Taiwan Travelogue – Yang Shuangzi

In this podcast, we look at the novel that was, a little more than a week ago, awarded the International Booker Prize. Taiwan Travelogue is a novel that pretends to be a travelogue, where a Japanese woman from Nagasaki, an important writer in the Japanese empire. She travels to Taiwan to travel and talk about […]

Stephen Owen Obituary

I am sad to report that Stephen Owen, a professor at Harvard University who wrote about Chinese poetry, just passed away at the age of 79 in Massachusetts.  This short podcast talks a bit about one of the giants of the field. Here is a Chinese-language obituary that was just published.

Li Wai-yee and the Confucius Chronicles

In this podcast, I got the chance to do a face-to-face interview with Professor Li Wai-yee, a Harvard scholar who is one of the most prolific scholars of Chinese literature. During our interview, we discussed her new book, The Confucius Chronicles, just released by Columbia University Press, along with the massive role that Confucius has […]

Kublai Khan, Morris Rossabi and the 10th Anniversary of the Podcast

First off, I am dropping the podcast on the 10th Anniversary of our first episode. On April 9th, 2016, the Chinese Literature Podcast had its first episodes. The first episode of the podcast’s next decade is Morris Rossabi, the scholar who made the world rethink Kublai Khan and the Mongols. He wrote the first good […]

Du Fu – Spring Gazes – Tang Poetry Masters Series

Today, we finish up the 3 part series on Tang Poetry Masters with a look at Du Fu, China’s poet historian. The An Lushan Rebellion tore the Tang Dynasty in half and is one of the defining events of Chinese history. Du Fu is pivotal for our memory of that event, as his poems are […]

Tang Poetry Masters Series – Wang Wei and his Moment of Zen

Today, the podcast gets to Wang Wei and a Buddhist poem he wrote with the eye of a painter. Wang Wei is the least popular of the three High Tang poets, at least, since the Song Dynasty, but, back in the day, he was the most popular, more popular than Li Bai and Du Fu. […]

Tang Poetry Masters Series – Li Bai and the West

Today is the beginning of a three part series I am going to do on the three big Tang poets, Li Bai, Wang Wei and Du Fu. In this episode, we take a look at Li Bai, often considered China’s Greatest poet, and his relationship with the regions to China’s West, modern day Xinjiang and […]

Interview with Susan Wan Dolling

Today, Lee gets to chat with Susan Wan Dolling, Hong-Kong-American poet, novelist and translator. She recently published her latest book of Song poetry translations, What the Cuckoo Said, but she has long been working on translating Chinese poetry into an English that does what is hard to do, that preserves the music that you hear […]

Zoom Talk I gave on the Book for the Modern China Lecture Series

I was honored Professor Jeremy Murray invited me back to the Modern China Lecture Series to talk about my book, China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read.

Return of the Rob

On this episode, I give a brief update on the book’s status, which should be in your hands by mid-November. And also, Rob returns, joining the podcast from France to talk about what he has been up to and also to chat with Lee about the book.  Transcript generated by AI  My name is Lee […]

Dumptruck Poetry – Lei Feng

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 […]

Li Shangyin – Goodbye Poem

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 […]

Marriage Manga with Nick Stember

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 […]

Interview with Robert Delaney

Today’s podcast is a solo podcast where Lee interviews China journalist and author, Robert Delaney. Delaney has just published a novel which is semi-autobiographical, in which a film-maker disappears into the maw of the Chinese police. Note: we here at the podcast had a technical difficulty on our end that, for some inexplicable reason, caused […]

Bring the Pain: Ding Ling’s Xia Village

Look, just because it’s depressing doesn’t mean it isn’t also great. We bear that in mind as we discuss a truly great short story from the equally great Ding Ling, the writer of Miss Sophie’s Diary, another podcast post on the site. In it, a visiting writer takes stock of the way the Japanese invasion […]

Mencius and King Hui

Greek philosophy has the dialogues of Plato. Chinese philosophy has those of Mencius. As one half of the “Kong-Meng” 孔孟 duo (Confucius and Mencius), Mencius was more responsible than perhaps anyone in history for the spread of a kind of thought that later generations would call Confucianism. In this podcast, we talk about a famous […]

Bus Stop

Our last podcast was on Mao’s Yan’An lectures. If you left that podcast wondering, “Fine, but what’s an example of what Mao considered REALLY bad art?”, then we have a treat for you: Gao Xingjian’s 1981 play “Bus Stop.” A peculiar existential piece very much indebted to Samuel Beckett, it hardly seems the sort of […]

Art for the Masses: Mao Zedong’s Yan’An Lectures

At the 1942 Yan’An Forum on Literature in Art, held in the Shaanxi city of Yan’An, Mao Zedong delivered a series of lectures on the role played by the literary arts in shaping, and being shaped by, the “soldier, farmer, and worker.” While not literature per se, they still played a huge role in Party […]

When Death is an Improvement: Pu Songling’s “Judge Lu” (陆判)

Man drinks with his buddies. Man upgrades and becomes drinking buddies with one of the grand poobahs of the underworld. Man dies. Man becomes high-ranking bureaucrat in the afterlife. Man becomes more present and caring father and husband from his place in the underworld. That kind of thing happens every day, right? It does in […]

Yang Huang’s My Old Faithful

Today, we get to interview a flesh-and-blood maker of Chinese literature who has recently put out a series of short stories on a fictionalized version of real Chinese families. We talked to her to find out how she went about her craft and what motivated her to write the stories she did.   http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Yang_Huang_Interview_-_edited.mp3   […]