Today, in our third podcast in our series on toxic masculinity in Chinese literature, we examine Jin Ping Mei, the most important work of pornography in Chinese fiction. The novel is 100 chapters long, and it is dirty…the title itself refers to an event which is too dirty to discuss too much, but use your […]
The Water Margin, or the 水浒传 (shui hu zhuan) is one of the novels from the Ming Dynasty that we can point to as the origin of much of the Kung Fu tradition. It is the story of 108 dudes (I’m being technical here). They live outside of the boundaries of the urban Chinese world, […]
Today Brandon joins Rob and Lee for one of the weirdest stories that they have ever done. The “Biography of Lord As-You-Like-It” 如意君傳 is a work of Ming Dynasty pornographic literature that discusses the only Empress to ever rule China, the Tang empress Wu Zetian. In this pornographic work, the idea of feminine rulership is […]
We are posting this podcast on June 4th, 2019, the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. We have decided to focus on a song (which is just a poem after all) that was performed for the protesters in the Square and that became the anthem for the movement that, thirty years ago, briefly lit […]
Modern Chinese Literature begins with the May 4th Movement. Well, that’s according to the orthodox understanding of Chinese literature promoted by the CCP in China. Either way, May 4th, 1919 was a turning point both in Chinese society and in Chinese literature. It was during and after this date that Lu Xun wrote some of […]
This work of Daoism is one of the most translated books in the world. But what is it really about? Rob and Lee explore the Laozi (he probably was not a real person, so we call him the Laozi or the Lao tze) and a passage from his Dao De Jing.
This podcast we take a look at a story from a strange Daoist classic, the Huainanzi 淮南子. The tale is called Old Man on the Border Loses his Horse 塞翁失馬. The story title is, itself a chengyu, that means something like you never know if something that seems unfortunate is actually fortunate. Here is the […]
Today, we look at one of the most popular writers during socialist China (1949-1976). His name is Lei Feng. He wrote poetry about dump trucks, but he was killed when a dump truck backed up into a telephone pole which came crashing down on him. As they were cleaning up the deceased earthly possessions, they […]
Today, Rob and Lee say goodbye, or, at least, say goodbye to the face to face format of podcasting. Rob has earned a Chateaubriand Scholarship to the Sorbonne in Paris, where he will be researching the nexus of Chinese and French culture in the late Qing. That means Lee and Rob may have to change […]
Today, Nick Stember, the expert on Chinese Manhua (similar to Japanese Manga), joins us as we discuss a short manhua cartoon booklet that was published in 1950. The booklet was meant to be a simple way to explain the 1950 Marriage Law, one of the first acts passed by the new Communist government. The Law […]