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 […]

Cat Country

Welcome to Cat Country! In 1932, Lao She, the famous Chinese writer, penned a book about a Chinese astronaut crashing into Mars and finding the planet populated with Cat People. These Cat People are a way for Lao She to satirize the Chinese. Let the craziness begin! http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Cat_Country_Edited_1.mp3

Miss Sophie’s Diary

Finding a “first” of anything is a tricky proposition, but if we had to pick a “first” great work of feminism in modern Chinese literature, it would by Miss Sophie’s Diary, by Ding Ling, published in 1928. An absolutely fascinating work that takes full advantage of the diary format, in a way Lu Xun’s own Diary of […]

Can Xue’s Hut on a Mountain

Can Xue is one of the most famous avant-garde authors to emerge from China in the 1980’s, and we took a look at one of her best and most enigmatic short stories, “Hut on the Mountain.” http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Cao_Xues_The_Hut_on_the_Mountain_-_edited.mp3

Zhuangzi and His Fish

We here introduce one of the great duos in Chinese literary history: Zhuang Zi and his less-than-intelligent foil, Huizi. In this classic passage, the pair discuss whether it is possible to know how others feel, and on what basis one can make those kinds of assumptions. As is usual with Zhuangzi, nothing is fixed, so […]

It’s the End of the World as We Know It: Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem

How would the world’s population function if it knew the end was coming…in 400 years? What would your view of humanity be if everyone you loved had been brutally taken from you by a tyrannical regime? These are the two structuring questions for the Hugo and Nebula-award winning novel The Three-Body Problem by China’s greatest […]

Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring

Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring is one of the most famous in all of Chinese literature. A fisherman wanders into a cave and stumbles upon a utopia, but leaves it all because he wants to tell others. Join us as we dive into the cave with Tao Yuanming. http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Peach_Blossom_-_finished.mp3

Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman

Recorded just after Halloween, this podcasts feels a little like a ghost of podcasts past for two reasons. We have recorded an episode on this story, Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman, three times. Unfortunately, we lost the first two attempts, so we resurrected this podcast from the grave on All Soul’s Day. The second ghostly […]

Confucius

Confucius, Confucius, Confucius. What more can be said about the man who, since two and a half millinea after he lived, has defined China. In this podcast, we will focus on how a single passage, just eight characters echoes throughout Chinese literature and beyond, even into the contemporaneous Communist Party shindig happening in Beijing this […]

October Dedications: An Interview with Lucas Klein on the Poetry of Mang Ke

Back in action after a brief hiatus, Lee and Rob interview translator and professor Lucas Klein, whose most recent work, October Dedications, is a book of translations of the poet Mang Ke. Prof. Klein is best-known for his work with Xi Chuan, but gives a nice guided tour of historical trends in poetry translation, the differences […]

That’s One Weird Utopia: Kang Youwei’s “Book of Great Unity”

There were a lot of texts dealing with reform in the late Qing (1895-1911), but few of them were more radical, or more bizarre, than Kang Youwei’s Book of Great Unity (《大同书》). The venerable linguist and Confucian scholar advocated a future utopia in which not only would governments and international commerce no longer exist, but even species […]