Chinese Literature Podcast

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-mo...

11 Nov 201919min

12 Sep 201922min

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 tec...

9 Aug 201922min

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" is a work of Ming Dynasty porn that discusses the only Empress to ever ...

8 Juli 201922min

We are posting this podcast on June 4th, 2019, the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. We have decided to focus on a song (which is just a poem, after all) that was performed for the pr...

3 Juni 201923min

Modern Chinese Literature begins with the May 4th Movement. Well, that's according to the orthodox understanding of Chinese literature promoted by the CCP in China. Either way, May 4th, 1919 was a tur...

3 Maj 201919min

This work of Daoism is one of the most translated books in the world. But what is it really about? Rob and Lee explore the Laozi (he probably was not a real person, so we call him the Laozi or the Lao...

10 Apr 201917min

This podcast we take a look at 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...

14 Mars 201917min