Story Club

The New and the Old

Shen Congwen

A tale of crime and punishment from Shen Congwen - translated by Jeffrey Kinkley

During a year in the reign of the Guangxu Emperor, 1875– 1908….

Horses were being raced in this little county town, across parade grounds drenched by the sun in shimmering yellow. Meanwhile men in military garb, outfitted in all the colors of the rainbow, gathered before the Martial Demonstration Hall to rehearse the eighteen different disciplines of the martial arts. It fell to the circuit intendant in this season of Frost’s Descent1 to inspect the drills as tradition required, set the ranks in order, announce promotions and demotions, and confer rewards and punishments. And so this army, of the Military Preparedness Circuit commanding the frontier prefectures of Chenzhou, Yuanzhou, Yongzhou, and Jingzhou, was stepping up its drills in preparation for examinations. Seated on folding chairs in front of the Martial Demonstration Hall, the patrol commander and drill instructor drank tea from covered bowls and called the roll from a register in red covers. Each soldier could select the gear that best suited him and have a crack at wielding his weapon, solo or against an opponent. When it came to the competitions on horseback, the mounts were given free rein to gallop like the wind, while the men demonstrated their skill at knocking off balls with long lances or revolved in the saddle to show off their archery – “puncturing the willow leaf” from a hundred paces. Each won hurrahs or jeers according to his prowess.

Chinese Literature Podcast

One Hundred Days, One Hundred Nights

Rob Moore

Rob Moore and Lee Moore get up close and personal with Liang Qichao

"If one intends to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction." With these words, would-be reformer Liang Qichao (1873 - 1929) launched his influential literary magazine, New Fiction, in 1902. Living in exile in Japan following the disastrous failure of the Hundred Day's Reform, Liang Qichao belonged to the last generation scholars to pass through the examination system in the final decades of Qing-dynasty. Largely overshadowed by later May Fourth-era figures like Lu Xun and Hu Shi, Rob and Lee discuss why Liang Qichao's work has come back into the limelight:

Borderlands

Nine Million People You Might Never Have Heard Of

Stevan Harrell

Stevan Harrell introduces the Yi of southwest China

There are more Yi people than there are Norwegians, Swiss, Libyans or Tibetans – around nine million. They have one of the world’s only independent writing systems, derived from neither Phoenician nor Chinese. They are the only people who make soup bowls out of water buffalo hide (they also used to use it to make armor and helmets), and they do some of the world’s most unique and exquisite needlework. They are enshrined in Chinese Communist Party history for having helped Mao on the Long March in 1936, only to rebel against land reforms in 1956-57. They helped Theodore Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt shoot the first giant panda to be brought to the US for a taxidermy exhibit. They sacrifice animals on just about all special occasions, but they don’t eat the meat of horses, bears, dogs, monkeys or frogs, because they are all animals with claws (horses have dewclaws) and thus related closely to humans. Some 19th and early 20th century European missionaries thought they might be the Lost Tribes of Israel.  

Why might you never have heard of them?

Chinese Corner

Let’s Go Laaaaaaaa

Rosalyn Shih

And learn Cantonese particles – Rosalyn Shih

“If you’re picturing someone in your head speaking Chinese and it sounds really funny,” Canadian comedian Russell Peters said, “you’re picturing Cantonese.”

Even to non-speakers like Peters, Cantonese is easily identified as the “funnier sounding language” compared to Mandarin: “It’s the more flamboyant one," he joked, "with the extended sounding words. … Sometimes they speak and it sounds like they’re falling off a cliff. Dong laaaaaaahh…”

Reviews

Sci-Fi for the World

Anjie Zheng

Anjie Zheng reviews Touchable Unreality

Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, predicted in 1903 that science fiction would play a major role in the advancement of China. It took a century, but that moment has arrived. While science fiction in China was restricted mainly to political purposes after 1949, it has achieved a literary life of its own in recent years.

A new bilingual anthology makes this genre even more available to global readers, thanks to the sparse, expressive translations of Ken Liu, Carmen Yiling Yan, Nick Stember, and John Chu. Touchable Unreality features some of China’s most beloved contemporary science fiction authors, including Liu Cixin and Hao Jingfang, the only Chinese authors to have won the Hugo Award, the highest honor in science fiction and fantasy writing.