Chinese Literature Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Today, the podcast does something different. In this episode, we are looking at a film. And not just any film. It is perhaps the greatest film ever made. Yi Yi or A One and a Two is the magmum opus of Edward Yang, the Taiwanese filmmaker. We are going to explore the symbolism of balloons, sticks and condems in this amazing film. 

The greatest of Taiwan's modernists, Bai Xianyong's short story, "Winter Nights," is a tale about history and how little we are able to change things. These revolutionaries of Beijing's hot summer of 1919 reconvene in Taipei in the 1960's having lost their cause and their country. Lee taught this story about protestors during the height of the pro-Palestinian protests in 2024, and he describes how his students reacted to the story. 

Today, we take a look at Sima Qian's Biography of the Capitalists, chapter 129 in the Records of the Historian. This chapter is Sima Qian's two-millennia old defense of free market capitalism. The chapter is one of the most interesting his oeuvre because Sima Qian was condemned for it by later historians. 

Part 5 in our Journey to the West Series, Rob and Lee take a look at Chapters 59-61, one of the most important fights in the book. In these chapters, Monkey struggles to take the fan from the aptly named Princess Iron Fan. With the fan, he can extinguish the fire on the, again, aptly named, the Fire Mountians and continue his journey west. But there are lots of complications. Take a listen to Rob and Lee's discussion of the episode, gender and colonialism in this scintillating podcast. 

In this third part of the series on Journey to the West, Rob and Lee discuss the characters in the novel other than Monkey (but they still end up mostly talking about Monkey...he is just that much fun). 

By far the most well-known part of Journey to the West is the first 7 chapters. A quasi-divine monkey figures out how to get nearly limitless power, has a whole lot of fun with it, then starts a war with heaven. And almost wins. Join us for a discussion of one of the most beloved figures in all of Chinese literature: the Monkey King (Sun Wukong).

Today, we begin our series on on of the most influential novels in the history or China, really in the history of Asia. Today, we begin the Journey of the Journey by contextualizing the novel. 

Today is the last in our podcast series on the Song (we think...). Our subject, Ouyang Xiu is one of the most famous literatis of the 11th century, and he helped inspire the turn towards antiquarianism in Chinese culture. He was obsessed with collecting old stuff, particularly epigraphs (writing carved into rocks or other medium). This is a short prose passage/poem where we see Ouyang Xiu beginning to develop this obsession. The passage is taken from Stephen Owen's Anthology of Chinese Literature.

Brandon Folse joins us in our next installment on our Song Dynasty series. Today, we are discussing what is definitely the greatest female writer of the Song dynasty and is possibly the greatest female writer in all of Chinese literature, Li Qingzhao. Some might even consider her the greatest poet in Chinese history, though this would be a controversial claim. Still, what is not controversial is that Li is one of the greats of the Song Dynasty.