Chinese Literature Podcast

Yu Dafu is an early 20th Century writer known for one work:  Sinking . This novella is highly autobiographical, and it discusses the trials and tribulations of a Chinese student living in Japan. His attitude towards Japanese women and the Chinese nation is both fascinating and disturbing, and Rob and Lee dive into those attitudes. This is the last of our series on Toxic Masculinity in Chinese Lite...

The Fourth in our series on Toxic Masculinity, this is the story of a man whose wife is sleeping around, a man who is not doing a good job of taking care of his father, a man who, at least in a pre-modern Chinese context, is not a man at all. Upon learning that his wife has tricked him, Ren mans up, going on a murderous rampage, killing his wife, her lover, her parents and her maid, and thus resto...

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, just on the edge of civilization. The government is corrupt, so they have formed their own gang. They live by a code,...

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" is a work of Ming Dynasty porn that discusses the only Empress to ever rule China, the Tang empress Wu Zetian. In this pornographic work, the idea of feminine rulership is equated with sexual promiscuity, and, according to the pornographic story, the only way to solve th...

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 ofr the movement that, thirty years ago, briefly lit a path for Chinese democracy, before being snuffed out so brutally. 

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 his most important pieces of fiction. Those works came together in a book Warc...

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 original Chinese from the Huainanzi: 夫禍福之轉而相生，其變難見也。近塞上之人有善術者，馬無...

When most folks outside of China hear of the Tiananmen Square Incident, and most people either think of the massacre that occurred in 1989. But there was an earlier incident. In 1976, people were getting tired of the Cultural Revolution, but any one who stepped out of line could be criticized. Zhou Enlai, the premier of the country and a beloved figure, died. Mao was sick, and leftists forces were...

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 found a diary that showed such dedication to the party and to Chairman Mao that they decided...

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 some things up in the way the podcast is done, but fear not, the podcast will continue.  The poem they...

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 legitimized the Communists in the eyes of many Chinese women and their progressive allies. It...

 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.

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.

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 Japanese. Zhang Ailing is responding to Shi Zhecun's  One Night in the Rainy Season,  but her w...

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 they will still be reading in fifty years. 

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#$* Mama. Does this boy serve as a good leader for the village? Does he destroy the village? Every time...

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 to rescue his misbehaving mother and is one of the m...