This week and next week, in honor of Asian American History month, we are interrupting our weird 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 on Angel Island 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 […]
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 […]
Liang Qichao’s writings midwifed the birth of a new way of thinking about the Chinese language, and his thinking became the foundation of Chinese politics in the twentieth century. Though not as famous as some of those later thinkers who stood on his shoulders, like Lu Xun, he is arguably more influential. http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Liang_Qichao.mp3