Chinese Literature Podcast

Welcome to Cat Country!  In 1932, Lao She, the famous Chinese writer, penned a book about a Chinese astronaut crashing into Mars and finding the planet populated with Cat People. These Cat People are a way for Lao She to satirize the Chinese. Let the craziness begin!

I know you are going to like this podcast about Zhuangzi and his dumb foil for everything Huizi. In it, the pair discuss whether it is possible to know how others feel, and on what basis one can make those kind of assumptions. As is usual with Zhuangzi, nothing is fixed, so question everything as you descend to the Hao River and join us for a conversation with Zhuangzi. 

Tao Yuanming's Peach Blossom Spring is one of the most famous in all of Chinese literature. A fisherman wanders into a cave and stumbles upon a utopia, but leaves it all because he wants to tell others. Join us as we dive into the cave with Tao Yuanming. 

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