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: Translation
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...
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...
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...
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...
Shen Fu vs. Zhang Daye
One thing I always have to do as a teacher is figure out what books to assign. Since I always find this hard to do, I thought I would think it out in terms of M...
Early Medieval China
Just for fun I have been reading Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook.1 It is a very good book, written by a collection of the superheros of the field. The advert...
說曹操，曹操到
Now is the time in my Early China class when I get to the Three Kingdoms. This is usually a time some of the students have been waiting for, since they know the...
Rustic poetry
The contrast between the center and the periphery is a common theme in Chinese literature. To be an official sent from the capital to the provinces, or a sent-d...
The Will of a Traitor
There is a lot of treason to be found in the vicinity of LOC number DS777.5195.W34 in the Harvard-Yenching library. It’s Wang Jingwei (汪精衛) territory, inf...