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 […]
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 […]
We go back to Zhang Ailing, the author Lee claims to be the best Chinese writer of the 20th Century. Rob and Lee discuss her most anthologized work in English, Sealed Off. It is a psychological story occurring inside the heads of a handful of people stuck on a tram in Shanghai under the control of the […]
50th Podcast Anniversary We Made it to 50! No one expected it, least of all us, but this is our 50th episode with the podcast. Today, Rob and Lee are going to celebrate just like the ancients used to….with a Top 5 Countdown! The pair will share what the top five works of Chinese literature […]
In this episode, we return to the Root-seeking authors (xungen), this time with Han Shaogong and his enigmatic story Bababa. The story, if you can call it that, has a disjointed plot. It is focused on a village, and maybe the main character is a boy who can only say two things, Papa (baba) and F#$* […]
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 […]
This story, The Great Maudgalyayana Rescues his Mom from Hell, is one of the earliest in Chinese vernacular fiction. The version we are reading was found in Dunhuang by Aurel Stein, the Hungarian Britisher who discovered the world’s oldest known book. Today’s story looks at Maudgalyayana, the Indian Buddhist who travels into the depths of hell […]
Liang Qichao’s writings midwifed the birth of a new way of thinking about the Chinese language, and his thinking became the foundation of Chinese politics in the twentieth century. Though not as famous as some of those later thinkers who stood on his shoulders, like Lu Xun, he is arguably more influential. http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Liang_Qichao.mp3
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 […]
Tao Yuanming, who we’ve already covered in a previous podcast, was not only a skilled prose writer but also a poet. In today’s podcast, we look at one of his most famous poems. http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Tao_Yuanming_-_Return_to_the_Fields_and_Gardens_-_Edited.mp3