…And then there were the Maoist years. Following the Chinese Communist Party’s victory in 1949, literature was tightly controlled until 1976. That means, well, it’s a pretty rough period to discuss. But we still found some gems! Join us to find out more!
Who owned the 1930’s: the author who gave us talking Martian cats, or the one who gave us a sentient decapitated head? Yes, it was a weird decade, was the 1930’s. Join us to learn more!
World traveler. Friend of Sahrawi freedom fighters. Ambassador for Chinese culture in northern Africa. San Mao had the kind of life that few of her time, or any other, have had. Not surprisingly, she’s still one of the most popular writers in the Chinese language, decades after her death.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]