Lee and Rob got the chance recently to sit down with Dylan King, a scholar and translator of Chinese literature. In this podcast the three talk about the eccentricities and fascinations of post-Cultural Revolution fiction, and dive into Dylan’s recently-published English translation of Record of Regret, Dong Xi’s beautiful, and darkly humorous, account of a countryside […]
No, really: pumpkin seeds are the reason Mao and the People’s Liberation Army won the civil war in 1949, and why the generations that followed pretty much rocked. Or so says Hua Tong’s Cultural Revolution-era short story “Yan’An Seeds.” It’s Communist propaganda, so…is it crap? Yes. But, as Lee puts it, it’s some of the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Political allegory? Straight-ahead love story? Supernatural adventure? All of the above? Lee and Rob discuss the story “Rare Stone from Heaven” (tr. Hu Shiguang) from the renowned collection Strange Tales from Liao Zhai (《聊斋志异》), and debate just how literally you can read a story about a man’s love affair with a rock. […]