we are looking at is Su's "Waking up on a Boat at Night."
This week, we explore Jing Tsu's fascinating exploration of the history of language in her book Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora.
On today's podcast, we go all the way back to the Northern Song Dynasty, one of the highpoints of Chinese culture, but also a point in which consensus was breaking down. Infighting in the 1070's began a process that would weaken China to the point which it could not face up against its external threats and would collapse in 1127, losing half of Song territory. Today's podcast is on Wang Anshi, one of the scholar-politicians who was at the heart of this infighting. We'll look at three of his poems in a part of a mini-series on Song figures.
Today's podcast is an interesting poem that functions less as a beautiful poem but more a historical artifact. In 1793, the English Ambassador met with the Chinese Emperor. After their meeting, the emperor, Qianlong, wrote an interesting poem about the encounter. In today's podcast, we dissect that poem. Below is also Lee's English translation of the poem, along with the original, straight from the pen of Qianlong.
This week's episode is a Supplement, where we will talk about China's Good War, Rana Mitter's latest book. Mitter is a historian, but a lot of the content he analyzes is literary or filmic. Mitter's argument is that China today is trying to rethink World War II in a way that is advantageous to contemporary politics, both domestic and international.
In today's podcast, we interview author Yang Huang about her new book looking at the intersection of China, the US, and the politics of family and gender. The book is titled My Good Son, and it is her third work of fiction. The book's plot revolves around two father-son pairs, one Chinese, one American. In the Chinese pair, the son does not meet the father's academic standards, while in the American pair, the father is religious while the son is gay. Join us for a fascinating talk with one of the people who actually does the hard work of making literature.
Today, we dig back into a podcast recorded several years before but never before aired. The topic is Nie Zheng (聂政), a story in the biography of the assassins, in Sima Qian's Shiji. The story may be one of the early predecessors to Kung Fu film and literature.
This is it, this is the end of our decade-by-decade exploration of Chinese Literature in the 20th Century. Lee explores Mo Yan, while Rob chooses Xi Chuan. Join them for the final episode in this series.
This week's episode looks at a Tang Dynasty Poem that cost Meituan Dianping, one of China's unicorn internet companies, 26 Billion dollars off its market capitalization. In this episode, we take a look at the Zhang Jie's "Book Burning Pit" and explore the full story behind the poem that the media is not explaining.
Today, we are rebroadcasting an episode that we did on the Three-Character Classic in honor of Chloe Zhao's quoting of the text during the Oscars. The audio quality is a little...well, you'll hear. We apologize. Just think, it has only been a year since we recorded this and already we are this much better.
At last! Out of the Maoist wilderness and into what may be the most riveting period for literature and the arts in the entire 20th century in China.
Today, the Chinese Literature Podcast asks the ultimate geopolitical question: Is Taiwan Chinese?
Actually, we are looking at a book titled Is Taiwan Chinese, an anthropological study by Melissa Brown that examines how identity, Chineseness and ethnicity are constituted on both sides of the Taiwan Straits...that is just a fancy way of saying that identity is something that one does rather than something that one is. We look at Brown's exploration of that process in China and Taiwan.
The dark night lifts at last! 1976 marks the end of both the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist era. It also marks the beginning of one of the most remarkable periods of literature in Chinese history. Literature on Taiwan is also flourishing. Join us to find out more!
Okay, fine, so Prof. Chan is on our dissertation committees. But you know what? That lack of objectivity on our parts doesn't mean The Edge of Knowing isn't still a thoroughly remarkable book, because it is. Join us to find out more!
You want a hard period for a good literary discussion? Then this is your port of call. The 1960's wasn't just a bleak literary landscape in China; it was practically nonexistent. We got around the problem by going across the Straits or underground. Join us to find out more!
Shalom and welcome to the Chinese Literature Podcast. Today, we have a very special Chinese Literature Podcast in celebration of Passover. We will be looking at the book The Haggadah of the Kaifeng Jews of China by Fook-Kong Wong and Dalia Yasharpour.
...And then there were the Maoist years. Following the Chinese Communist Party's victory in 1949, literature was tightly controlled until 1976. That means, well, it's a pretty rough period to discuss. But we still found some gems! Join us to find out more!
19 different translations of a single short Tang Dynasty poem add up to a fascinating guided tour of how rich and peculiar it is to encounter the Chinese poetic tradition. Join us to find out more!
There's only one decade whose representative writer we both agree on, and this is it. Debates are more fun, but really? It's hard to argue about Zhang Ailing.
This slim little volume has a whole lot packed into it. Not only does it give the reader a concise history of a crucial moment in Chinese history, but it also beautifully explains to a non-Chinese audience just why Du Fu was so brilliant.
Who owned the 1930's: the author who gave us talking Martian cats, or the one who gave us a sentient decapitated head? Yes, it was a weird decade, was the 1930's. Join us to learn more!
The greatest scholar on China ever to emerge from the U.S. academy? That's Lee's line in the sand. But even Rob would agree you can't go wrong reading Jonathan Spence. Join the discussion and tell us what you think!
Lu Xun again? Really? Yes, really. But we still disagree. For Rob, the 1920's were Lu Xun's definitive decade. For Lee, it was the era of Ding Ling, who fired the opening salvo in what would become a century of powerful, innovative female writers.
Who was the most important Chinese writer of the 1910-1919 period? Was it Li Dazhao, and his experiments with prose poetry and Marxist theory? Or was it Lu Xun, with his adaptation of Russian realism to a Chinese context? And who, most importantly, had the best moustache?
Have you ever wanted to learn more about China, but were either unsure where to start, or didn't have the money or access? Our new supplement is designed to help. Join us as we discuss our personal picks for essential works on China. Wowkrs that are challenging, but not opaque, interesting, but not amusing. It's everything you need.
Here it is: part one in our new series! We're discussing the definitive writers of each decade in China's 20th century. Along the way, you'll get a mini tour of modern Chinese history, and see how literature played a part in its development.
This week? See how Wang Guowei and Wu Jianren were the writers who defined the last imperial decade in Chinese history.
We said we'd post something on the 24th, didn't we? And here it is. Just a friendly chat about some of the things that have changed for the podcast, and for us as podcasters and scholars.
Today, we have a guest, Antonio Leggieri on the podcast to talk about his phd research on the late imperial novel Guzhang Juechen.
The 三字經, usually translated as the Three Character Classic, is a fascinating text because it functions like a "my first Confucian text." Children were given this text when they were quite young and asked to memorize the book, teaching them moral lessons that would prepare them to master the real Confucian classics later in life. In this episode, Rob and Lee debate the first few lines of the poem.
Just a note: we recorded this in 2018, and then we added a prologue to the front end of the podcast.
Today, Rob is off doing research in China, so Lee interviews Professor Van Norden. Professor Van Norden is a philosophy professor at Vassar, and he works on early Chinese philosophical texts.
He recently published a textbook for learning Classical Chinese (文言文). The book is the outgrowth of Professor Van Norden's teaching, and he seeks to make Classical Chinese more approachable than do other textbooks on the language. Professor Van Norden and Lee discuss his book and wider issues related to early Chinese texts.
Yu Dafu is an early 20th Century writer known for one work: Sinking. This novella is highly autobiographical, and it discusses the trials and tribulations of a Chinese student living in Japan. His attitude towards Japanese women and the Chinese nation is both fascinating and disturbing, and Rob and Lee dive into those attitudes. This is the last of our series on Toxic Masculinity in Chinese Literature.
The Fourth in our series on Toxic Masculinity, this is the story of a man whose wife is sleeping around, a man who is not doing a good job of taking care of his father, a man who, at least in a pre-modern Chinese context, is not a man at all. Upon learning that his wife has tricked him, Ren mans up, going on a murderous rampage, killing his wife, her lover, her parents and her maid, and thus restoring his masculinity. Does this story endorse this violent act? Or is it being ironic? That and more in another Moore debate on this episode of the Chinese Literature Podcast.
The Water Margin, or the 水浒传 (shui hu zhuan) is one of the novels from the Ming Dynasty that we can point to as the origin of much of the Kung Fu tradition. It is the story of 108 dudes (I'm being technical here). They live outside of the boundaries of the urban Chinese world, just on the edge of civilization. The government is corrupt, so they have formed their own gang. They live by a code, brotherhood and revenge, and they kill anyone who gets in their way, including each other. This is the second in our series on toxic masculinity.
Today Brandon joins Rob and Lee for one of the weirdest stories that they have ever done. The "Biography of Lord As-You-Like-It" is a work of Ming Dynasty porn that discusses the only Empress to ever rule China, the Tang empress Wu Zetian. In this pornographic work, the idea of feminine rulership is equated with sexual promiscuity, and, according to the pornographic story, the only way to solve the problem of political illegitimacy/sexual promiscuity is for Wu Zetian to submit, both politically and sexually, to a man with a giant penis. This work of pornography is fascinating from a feminist perspective, because it makes the nexus between power and gender explicit. It is also important to literary scholars because it is one of the predecessors to the pornographic novel Jin Ping Mei, the Plum in the Golden Vase.
We are posting this podcast on June 4th, 2019, the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. We have decided to focus on a song (which is just a poem, after all) that was performed for the protesters in the Square and that became the anthem ofr the movement that, thirty years ago, briefly lit a path for Chinese democracy, before being snuffed out so brutally.
Modern Chinese Literature begins with the May 4th Movement. Well, that's according to the orthodox understanding of Chinese literature promoted by the CCP in China. Either way, May 4th, 1919 was a turning point both in Chinese society and in Chinese literature.
It was during and after this date that Lu Xun wrote some of his most important pieces of fiction. Those works came together in a book Warcry (呐喊) which is one of the monumental works in Chinese literature. The preface to that book, our subject today, is the most talked about part of that work. Today, on the 100th anniversary of the May 4th movement, we think about Lu Xun, his preface to Outcry and how we still hear echos of the work today.
This work of Daoism is one of the most translated books in the world. But what is it really about? Rob and Lee explore the Laozi (he probably was not a real person, so we call him the Laozi or the Lao tze) and a passage from his Dao De Jing.
This podcast we take a look at a story from a strange Daoist classic, the Huainanzi 淮南子. The tale is called Old Man on the Border Loses his Horse 塞翁失馬. The story title is, itself a chengyu, that means something like you never know if something that seems unfortunate is actually fortunate.
Here is the original Chinese from the Huainanzi:
夫禍福之轉而相生，其變難見也。近塞上之人有善術者，馬無故亡而入胡。人皆吊之。其父曰：「此何遽不為福乎？」居數月，其馬將胡駿馬而歸。人皆賀之。其父曰：「此何遽不能為禍乎？」家富良馬，其子好騎，墮而折其髀。人皆吊之。其父曰：「此何遽不為福乎？」居一年，胡人大入塞，丁壯者引弦而戰，近塞之人，死者十九，此獨以跛之故，父子相保。故福之為禍，禍之為福，化不可極，深不可測也。
Lee's Translation:
Oh, the vicissitudes of fortune and misfortune, the two are born together, and it is hard to distinguish between the two. There was a man who was a good fortune teller who lived near the border. His horse ran into the barbarian's territory. Everybody said that this was unfortunate, but the man said, "Not so fast. Maybe this is fortunate." They waited several months and the horse returned, bringing with them a barbarian horse. Everybody said, this was fortunate. The man said, "Not so fast. Maybe this is misfortune." Their family was rich, they had good horses, their son rode well, but then he fell off the horse and broke his thigh. Everybody said that this was unfortunate, but the man said, "Not so fast. Mabye this is fortunate." After a year, a great barbarian army crossed the border, and all able-bodied men were given arms and sent to war. Those in the border region, nine out of ten died, it was only because of the son's broken leg that the family was spared this fate.
Thus, fortune becomes misfortune, misfortune becomes fortune. Change continues without end, these depths cannot be measured...
When most folks outside of China hear of the Tiananmen Square Incident, and most people either think of the massacre that occurred in 1989. But there was an earlier incident. In 1976, people were getting tired of the Cultural Revolution, but any one who stepped out of line could be criticized. Zhou Enlai, the premier of the country and a beloved figure, died. Mao was sick, and leftists forces were preparing to take over the country and continue the Cultural Revolution. But on the death of Zhou Enlai, masses of people filled up Tiananmen Square without authorization from the government as a way to protest the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. These people also posted numerous poems on the walls throughout the city. Today, we look at what happened during the 1976 Tiananmen Incident and analyze one of the poems.
Today, we look at one of the most popular writers during socialist China (1949-1976). His name is Lei Feng. He wrote poetry about dump trucks, but he was killed when a dump truck backed up into a telephone pole which came crashing down on him. As they were cleaning up the deceased earthly possessions, they found a diary that showed such dedication to the party and to Chairman Mao that they decided to use Lei Feng as a model for the ideal party member.
Some say it is all made up, that the communists invented Lei Feng out of thin air as a work of propaganda (but only capitalists and their running dogs believe that). Whatever you believe, take a journey with us as we read Lei Feng's Ode to a Dumptruck.
Today, Rob and Lee say goodbye, or, at least, say goodbye to the face to face format of podcasting. Rob has earned a Chateaubriand Scholarship to the Sorbonne in Paris, where he will be researching the nexus of Chinese and French culture in the late Qing. That means Lee and Rob may have to change some things up in the way the podcast is done, but fear not, the podcast will continue.
The poem they will look at is one of Li Shangyin's most famous goodbye poems. Here is Lee's translation of it:
It was hard to meet, and hard to part
the east wind is weak, the hundred flowers are withering
the spring's silkworms move towards death, the silk is done
the candle grows gray, wax tears turn dry
she looks into the mirror but worries that her hair is changing
at night, she chants, the moonlight's chill is all she knows
the mystic home is not far away
the blue bird will be the messenger of my love.
And the original:
相見時難別亦難，東風無力百花殘。
春蠶到死絲方盡，蠟炬成灰淚始乾。
曉鏡但愁雲鬢改，夜吟應覺月光寒。
蓬山此去無多路，青鳥殷勤為探看
Today, Nick Stember, the expert on Chinese Manhua (similar to Japanese Manga), joins us as we discuss a short manhua cartoon booklet that was published in 1950. The booklet was meant to be a simple way to explain the 1950 Marriage Law, one of the first acts passed by the new Communist government. The Law legitimized the Communists in the eyes of many Chinese women and their progressive allies. It was the first Chinese to legalize a woman's right to divorce (divorce had been permitted before, but under circumstances generally unfavorable to women), and it modernized many of the old customs in rural China. This was the first in a series of feminist policies the Communists implemented, and the text we explore today provides an interesting angle through which to explore gender, propaganda and ideology in 1950's China.
Today's podcast is a solo podcast where Lee interviews China journalist and author, Robert Delaney. Delaney has just published a novel which is semi-autobiographical, in which a film-maker disappears into the maw of the Chinese police.
Today, we get to interview a flesh-and-blood maker of Chinese literature who has recently put out a series of short stories on a fictionalized version of real Chinese families. We talked to her to find out how she went about her craft and what motivated her to write the stories she did.
We go back to Zhang Ailing, the author Lee claims to be the best Chinese writer of the 20th Century. Rob and Lee discuss her most anthologized work in English, Sealed Off.It is a psychological story occurring inside the heads of a handful of people stuck on a tram in Shanghai under the control of the Japanese. Zhang Ailing is responding to Shi Zhecun's One Night in the Rainy Season,but her work universalizes this psychologicalized narrator; now, women can be narrators, something seemingly impossible in Shi Zhecun's work. The question that hangs over the story is what is sealed off from what? We drift in between the minds of men and women on the tram; we are not sealed off from the most intimate parts of their heads. So what are we sealed off from?
No one expected it, least of all us, but this is our 50th episode with the podcast. Today, Rob and Lee are going to celebrate just like the ancients used to....with a Top 5 Countdown! The pair will share what the top five works of Chinese literature they will still be reading in fifty years.
In this episode, we return to the Root-seeking authors (xungen), this time with Han Shaogong and his enigmatic story Bababa. The story, if you can call it that, has a disjointed plot. It is focused on a village, and maybe the main character is a boy who can only say two things, Papa (baba) and F#$* Mama. Does this boy serve as a good leader for the village? Does he destroy the village? Every time he utters one of his two phrases, villagers try to divine what he means and what it means for the fate of the village. The story questions whether or not language means anything, whether we can say stories even mean anything
This story, The Great Maudgalyayana Rescues his Mom from Hell, is one of the earliest in Chinese vernacular fiction. The version we are reading was found in Dunhuang by Aurel Stein, the Hungarian Britisher who discovered the world's oldest known book. Today's story looks at Maudgalyayana, the Indian Buddhist who travels into the depths of hell to rescue his misbehaving mother and is one of the most successful advertisements for Buddhism in China.