Chinese Literature Podcast Rob and Lee Moore

Today, Rob is off doing research in China, so Lee interviews Professor Van Norden. Professor Van Norden is a philosophy professor at Vassar, and he works on early Chinese philosophical texts. He recently published a textbook for learning Classical Chinese (文言文). The book, called Classical Chinese for Everyone, is the outgrowth of Professor Van Norden’s […]

Yu Dafu is an early 20th Century writer known for one work: Sinking. This novella is highly autobiographical, and it discusses the trials and tribulations of a Chinese student living in Japan. His attitude towards Japanese women and the Chinese nation is both fascinating and disturbing, and Rob and Lee dive into those attitudes. This is […]

The Fourth in our series on Toxic Masculinity, this is the story of a man whose wife is sleeping around, a man who is not doing a good job of taking care of his father, a man who, at least in a pre-modern Chinese context, is not a man at all. Upon learning that his […]

Today, in our third podcast in our series on toxic masculinity in Chinese literature, we examine Jin Ping Mei, the most important work of pornography in Chinese fiction. The novel is 100 chapters long, and it is dirty…the title itself refers to an event which is too dirty to discuss too much, but use your […]

The Water Margin, or the 水浒传 (shui hu zhuan) is one of the novels from the Ming Dynasty that we can point to as the origin of much of the Kung Fu tradition. It is the story of 108 dudes (I’m being technical here). They live outside of the boundaries of the urban Chinese world, […]

Today Brandon joins Rob and Lee for one of the weirdest stories that they have ever done. The “Biography of Lord As-You-Like-It” 如意君傳 is a work of Ming Dynasty pornographic literature that discusses the only Empress to ever rule China, the Tang empress Wu Zetian. In this pornographic work, the idea of feminine rulership is […]