There aren’t a lot of things we agree on, but one of them is Pu Songling. The author of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio 聊斋志异 (1740), which is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of strange tales. Very strange. Strange and wonderful. Today we start a three-part series where we dig into this […]
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 […]
Today, in our third podcast in our series on toxic masculinity in Chinese literature, we examine Jin Ping Mei, the most important work of pornography in Chinese fiction. The novel is 100 chapters long, and it is dirty…the title itself refers to an event which is too dirty to discuss too much, but use your […]
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, […]
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” 如意君傳 is a work of Ming Dynasty pornographic literature that discusses the only Empress to ever rule China, the Tang empress Wu Zetian. In this pornographic work, the idea of feminine rulership is […]
Look, no matter how law-abiding we all are, there’s always that part of us that wishes we didn’t have to be, and just about every culture has its stories that celebrate that. Robin Hood, anyone? How about Ocean’s 11 and its sequels? China has its own long history of outlaw stories, and we talk about […]
So here’s a question for you: why was one of the most popular books in the late Qing Dynasty (1895-1911) a translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Lee and Rob attempt to answer this question, and along the way discuss matters of representation and legal rights in America and China. http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Uncle_Toms_Cabin_-_Edited.mp3
In the Ming Dynasty, If you weren’t born into a noble family, and weren’t on track to pass the civil service exams, you pretty much had to make something of yourself…by yourself. But if fate’s on your side, well, maybe that’s enough. In this classic vernacular short story (hua ben), a man who just never […]
http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Shen_Xius_Bird_-_edited.mp3 This week, we are getting back to our roots. Some of the earliest podcasts we did were on the huaben (話本) story. The very first podcast we posted (we recorded others before, but we canned them because they weren’t good enough) was a huaben that we called Of Gods and Telescopes. We also did the gender-bending huaben Male Mencius’ […]
In today’s podcast, we return to the Historian of the Weird, that is the late, great Pu Songling. Previously, we did a podcast on his touching love story about a man and his rock. This time, we take a look at an equally ‘touching’ love story, though here, we are talking about bad touch. In the story […]