Chinese Literature Podcast

The General's Head

Song Dynasty Ci - Liu Yong

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' Mother and Jiang Xingge's Pearl-Sown Shirt. The huaben is just a kind of short story from the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Huaben operate in a karmic universe where bad deeds are punished and good deeds rewarded. In today's podcast, we look at the Feng Menglong story, "Shen Xiu and his Bird Causes 7 Deaths." The story starts with a rich layabout, Shen Xiu, who is always out playing with his bird. While he is out, Shen Xiu collapses and Zhang, a cooper, sees him lying there with his bird. He decides to steal the bird, but Shen Xiu comes to, so Zhang kills Shen Xiu and sells the bird. Afterwards, several more people die in this trail of horrors. The question that Rob and Lee argue over is

Nick Stember and Jia Pingwa's Ugly Stone

Are you listening to the world's only Chinese Literature podcast right now? Or are you just a butterfly floating around who is dreaming that you are a human who is listening to this podcast? How can you prove that you are actually the human rather than a butterfly dreaming they are a human? Is it even possible to prove something like that? You have now entered a world of philosophical pleasure and pain that is the Zhuangzi, an ancient Chinese text that has teased and troubled scholars for almost three millennia. We will game around with some of the issues playing out in the dream of the butterfly, the most famous passage in the text.

In today's podcast, we return to the Historian of the Weird, that is the late, great Pu Songling. Previously, we did a podcast on his touching love story about a man and his rock. This time, we take a look at an equally 'touching' love story, though here, we are talking about bad touch. In the story that is literally translated as Human Prodigy (人妖), a family named Ma tries to play the old trick-a-roo where you invite the local virgin to give your wife a massage and then, in the darkness the husband takes the wife's place. But when Mrs. Ma slips out of bed and Mr. Ma slips into bed, Mr. Ma finds a surprise. The young virgin he wanted to rape is actually a man...we'll leave the rest to be discussed on the podcast. This disturbing, gender-bending story makes for an interesting read and an even more interesting discussion. 

Podcast on a poem by Du Fu

In today's episode, we look at a specific poem by Haizi, his most famous.