This is the first in a two-part mini-series on the screw in modern Chinese literature. Yep, that is right, the screw, the humble tool which binds the world. This week, I am looking at a passage in Lei Feng’s diary on how he wants to be a screw for the Revolution, with a capital R. […]
Mr. Close Enough…Mr. Cha Buduo. He never seems to get things quite right, but he represents everything China is about. This is his story, a short, sardonic piece by the scholar and UN Ambassador Hu Shi. In some ways, Mr. Close Enough echos Lu Xun’s Ah Q, in other ways it is the polar opposite […]
Xu Xu is a writer who was very famous in the 1930’s and 1940’s. He lived in China until 1949, he was one of the country’s most important writers during this period. Then, after the victory of the CCP, he, fearing for his safety, left for Hong Kong. He continued to write but drifted into […]
Liu Xijun was a princess. Her father and mother were executed when they rebelled against the emperor, her great uncle. Liu was sent to marry a king of the distant Wusun, a group of Central Asian herders that the emperor was trying to curry favor with. This is her poem.
Today’s poem is by Li Bai, and its title is fairly long in English: “Going Down Zhongnan Mountain with Mountain Man Husi, Staying at His Place and Hitting the Bottle.” It involves questions of one’s role in the social world and drinking. It is one of the top 300 poems from the Tang Dynasty and […]
This week, the Chinese Literature Podcast goes where few literary scholars have gone before. We take a look at some poetry by sex workers in the city of Dalian. In the podcast, I use the poem to tackle issues of gender in China. Be forewarned, there is some explicit language in this poetry. Anonymous I […]
This episode, we go to a small island off the coast of Victoria, Canada. Shortly after he was exiled from Qing China, Kang Youwei, the rockstar amongst late Qing intellectuals, found himself on Coal Island, just north of Victoria. In this episode, I look at 1.5 of the cycle of 19 poems he wrote while […]
This week, Lee interviews Kyle Anderson, who has just published the first volume in a young adult series titled MountainSea Scrolls. This first volume is called The 9 Tailed Fox. Dr. Anderson describes the series as Narnia meets China. Dr. Anderson has also worked in translation and academia, and his work includes the translation of […]
On the previous episode, I went all the way to the beginning of Chinese literature. This episode, I explore a contemporary novel, Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum. It won Mo Yan the Nobel Prize, it has been made into a famous movie, this novel has been very influential. Let’s dive in!
Oracle Bones (甲骨文) are the oldest written Chinese texts that have ever been discovered. Today, Lee looks at what Oracle Bones are, how they were discovered in the 1890’s and reads out the translation of two of them in a podcast that takes it back to the very beginning of Chinese literature.