Chinese Literature Podcast

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.   

The great romantic martyr of contemporary Chinese poetry, who killed himself at the age of 25 in 1989, Hai Zi is one of the most studied, recited, and well-known poets of the 20th century in China. Positioned alternately as the bard of the countryside or a "pure" poet, he is a figure believed to have been outside the hurly-burly of Chinese political life. Yet his unfinished epic work, The Seven Books of the Sun, which has little to no scholarship, problematizes that idea. 

How does a low-life moron become one of the great tragic figures in modern Chinese culture? Lu Xun's 1921 novella The True Story of Ah Q, a masterpiece of the May 4th Movement, presents just such a situation. We discuss the story's unique narrative choices, and Lu Xun's varying reception in Taiwan and mainland China.

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.