Chinese Literature Podcast

This week, Rob and Lee look at a short essay where Ouyang Xiu talks about a Mei Yaochen poem that he finds woven into the fabric of a barbarian's bag. Their discussion touches not only on the poem, but also on questions of the materiality of literature. 

Bei Dao is one of the first great poets in the Post-Mao era, and this short poem demonstrates why. 

This week looks a poem by Mao Zedong celebrating the communist defeat of a tiny parasite. "Shooing Away the God of Epidemics" was written in 1956 upon Mao hearing that a county in Jiangxi had eliminated all their blood flukes.  #1 China’s green waters and the blue mountains are so numerous but even the great ancient Chinese medical theorist Hua Tou is unable to take care of this little worm, The thousand villages are covered in vines and peppered with their leaking shit, the ten thousand homes are abandoned, only ghosts sing inside them.  He sits on the Earth everyday and walks 80,000 miles, He roams through the heavens and looks out the distance at the thousand rivers. China’s Orion constellation desires to ask the God of Epidemics about it, happiness and hopelessness are all the same as time goes by.   其一 绿水青山枉自11多，华佗2无奈小虫何！ 千村薜荔3人遗矢12，万户萧疏13鬼唱歌。 坐地日行八万里，巡天14遥看一千河。 牛郎4欲问瘟神事，一样悲欢15逐逝波5。 #2 A spring wind blows through a billion poplar and willow branches, the 600 million Chinese of today live like the sa

This week, we are looking at a poem in the news. We are airing on Saturday, October 15th, 2022. On Thursday October 13th, 2022, just three days before Chairman Xi Jinping is supposed to be anointed for his third term, someone mounted the Sitong Bridge in Beijing and unfurled two banners. One had a poem which read:   We don’t want nucleic acid [tests], we want to eat We don’t want the Cultural Revolution, we want reform    We don’t want lockdowns, we want freedom We don’t want a leader, we want voting   We don’t want lies, we want respect We don’t want to be slaves, we want to be citizens   不要核酸1要吃饭3，不要文革要改革 不要封城要自由，不要领袖4要选票 不要谎言要尊严，不做奴才2做公民

Today's podcast is Rob-less, and it looks at the 1052 poem by Wang Anshi, China's controversial economic thinker. This poem (probably) has little to do with Wang's economic policies, but is rather all about his love for his father and elder brothers and his meditation on his own mortality. 

The last episode in our mini-series on Zhuangzi, we look at one of the most elequent passages in all of the Zhuangzi, even if it almost certainly was not written by Zhuangzi himself. Autumn Floods focuses on understanding how tiny we are in the universe. 

He cuts the ox without dulling his blade because he uses the Dao to do it. He does not hack, but rather finds the spaces in between to seek out the path of least resistance for his cleaver. And he is one of the most important parables to come out of Zhuangzi. This week, Rob and Lee turn to Butcher Ting. 

Today is part 2 of our accidental series onf Zhuangzi. We did not mean to do a series on Zhuangzi, but the book is just too fascinating to put down. This week, we try to get at what the meaning of Dao (not Tao, as we explain), at least, what it means according to Zhuangzi. 

Death is tough to grapple with, but it is a reality we, all to often, face the wrong way. In this episode, we take a look at how Zhuangzi, the famed Warring States philosopher, mourns his dead wife. 

Where did the Uighur name come from? It might seem crazy, but a poet in the 1930's took Uighur as his penname, and the Uighur people may have taken their name from that man (well, it is a little bit more complicated than that, but those are the basics). Abdukhaliq Uighur called on his people to rise up against the Chinese and become the Uighur people. We look at a poem that he wrote when he was facing execution in in Chinese prison cell. 

Xi Xi, one of Hong Kong's most famous writers, pens a weird, postmodern portrait of Hong Kong. Rob does not like it, Lee does. Why? Take a listen as they tackle this weird and sometimes wonderful effort to deal with what Hong Kong is. Or, is it even Hong Kong?

This week, we tackle the biggest question in Confucianism: are people born good and made bad by their environment, or are they inherently bad and only made good through rules and punishments. We look at a passage in the Mencius, arguably the most important text in the Confucian tradition (yes, maybe even more important the Confucius himself). We are looking at the passage from Book 6 A, Passage # 6. 

Today, we take a look at a poet who, astonishingly, was writing interesting poetry during the height of the Maoist era. His is the most underground of the underground poets, and today we look at one of the poems by Shi Zhi, "The Ocean and the Wave."

Can Li Bai, China's greatest poet, be translated into frat-boy-ese? Lee tried.  It is not as crazy as it sounds. Li Bai is an alcoholic poet. Though he has long been translated into a highfalutin English that sounds like a stuffy Shakespere. But Li Bai is just talking about getting drunk.  Does Lee's translation work? Stay tuned and decide for yourself. 

In this episode, Part Two of our two part series on Chen Qiufan's first novel, Rob and Lee try to pivot away from the narrower discussions of what happens in the novel and more on a broader discussion of its place in Chinese Science Fiction. Whether or not they succeed in doing that...well, we'll let you decide.

This is part 一 in a two part series on the novel called Wast Tide. This is Chen Qiufan's first novel, its a science-fiction novel that touches on environmentalism and transhumanism. Join Rob and Lee as the struggle with this novel .

How many cats have been immortalized in poetry that we are still reading a millenium later? At least one, Mr. Five White. Here, we stand with Mei Yaochen as he gives Mr. Five White the appropriate send off after his death. 

This week, we get back to our weird poetry series. Today's weird poem is one written by an editor at the Xinhua News Agency, China's state-sponsored answer to Reuters or Bloomberg. Chairman Xi visited Xinhua and told them that the news needed to support the Party. During the visit, Pu wrote this poem, showing that he definitely supports the Party. 

This week's weird poem is weird in an unexpectedly weird way. Upon first glance, it is an anodyne poem published in the overseas edition of the People's Daily, the official rag of the CCP. Until you see the political message hidden in the poem that caused a small controversy in the 1990's. This is the last of our weird poem series. 

One San Francisco poet, writing in the early 20th century, wrote something that no other poet ever said in the history of Chinese literature (probably): having money is more important than having sons! This is a huge statement that runs against much of traditional Chinese thinking. But, this anonymous poet, though writing in a mixture of Cantonese and Classical Chinese, is an American, so it makes sense. Join Rob and Lee for their look at this poem published in either 1911 or 1915 in San Francisco's Chinatown.