Teaching the death of Mao Zedong
If you ever have to teach about the end of Maoism, Ai Qing‘s poem “On the Crest of a Wave” is a good thing to use. Ai was one of China’s...
Category: Literature
Korean social history through yadam
I was recently sent a copy of Si Nae Park The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing (Columbia U.P., 2020) It̵...
The Songs of Chu
Columbia University Press sent me a copy of Gopal Suku’s new translation of Qu Yuan’s The Songs of Chu. I am not qualified to speak about it as a scholarly tran...
Dress and identity in the Qing
I have been reading Guojun Wang’s Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama. I am not particularly a student of drama, or of costume, but in the T...
Was Hirata Atsutane Japan’s first Science Fiction writer?
Maybe. Well, sort of. It kind of depends on how you define things. Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) was one of the key thinkers and popularizers of Japanese Nativism...
Who likes short shorts?
Columbia University Press sent me a copy of Mu Aili and Mike Smith’s Contemporary Chinese Short-Short Stories: A Parallel Text. The book is, as you might have g...
Books with “Laozi” on the cover
Konrad called my attention to Paul R. Goldin’s “Those Who Don’t Know Speak: Translations of the Daode Jing by People Who Do Not Know Chinese.”1 As you mig...
David Todd Roy has died
This saddens me a great deal. I saw him speak years ago when only one volume of his Jin Ping Mei translation was out, and I wondered if he would finish. He did ...
Dunhuang, translation, and cultural contact
If you teach about Dunhuang, or the Tang dynasty, or inter-cultural contact, or just like to read interesting things, you should be aware of the Early Tibet web...
Yuan Mei, Food Network star
As Yuan Mei’s Garden of Accord Food Book is now available in English translation, I have been reading the whole thing. One of the things that strikes me is how...
Folding Beijing
One of the primary sources I assigned for my History of East Asia class this semester was “Folding Beijing” a Chinese science fiction story by Hao J...
Li Bai and the whale
One of the books I will be using in class this Fall is Sanyan Stories by Feng Menglong. In class we will be using the much condensed version from University of ...
Zhuangzi’s brain
I have been reading Wilt Idema The Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun. The book is a translation of various versions of the story of Zhuangzi and th...
Wang Wei and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
I have been reading Sarah M. Allen’s Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China. One of the main texts she is look...
Literary Detectives (SO-27) OR The Strange Affair of the Flesh of the Bosom
If you have not read David Lodge’s Small World you should. It is a fine comic academic novel. At one point our hero is in a bar with a bunch of drunken Ja...