Huang Chunming – Sayonara, Zaijian

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 […]

Huang Chunming – The Drowning of an Old Cat

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.  Finally, I mentioned that Rob and I did a podcast on the 1884 […]

Interview with Professor Daniel Bell

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.  To purchase […]

Edward Yang – Yi Yi or A One and a Two

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 […]

Bai Xianyong – Winter Nights

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 […]

Taiwanese Comfort Women

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. 

Yu Yonghe – Small Sea Travel Diary

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 […]

Ge Fei – The Invisibility Cloak

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. 

Nicky Harman Interview on Jia Pingwa’s The Sojourn Teashop

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 […]

Ian Johnson Interview

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 […]

Yang Huang’s My Old Faithful

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.   http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Yang_Huang_Interview_-_edited.mp3   […]

Zhang Ailing’s Sealed Off – Sealed Off from What???

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 […]

50th Podcast Anniversary

50th Podcast Anniversary We Made it to 50! 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 […]

F#$* Mama – Han Shaogong’s Bababa

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#$* […]

Record of Regret: An Interview with Dylan King

Lee and Rob got the chance recently to sit down with Dylan King, a scholar and translator of Chinese literature. In this podcast the three talk about the eccentricities and fascinations of post-Cultural Revolution fiction, and dive into Dylan’s recently-published English translation of Record of Regret, Dong Xi’s beautiful, and darkly humorous, account of a countryside […]

Buddhist Rescues Mom from Hell

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 […]

Liang Qichao

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

How Pumpkin Seeds Won the War: Hua Tong’s Yan’an Seeds

No, really: pumpkin seeds are the reason Mao and the People’s Liberation Army won the civil war in 1949, and why the generations that followed pretty much rocked. Or so says Hua Tong’s Cultural Revolution-era short story “Yan’An Seeds.” It’s Communist propaganda, so…is it crap? Yes. But, as Lee puts it, it’s some of the […]

Tao Yuanming’s Return to the Fields and Gardens

Tao Yuanming, who we’ve already covered in a previous podcast, was not only a skilled prose writer but also a poet. In today’s podcast, we look at one of his most famous poems. http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Tao_Yuanming_-_Return_to_the_Fields_and_Gardens_-_Edited.mp3

Get Ready to Root for the Bad Guy: Zhang Yingyu’s Book of Swindles

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 […]