Chinese Literature Podcast

This week, we are honored to get Megan Walsh on the podcast. She is the author of The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why It Matters, an excellent survey of Chinese literature today that was recently published as a part of the Columbia Global Reports. Megan was kind enough to share her insights into the state of contemporary Chinese literature with Rob and Lee. 

In this last episode in our lengthy series on Lu Xun, we look not so much at Lu Xun himself, but the Lu Xun that has been imagined in the minds of Communist Party apparatchiks. Here we try to tackle the legacy of Lu Xun and how it is has been interpreted. 

Today, we interview Professor Roy Chan. Professor Chan is not only one of the most interesting thinkers trying to tackle Lu Xun in the American academia, but he is also the mentor of both Lee and Rob. Professor Chan is the author of The Edge of Knowing, an exploration dreams in the work of Lu Xun and other 20th Century Chinese writers. Today, Professor Chan discusses one of Lu Xun's most enigmatic works, Wild Grass.

What is a Zawen? It is complicated. In this episode, we try to tackle what zawen are and what they meant to Lu Xun's career. Guiding us on our journey is Professor Andrew Jones of UC Berkeley, one of the most well-regarded scholars of Lu Xun in American academia. Professor Jones is the author of Developmental Fairy Tales, and is a contributing translator to the new collection of Lu Xun's zawen in a book titled Jottings Under Lamplight.

On Today's podcast, we have one of the best writers on contemporary Chinese youth, Alec Ash. Alec wrote an excellent book on Chinese young adults called Wish Lanterns. It was renamed China's New Youth for the American book market. Alec joins us today on the podcast to talk about one of Lu Xun's shortest stories. We debate how close Lu Xun is to the narrator of the story and what it says about the China of the early 20th and early 21st Century. 

One of Lu Xun's most trenchant stories, in this episode, part of our series on Lu Xun, we tackle a story about gender, rape and class. The story is brutal, one of Lu Xun's masterpieces. 

Blood and Bread.  A national reckoning between two mourning mothers. Today, Rob and Lee interview Professor James Carter, Dean of the History Department at Saint Joseph's University. The story that the three discuss is Lu Xun's story "Medicine."  Professor Carter's most recent book is Champions Day, a book about the last gasp of old Shanghai.  

Today, we are interrupting our podcast series on Lu Xun to celebrate the  anniversary of Nixon's earth-shattering visit to Beijing 50 years ago this week. In this episode, we take a look at the John Adams Opera, Nixon in China, tackling how the opera incorportates elements of Chinese Cultural Revolution opera and how some of the controversies surrounding the opera have played out in recent years. 

Today's podcast is an interview with Professor Carolyn Brown, author of Reading Lu Xun through Carl Jung. We had a great conversation with her about Lu Xun's story "Soap." This story, in Lu Xun's collection titled 彷徨 (not the more well-known collection 吶喊), is too often ignored. Professor Brown shows that this story touches on issues of gender, class and modernity in a way that deserves more attention. 

This week's podcast is on one of the most important stories in modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun's True Story of Ah Q (鲁迅 - 阿Q正传). Rob and Lee attempt to tackle the story that changed China and still echos down to the present. 

Today, we have author, translator and teacher, Professor Bryan Van Norden, on the podcast to discuss Lu Xun's short but fascinating story of Kong Yiji (鲁迅 - 孔乙己), the book-stealing scholar who Lu Xun imagined to be the symbol of the true state of China's elite culture. Professor Van Norden, Rob and Lee walk through the symbolism of the story and discuss its wider importance. This is #5 in our Lu Xun Series. 

Here we are at what is arguably Lu Xun's most important text. Rob and Lee discuss this text in terms of content, language and modernity. 

In Episode 3 in our Lu Xun Series, we interview one of the experts in the field of Lu Xun studies (and advisor to both Rob and Lee) about the Preface to Lu Xun's most important collection of short stories War Cry (Nahan). This preface has been the subject of numerous debates in China and in literary circles outside of China. We tried to break down some of the most important parts of that debate in our discussion. 

Today, we have our second installment in the Lu Xun series. This week we are joined by Professor Theodore Huters, Professor Emeriti in UCLA's Asian Languages and Cultures Department and Chief Editor, Renditions, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of several books, including Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China and Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity, soon to be released by Cambria Press. Professor Huters was generous enough to give his time to talk about one of Lu Xun's less-well known early works: "Towards a Refutation of Malevolent Voices," published originally in 1908. Professor Huters convincingly argues that though this work is not well known, it is important for understanding the arc of Lu Xun's work. 

This is the first episode in our series on Lu Xun, and, for this episode, we are going to look at some of the earliest aspects of Lu Xun's career, both his time growing up in Shaoxing, his time in Japan and his attempts to become a translator.  

This week, we change up the format a bit. Instead of talking about a specific text, we catch on our personal lives a bit, talking about grad school, what we learned in finishing our Ph.D.'s and a few other things. The podcast is also a bit longer than our normal format. 

A disturbing if sometimes trite story of a country girl who goes to boarding school in 1930's China, gets treated like crap and is eventually pushed out of the school, all because she is low class and her hands, stained by the dye her family uses to put her through school, are ugly. Rob and Lee unpack this story of class and mistreatment for this week's podcast. 

This week, we look at one of the most famous writers in modern China. It is surprising that we have not tackled Shen Congwen before...he was in contention for China's first Nobel Prize for Literature until his death in 1988. The reason we have not discussed him is, despite his importance to Chinese literature, neither of us really like him. Listen as we work through why Shen Congwen is really valuable to read, even if we don't like him. 

This week, we are discussing a story from Ken Liu's Invisible Planets, a collection of science fiction short stories that he recently translated and published. Chen Qiufan's "The Year of the Rat" is a weird story that may or may not be science fiction but is definitely worth reading for everything it tries to say about Chinese politics.

Part Two of our miniseries on Bai Juyi: this week we look at a poem of biting satire that is a good example of Bai's more polemical poetry. Bai was eventually exiled for some of the poetry he wrote (not this poem, but an equally cutting poem). Listen as we try to work through Bai Juyi's artistry and politics in this week's edition of the Chinese Literature Podcast.