Chinese Literature Podcast III

The Book of Swindles

A late-Ming vernacular collection of humorous heist tales.

Lao She: Cat Country

A 1939 SF novel about China’s contemporary political crisis, if everyone was a cat.

I was wondering about China’s relationship with Dickens—apparently Lao She was at SOAS in London, and was hugely into him. Lao She is considered a top ten 20th century mainland writer, so ought to be fairly influential, which makes this a relevant data point. It’s interesting as Dickensian prose feels like about as far from classical Chinese prose as you can possibly get, in terms of structure and aesthetic values.

 

The podcast really wants to pin Lao She’s death (a suicide after a struggle session that shamed Lao She) specifically on communism in a way I’ve never seen a western thinker talk about deaths from poverty, medical care or racism as precipitates of (racial) capitalism. Again, I’m not really interested in exonerating Maoism, I just keep getting awkwardly shoved in this position by honestly disingenuous takes? Like you’re going to treat this as an extrajudicial state murder, but you’re going to act like that’s never a position Western states also put subjects in? Like what do you think the Turing suicide was? 

 

I don’t think it holds to suggest that they just don’t happen to get around to providing comparative points regarding other regimes: there’s huge Othering work being executed again and again in this. Is it because they’re spent a lot of time in Taiwan, that they’re here functioning kind of as unpaid executors of imagined Taiwanese political will without ever, ever calling out comparable bullshit? They’ve made literally one slightly negative comment ever about Chiang Kai-shek, and there is—stuff one could say.

 

Huainanzi

A “story from a strange Daoist classic, the Huainanzi 淮南子. The tale is called Old Man on the Border Loses his Horse 塞翁失馬. The story title is, itself a chengyu, that means something like you never know if something that seems unfortunate is actually fortunate.”

Laozi

An overview of the core text of Daoism.

 

Zuangzi and his fish

Introduces the Boswell and Dr Johnson team of ‘Zhuang Zi and his less-than-intelligent foil, Huizi.’

Du Fu:

A discussion of his poem, “Thinking of My Brothers on a Moonlit Night”.