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 […]

The Ugly Stone: A Conversation with Nick Stember

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.” If you are interested in […]

There Can Be Only One: The Biography of Xiang Yu

  The multi-volume Records of the Grand Historian, by Sima Qian, is one of the masterworks of Chinese history and literature . Even today it is the only source for much of our information on pre-Han (206 B.C.E.) China. One of the classic stories from the collection is The Biography of Xiang Yu (《项羽本纪》). Lee and I […]

And They Lived Happily Ever After…

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 […]

Thinking of My Brothers on a Moonlit Night

  Today, we’re looking at one of Du Fu’s poems. We covered one of his works before, but his oeuvre is massive. Here is the poem for the day:       月夜憶舍弟   戍鼓斷人行，秋邊一雁聲。 露從今夜白，月是故鄉明。 有弟皆分散，無家問死生。 寄書長不達，況乃未休兵。   Thinking of my Brothers on a Moonlit Night   The drums of war have cut the roads […]

Journey Even MORE to the West: The Xi You Bu

In this second of two podcasts on the Journey to the West, Lee discusses his work on a very strange, and very understudied, addendum to the original Journey to the West, written some time later. It turns the original’s focus inward, presenting multiple layers of reality.               http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Xi_You_Bu.mp3

Journey to the West

  The 100 chapter picaresque novel Journey to the West (西游记) is one of the “four classic works” of Chinese literature. It is also one of the most popular pieces of writing in the Chinese language. With guest Brandon Folse, we talk about its enduring popularity, curious structure, and baroque approach to names.     […]

Zhang Ailing’s Love in a Fallen City

In this podcast we discuss the writer whom Lee asserts is the single greatest Chinese novelist of the 20th century: Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang). In particular, we take a closer look at one of her most famous stories, Love in a Fallen City (《倾城之恋》), and its depiction of the Japanese bombing of Hong Kong.   […]

Haizi – Looking Toward The Sea

In today’s podcast, we will take a look back at Haizi, post-1979 China’s most famous poet. Previously, in this episode, we talked about Haizi in this mythologically laced poem.  Today, we’re going to take a look at his most famous poem, called “Facing the Sea, the Spring Warm, Flowers Blooming.” http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Haizi_-_Poem_-_Looking_Towards_the_Sea.mp3 Below, Lee has provided […]

Junkyard Poetics: Ouyang Jianghe’s Phoenix

One of the more interesting poetry projects in recent years is Ouyang Jianghe’s opus Phoenix, an attempt to capture in print the Xu Bing sculpture, which is a pair of massive phoenixes composed entirely from things found at Beijing construction sites. Lee and I welcome a guest, Brandon Folse, as we talk about how to […]

Of Gods and…More Gods: Idle Talk Under the Bean Arbor

  One of the earliest, and certainly fullest, examples of the frame story is the  collection Idle Talk Under the Bean Arbor. Through a series of stories told by a group of people sheltering from the heat under a bean arbor, everything from karmic justice to the end of the world is discussed. We welcome a guest, Lindsey […]