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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.