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 […]

Liberia By Way of Beijing: The Appeal of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Late Qing China

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

Off With His Interior Self!: Shi Zhecun’s Weird and Wonderful “The General’s Head”

A character forgets whose head he has on his shoulders. An entire army delivers a unison monologue. Oh, and along the way an entire national approach to ethnicity comes into question. Shi Zhecun’s The General’s Head has a little of everything, and anyone interested in questions of nations, personal identification, and the life of the mind […]

Shen Xiu’s Little Bird Causes Seven Deaths

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’ […]

Mao’s Last Poem

Arguably the single most important political figure of the 20th century, Mao Zedong was also an active poet whose works are still read and, more frequently, debated. How exactly do you approach the poetry of a man whose legacy includes some of the worst man-made disasters in history? By way of exploring this question, we […]

Conversations with Nick Stember on Jia Pingwa’s Ugly Stone

We had the honor recently of talking with Nick Stember, a longtime translator of Chinese fiction and comics, and the official English-language translator of the renowned writer Jia Pingwa. On this podcast, we talk with Nick about his work, and about the intriguing Jia Pingwa short story “The Ugly Stone.” http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/The_Ugly_Stone_-_second_try.mp3 If you are interested […]

Reading Between the Lines: A Discussion with Professor Stephen Durrant

  Well, this is it: our Aerosmith-on-Wayne’s-World podcast, the one where someone way out of our league is gracious enough to pay us a visit. We recently had the distinct privilege of sitting down with one of the U.S. academy’s most respected scholars on ancient Chinese texts: Professor Emeritus Stephen Durrant. Prof. Durrant is the […]

Wait, Wait…Where’s Eddie Murphy?: The REAL Story of Mulan

No talking dragons. Little to no fighting. Lots of speeches. A woman warrior who just wants to go home and be a good, traditional daughter. And…rabbits? How exactly is this the Ballad of Mulan? Lee and I discuss the original story, and find ourselves split over the extent to which it qualifies as a work that […]

Zhuangzi’s Butterfly

Are you listening to the world’s only Chinese Literature podcast right now? Or are you just a butterfly floating around who is dreaming that you are a human who is listening to this podcast? How can you prove that you are actually the human rather than a butterfly dreaming they are a human? Is it […]