Ng Kim Chew’s magnificent fiction is the last entry in our series, and I think you’ll agree we saved the best for last. He grapples with the kind of questions only those in the Chinese diaspora can truly ask, the most important of which is: what does it mean to be Chinese when we don’t […]
World traveler. Friend of Sahrawi freedom fighters. Ambassador for Chinese culture in northern Africa. San Mao had the kind of life that few of her time, or any other, have had. Not surprisingly, she’s still one of the most popular writers in the Chinese language, decades after her death.
In the fourth and final installment of our Not Made in China series, we look at a snarky, critical poem written by a Chinese diplomat about an American election riddled with distrust, ferocious inter-party fighting, and distrust of the Chinese people. It’s just not the election you’re thinking of.
In part three of our series, we have decided to remain resolutely apart form the world of politics by discussing a poem scrawled into the wall of an Angel Island detention cell by a Chinese scholar who was being held there.
Voltaire was such a huge fan of China that he once wrote a poem in celebration of the Qianlong Emperor, due to little else than intel that the emperor was a poet. That was enough, apparently! Who knows if Qianlong read it, but we did. Join us for part two in our series.
We’re kicking off a multi-part series on works that discuss China, or use Chinese, but are not written in China. Our first installment is Hu Chunxiang (Hồ Xuân Hương), a Vietnamese woman who wrote in Tang regulated verse during the late 18th and early 19th century.