This week, Rob and I are travelling, so we have decided to go back into the vault and dig up one of our first podcasts ever…the sound quality is bad, our explanations are even worse…but the story is great. A man falls in love with a very young boy and things take off from there. […]
http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Shen_Xius_Bird_-_edited.mp3 This week, we are getting back to our roots. Some of the earliest podcasts we did were on the huaben (話本) story. The very first podcast we posted (we recorded others before, but we canned them because they weren’t good enough) was a huaben that we called Of Gods and Telescopes. We also did the gender-bending huaben Male Mencius’ […]
One of the earliest, and certainly fullest, examples of the frame story is the collection Idle Talk Under the Bean Arbor. Through a series of stories told by a group of people sheltering from the heat under a bean arbor, everything from karmic justice to the end of the world is discussed. We welcome a guest, Lindsey […]
On today’s podcast, Rob and Lee discuss a story that is relevant to today’s America as much as it is to China: Male Mencius’ Mother, a sort of medieval Chinese version My Two Dads. In the story of A Male Mencius’ Mother, we find ourselves in Fujian, on the edge of Chinese civilization, purportedly an […]
One of the most acclaimed 话本 (hua ben – vernacular short stories) in Feng Menglong’s 1620 collection Stories Old and New (tr. Yang Shuhui and Yang Yunqin). We discuss the question of irony in a story about both marital and extramarital bliss, and explore the reasons behind the story’s famously racy details. […]
Want a shortcut to immortality? Get a telescope! Or at least that’s the scenario posed by Li Yu’s classic 1657 story Tower for the Summer Heat《夏宜樓》. We’ll also take a closer look at the notions of cultural “inside” and “outside” spaces that inform Chinese social discourse to this day. http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Tower_for_the_Summer_Heat.mp3