Today, the podcast gets to Wang Wei and a Buddhist poem he wrote with the eye of a painter. Wang Wei is the least popular of the three High Tang poets, at least, since the Song Dynasty, but, back in the day, he was the most popular, more popular than Li Bai and Du Fu. We’ll travel to his empty mountain and see if we aren’t too disturbed by women doing the laundry to learn a bit about Chinese poetry. 

My Translation:

Living in the Mountains on the Cusp of Fall

Empty mountain after a new rain, 

The air is late, fall is coming

The bright moon shines amid the pines,

the clear stream’s water flows over a rock. 

Hubbub in the bamboo, the washing lady returning

the fishing boat pushing through lotuses. 

And then it happens that the flowers of spring die,

Me, a hermit, I can hang here for a while.

Original

山居秋暝

空山新雨後，天氣晚來秋。 明月松間照，清泉石上流。 竹喧歸浣女，蓮動下漁舟。 隨意春芳歇，王孫自可留。

Show Transcript (AI Generated)”

 My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature podcast. Okay. Last time I did a poem from Levi, the Greatest Tongue Dynasty poet. Arguably, there’s a debate we talked about that debate, that poem by Levi was featured in my book, China’s Backstory, the History Beijing doesn’t want you to read. I’m sure y’all are getting tired of me promoting the book.

Sorry about that. Today we’re going to look at Wong Way, another tongue poet. It’s been almost five years since the podcast took on Wong Way on March 19th, 2021. Me and Rahm, the podcast co-founder who’s now living in France. We did a podcast related to Wong Way. I think that’s been long enough. We really need to do another episode on Wong.

So as a part of this series on the three Greatest Tongue poets, here is a little bit about Wong Way. One of his poems. So today, when Chinese folks talk about tongue dynasty poetry, WWE is usually considered the third poet, and he’s a distant third behind Levi and Dufu. No one today is saying WWE is the greatest tongue poet ever.

No one says that today. But during their lifetimes, Wong wayI was actually more famous than either Levi or Dufu Wong wayI. He was born in six ninety nine ad he died in 7 61. Ad Levi is almost exactly the same. He’s born in seven oh one ad dies in 7 62. Ad Dfu is a little bit younger. He is born in seven 12 ad and dies in seven 70 a d.

While these three figures were alive, you could have done a straw poll amongst Tong Dynasty poetry readers and Wong wayI would’ve won the straw poll. Every time. It really wasn’t until about a century after they were at their prime, sometime in the middle of the eight hundreds ad that two literary critics, Hannu and y, uh, canonized, Levi and Dufu as the greatest poets of.

The Tong Dynasty, Wong wayI. Today. He’s regarded as not as cool as Levi and not as great as Dufu. But I don’t know, having done the research for this podcast, I actually think he’s pretty cool. And he’s obviously very in influential. A little bit about Wong Way’s background. He was born in a very upper class situation in Xi.

He became famous, fairly young for his poetry and his musical. Ability. He passed the civil service exam in 7 21 at the age of 22 with a top score. And like everybody in tongue China, the an Luan rebellion starting in 7 55 ad influence Wong Way profoundly WWE was in the Capitol Chang. When the rebels captured the city, Wong Wei himself was captured and he died before the rebellion fizzled out.

Wong Wei is known for two things. First that he was. In addition to being a great poet and a good musician, he was also a great painter. As far as I know, we don’t today have any of his paintings, but he was regarded as a master painter. In the T dynasty and when we read his poetry, you can feel the painter in his poetry, something that’s gonna be true in the the poem that we’re gonna get into in a minute.

His poems are almost imagistic. There’s a temptation to read them as if nothing’s happened. They’re just these still images where we see a moment in time and very. Little action. There is action in Wong Way’s, poetry, even if it’s a bit understated compared to Levi and Dufus poetry. But that view, that Wong Hui is, this Masistic poet is very influential.

Uh, it actually influenced, uh, the art theories of Ernest Osa. Uh, who’s this, who’s this American art historian who’s a specialist on Japanese art, but he also loved one way. Wong Wei is very influential in Japanese art, and Ernest Osa wrote a lot about Wong Wei and his poetry and artistry. So thing number one, you need to know about Wong Hui.

He’s a great painter and his poetry kind of reads like a painting thing. Two, you need to know. Wong Way is known for his distinctly Buddhist outlook. His poetry has this very zen feel to it. He’s been called the Poet Buddha. Again, that’s. True of this poem that we’re gonna look at today. Now, let me say something about the word zen.

So Zi is of course a Japanese word, but it’s just the Japanese pronunciation of a word that in Mandarin today is pronounced chan. So in Japan you have Zi Buddhism. In China, you have Chan Buddhism and Chinese nationalists would say that we should say Chan Buddhism and not Zen Buddhism, but they’re very similar.

You have two separate. But very closely connected discussions of Buddhism going on in Chan circles in China and zen circles in Japan. They’re feeding off of each other. Japan initially, all of its ideas about Zen from Chan Buddhist discussions going on in China. They build upon those and they build their own ideas, but they’re still connected to the Chinese ideas, which is a long way of saying Chan Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, basically the same thing, just.

Different pronunciations are the same word in Mandarin and Japanese. So Wong Way’s poetry has this very meditative zen sense to it. This plays into this imagistic tendencies of Wong wayI. There’s this lingering to much of Wong Way’s, Ooh, where it feels like we’re just in this poem, watching, observing, meditating on an image.

And that’s a great place to turn. Today’s poem, the title of today’s poem is Living in the Mountains. On the cusp of fall. It was probably written in 7 36 ad, and here is my translation of that poem. Empty Mountain. After a new rain, evenings coming, it feels like fall is coming. The bright moon shines amid the pines, the clear streams water.

Flows over a rock noise in the bamboo, the washing lady returning the fish boats drift through lotuses, and then it happens that the flowers of spring die me a hermit. I can hang here for a while. My translation. I’ll post the translation along with the original poem on the podcast website, chinese literature podcast.com.

Let’s see if we can break this poem down. The first couplet, that is the first two lines. When I read that first line, empty mountain after a New Rain. My first question is, what is an empty mountain? The word here is Khun. Uh, those are the first two words of the poem in Chinese. What does it mean to have an empty mountain?

Empty of what? Empty of trees. Empty of people. Empty of noise. Based on the rest of the poem. I think any of these are interpretations of what empty mountain means. What it is empty of. They’re viable. They could be what he is going for. Another way to interpret the phrase empty mountain is that the mountain is empty of mountainous.

That this is not a real mountain, but an imagined mountain. Remember, one way he’s heavily influenced by Zen Buddhist thinking, Sunata is the Indian concept in Buddhism that all things in the world are empty, that all things are devoid of inequalities, and your perception of anything other than emptiness is an illusion.

What’s the Chinese word for the Buddhist concept of sunata? That is empty. The word that’s used right here by won way. So maybe he’s talking about empty of trees. Maybe he’s talking about this mountain being empty of people. But another way to think about it is just in a zen way. This mountain is. Empty of mountainous Wong Way is considered number three in the top three tongue poets.

But even in these first two words, we haven’t done anything other than the first two words of the poem. Even in these first two words, there’s a lot to unpack. So pretty cool poet. Let’s keep going. So this empty mountain, empty of whatever it is, we don’t know. We have this rain that comes. Then we are looking on the scene afterwards as if everything is washed clean, it’s a clean slate, the air is late, fall is coming.

And I have to say this line was the hardest line to translate. I read some of the commentaries on it. I looked at some translations of this line from classical Chinese into modern Chinese and also from classical Chinese into English. And I’m still struggling with my translation of this, but I think that the translation that I have comes closest to won way’s original.

Evenings coming. It feels like fall is coming. Of course, fall is the season when things die, leaves fall, crops are harvested. Winter the killing season is coming. There’s something ominous about this line. It feels like fall is coming, evenings coming. It feels like fall is coming. But then we have lines three and lines four of the poem, which are really quite bright and strong.

The bright moon shines amid the pines. The moon is penetrating the pine trees, and you should know whenever you see pine trees in a Chinese painting or in a Chinese poem, they’re probably symbols of resiliency. The pine trees keeps its leaves even as other trees give up their leaves. Something similar is going on in line four.

The clear streams, water flows over a rock. So this rock seems to be resisting the punching erosive force of the water flowing over it. Now again, these first four lines, nothing has happened. It’s all just image. We’re seeing something that looks like a painting. That’s been written down. Nothing happens, nothing occurs, but we have this scene, the scene is set.

There’s this theological question that’s put out there. What does emptiness mean in this setting? And it seems like the fact that nothing happens in the first half of this poem. May relate to that question of what is empty about the empty mountain. That all changes at the beginning of the second half of the poem.

The emptiness disappears. You have this hubbub in the bamboo, the washing ladies are returning. Then you have fishing boats pushing through lotuses. Lotuses are important. Flowers and Buddhism symbolizing purity and divinity. So clearly more symbolism going on here. These fishermen who are just going after their catch are.

Pushing these lotus flowers, these symbols of, of. A good Buddhist around. Something’s happening here. I’m not sure how to interpret it, but I’m gonna say that this is clearly a Buddhist image. So these two lines, line lines five and six, there’s the sense that this tranquil scene where the hermit came out of his HUD after the rain, nothing says that, but that’s just kind of the image that I get of this hermit coming out of the mound after the rain and seeing the empty mound.

All that tranquility has been interrupted in lines five and line six, the world. Has entered and is distracting. The poet, narrator, whatever you wanna call him from his tranquility. Line seven. We circle back to that earlier theme of death in autumn. The poet says that the flowers of spring are dying. And then there’s that last line, the poet says.

He can stick around here for a while. When I first tried to translate this poem, I had no idea what this line was getting at until I posted my translation on a subreddit. So if, if, you know, uh, the, the internet platforms, reddit.com, they have a subreddit called r slash classical Chinese, where I posted my translation, and in it someone pointed out.

That this is actually an illusion to Chua or the songs of Chu. The songs of Chu is the second great Chinese poetry collection. The first being the Book of songs. The book of poems, something like that. And that’s really the first collection of, of Chinese poetry that we have. The Chua, the songs of Chu is the second collection, and it embodies this.

Other tradition, this alternate tradition of Chinese poetry, and someone who read my poem on the that subreddit, which is a great place to go if you’re interested in doing high level ch classical Chinese work. It’s basically like having a PhD level seminar with about 2000 people, some of whom are willing to check your translations and provide you with advice.

So one of the people who read my poem pointed out, this is an allusion to the songs of Chu and in the songs of Chu after the Flowers. Of Spring die off. The poet says, Hey, I’m gonna take off here. Wong wayI is actually taking that verdict and reversing it. He’s saying, actually, I’m gonna hang out here for a little while.

I’m good with hanging out here. So there’s also this generations long conversation going on in this poem. Wong wayI is actually reversing. What the poet narrator of the songs of Chu did. Okay? So that’s a kind of line by line analysis of what’s actually going on in the poems. Back to broader questions. My question, reading this poem, and I’m, I’ll just put my cards on this table.

I’m reading this poem as a Buddhist poem, though you don’t have to do that. You could read this ignoring the Buddhist elements, and still not be too far off the mark. If you take me seriously, which you shouldn’t, but let’s pretend like you are. Try and imagine this is a primarily a Buddhist poem. You have this sense in the first half of the poem of tranquility.

There is this recognition that the mountain is empty, a mountain, it’s empty of people, it’s empty of noise. There’s no hubbub. Maybe it’s even empty of the mountainous itself. It’s evacuated of all things of this world. The poet here finds tranquility and the coolness of air, the moonlight. Penetrating these long suffering pines and the spring water flowing over rocks, but that tranquility is interrupted and washing.

Women come in making a ruckus in the bamboo. The fishermen is sailing through the lotus’s. When the poet says he’s fine hanging out here for a while, is he saying he’s okay with his tranquil scene of the first half of the poem, or is he okay with the fact that his tranquility and the meditation that we assume he’s doing is being interrupted by these things of this world?

I don’t think the poem offers a clear answer. Instead, it leaves both interpretations open to the reader. Okay, I think this is a good place to call it. Let me know what you think of the poem. Email me at Chinese literature [email protected]. If you’re interested, check out my book, China’s backstory, the history of Beijing.

Doesn’t want you to read. There are lots of poems in there. This one’s not in there, but lots of other good ones are. And of course, along with this is the history behind the four most important topics in China related news. Taiwan Xinjiang, the Chinese economy in Hong Kong. And I think that’s enough of me banging on.

I’m gonna go off to my Hermitage in the mountain for a couple of weeks, hopefully not as long as the previous break I took over the new year. And when I return, the rain will wash everything away and hopefully the washing women won’t be. Distracting me from the work that I should be doing on the podcast.

My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature podcast.

Today is the beginning of a three part series I am going to do on the three big Tang poets, Li Bai, Wang Wei and Du Fu. In this episode, we take a look at Li Bai, often considered China’s Greatest poet, and his relationship with the regions to China’s West, modern day Xinjiang and the Stans. Li Bai has a strange relationship with the West; in fact, he was probably born in modern-day Kyrgyzstan, and was probably Persian, Turkic or maybe even Jewish. That’s right, China’s greatest poet may not have even been Chinese. Take a listen to the podcast to find out more. 

Today, Lee gets to chat with Susan Wan Dolling, Hong-Kong-American poet, novelist and translator. She recently published her latest book of Song poetry translations, What the Cuckoo Said, but she has long been working on translating Chinese poetry into an English that does what is hard to do, that preserves the music that you hear in the Chinese original.

If you want to check out more of her translations, check out Hundred Tongues (volume 1 of her Song poetry translations), Superstars (volume 1 of her My China in Tang Poetry series), Floating on Clouds (volume 2 of her My China in Tang Poetry series) and Friends and Lovers (volume 3 of her My China in Tang Poetry series).

You can also check out a new multi-media project Susan is working on, a YouTube Channel called Note After Note, where Susan recites some of her translations of Chinese poetry, followed by her Cello teacher performing musical pieces.

Also, my book, China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read is out! You can purchase a copy of it here from my publisher:

https://unsungvoicesbooks.square.site/product/china-s-backstory-the-history-beijing-doesn-t-want-you-to-read-preorder/BXJSID5U6P4RVONS7V4HSZSH

Or you can purchase it on Amazon here.

If you are interested, check out the nice things smart people have said about the book here.

On this episode, I give a brief update on the book’s status, which should be in your hands by mid-November. And also, Rob returns, joining the podcast from France to talk about what he has been up to and also to chat with Lee about the book. 

Transcript generated by AI

 My name is Lee Moore, and this is an addendum to the Chinese Literature podcast that you’re about to hear right after this. So we have a special episode coming up, a special guest that I guess some of y’all are going to recognize. The reason I’m adding this addendum is because I want to tell y’all about the book.

I actually had been holding this podcast much longer than I wanted to. I originally was gonna post this podcast at the end of September when the book was originally supposed to come out. The publication date was supposed to be September 30th, but. ’cause we’ve had some problems with the publication process.

It’s gonna be late. The good news is the book is still coming out. It’s just gonna be a little bit late. Last night I got word from the publisher editor Don Russo over at Unsung Voices books, who’s been working hard to make this book happen. He talked with the typesetter, the person who actually puts the words on the page and makes it look professional.

The typesetter said that the book is bigger than they had anticipated. That just means it’s packed with a lot more fun history that y’all are gonna enjoy, but it also means that it’s taking a little bit longer than they expected to do the type setting. Right now, it’s looking like the book will ship physically, like leave.

The printer in the US Postal Service on November 7th or eighth, so it should be in your hands a little bit after that if you already pre-ordered the book. So we’ll be there in time for Christmas presents or. If it’s your jam Thanksgiving presents, I will keep y’all updated on the publication status using the podcast.

I apologize for this. This is my first time getting published. I’m still learning the ropes. I think that the compromise that we ended up making being a little bit late, but having a really, really good book, that’s a trade that I would make any day of the week. But I understand this might be throwing some of y’all.

Off. I actually had someone write into me, they were giving the book as a birthday present and the birthday falls on November 4th, and she was really bummed out that the, the book wasn’t actually gonna be out until a little bit after the birthday, but we talked and I just sent her a copy of the cover that she’s gonna print out and put a note.

In the present saying, Hey, you know, this book is coming, but it’s gonna be a little late. If me getting the publication day late has caused you some issue like that, don’t hesitate to send me an email, Chinese literature [email protected]. I’m gonna do anything within reason to to fix the problems that I caused.

If I can send you a sticker with my autograph on it, so you. Stick that sticker onto the cover of a book. So your copy is kind of an autographed copy. I can do that. I thought about actually doing a promotion for the book where I write su PO’s fart worthy poem. And if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, make sure to go back to the March 29th, 2025 podcast.

The greatest fart joke in Chinese history. So I thought about doing a promotion where I actually wrote. Fart poem into the book itself. I bow my head to the heaven of heavens. That tiny ray of light that is Buddhism shines on the vast universe. The eight winds cannot move me. I sit up straight like the purple golden lotus.

And I was also gonna write. The cover, the response that pol received from Zen Master Buddhist stamps, which is literally just fart fart, FPFP. But of course, in, in Chinese fart means not just fart, but also it’s like calling BS on someone. So I was thinking about doing a promotion where I wrote the poem and fart, fart.

In the cover of the book, but it, it just turned out to be kind of difficult to coordinate that. But if I messed up a birthday with this late publication, send me an email, Chinese literature [email protected]. Show me the receipt where you. Pre-ordered the book and I will hand write that poem for you in the response of Zen Master Buddhist stamp on a sticker and send it to you so you can slap that right in there and you can know what kind of FAPE this book really is once you get it.

Okay. Just to sum everything up, the publication date originally, September 30th, 2025, but it’s probably gonna be mid-November before the book is actually physically in your hands. I’ll keep you all updated on the podcast, so keep listening. Okay, that’s enough for the addendum. Let’s get to the real thing.

Here it goes. I’m Lee Moore. And I’m Rob Moore. And this is the Chinese Literature podcast. Rob, you’re you’re back. It’s been a while. It’s been, it has been a while. A really long while. Actually. 2020 years. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. It was, it’s three years ago. Three years ago, four years. Three. What is that?

Three? I think we’re showing our, our literature cards by not being able to do basic arithmetic on our podcast. Was it three or four? I don’t remember. What’s five minus two? Rob, it’s great to have you back. We’re gonna catch up on where you are and we’ll also talk about. Where my book is in this podcast.

So originally we planned to have this podcast come out on the publication date of the book, which officially that is still what’s happening. We’ll talk a little bit about that. Yeah. China’s backstory, the history Beijing doesn’t want you to read officially. It’s set to be published on September 30th, but we are still rushing to get the books out to you.

I have seen a copy of the first round of proofs. I’m waiting on the second round. Proofs are. Rob, I know you’ve worked in the publishing and industries. Yeah. So you probably know this proofs are just where you read over a copy of the book to make sure everything’s exactly right before it goes to the printer.

So for those of y’all who have ordered it. When will it actually be coming out? Probably mid-October, but don’t hold me to that. This is my first time getting published so officially, this is my first rodeo. I’m still on a learning curve. We’ll talk a bit more about that in the podcast, but Rob, you’re in France.

I am in France. How are things? Things are great. I love being in France and I, I don’t say that in the, wow, I’m sure, glad I’m not in the US right now way. It’s just great to be in France. I enjoy France. I work at a bilingual Montessori school. It is not exactly the same career path I had when last we were podcasting, but it’s a great fit.

’cause you know, you and I talked a lot about enjoying teaching and it’s great that that’s, that’s what I do. That’s pretty much all I do all day long is teach in different subjects, different times. So it’s, it’s a lot of fun. You’ve talked about teaching a ton. What is it about teaching that you really like?

I think the biggest high in teaching is that moment of discovery or, and you know what I’m talking about. When you can, you can see something click like a student says something like, oh, the moment of discovery in them. Yes. Okay. In them. Yes. Yes. And the student. There’s nothing like that and there’s nothing like getting to introduce people to stuff that you really are interested in.

And I love to read so much. Anytime a kid is like, what’s this book about? I’m like, yes. Yes. Let’s talk about that book. Let’s do it. You know that those are the things. That’s what I, that’s what I live for at the university too. When we were doing the podcast regularly together, you told me that you would, if you could just teach at a university and not do any research, is that kind of what you’re doing now?

Kind of, yeah. I’m not teaching the same kind of stuff and occasionally I do sometimes miss the literature or the history and stuff. There is something incredible about working with kids. I work with kids between about the ages of six and 12, watching them ask certain questions for the very first time.

You know, one of the things that the university got kind of old is, and, and again, I’m preaching to the choir here, but you know, the, the students who are crying to sound much smarter than they are. The ones who are like, I think this symbolizes the following thing. And in internally you’re thinking you don’t even.

Oh, dude, just ask the question you wanna ask, which is, I’m sorry, I don’t have any idea what we’re talking about. What are we talking about? You know, and 60, this age group will say things, they’ll just look at you and be like, what are you talking about? I’m like, ha, good question. Let me see if I can rephrase that.

You know, there’s a lot of honesty in that age group. You’re, so you said it’s bilingual? Yes. You’re not using Chinese, it’s French and English, right? Correct. Okay. It’s a, it’s a big qualifier. Yes. French and English. It would be cool if you could do it in French and Chinese. That would be cool. That would be super cool.

I, it’s too hard for my brain to move between French and Chinese. English and Chinese is okay. French and Chinese is like one part of my brain. Does all the foreign language stuff and that side goes, Ooh, this is gonna be tricky. Every time I tried to speak French while in China, and I, you know, I knew I, I studied for a couple of years, my brain, by the end of the sentence, would always slip into Chinese.

Yeah. It’s, it’s really difficult to juggle. Yeah. When I was in China and speaking French regularly with a person who’s not my wife, I, I would, if, if I had been speaking French for a couple hours. If someone had called me and started speaking Chinese, I literally couldn’t remember for about six seconds how to even say niha.

Like it just was gone and then something would happen and the rhythm would kind of come back and I’d be like, oh, right. Yeah, yeah. I get it all now. It’s fine. It’s fine. So you forget stuff, but hey listen, I want to, I don’t wanna get sidetracked because we’re here to talk about, we’re gonna talk about you, Lee.

We’re here to talk about youth. That’s what we’re here to talk about. I love these specifically. Yeah. I, I love these old, the, the, the old kind of conversational style podcasts. I, because we didn’t really have to prepare for them. I didn’t, I, you know, I was thinking about it when we were originally gonna record Monday.

I was thinking about like, what do I need to do? ’cause normally I have, like, when I’m doing the show on my own, I have gotta create a script and, uh, not for these podcasts. Like we, we would do the reading and then just. It’s so cool to be back in, in this format. Yeah, but I interrupted your question. No, but we’re here because you’re publishing a book and I’ll, I’ll clarify to the listener, not a small press academic, probably never gonna know what in the world he’s talking about book, but a book for anybody sort of book.

It’s a project that actually I was a part of for a little while and then stopped doing for a long while, and then Brandon was a, for a couple years, I dunno, a year and a half, I guess. Not too, too long. We started China’s backstory, the history Beijing doesn’t want you to read it started out in late, mid to late 2020.

Brandon and I had talked about doing a book together. You got involved and we kind of divided it up. We were calling it. What were we calling it? The stories behind the story? Behind the story. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And then Brandon moved on. I moved on. We both had very different sort of interests, career trajectory and stuff.

You stuck with it and it is now finally. Getting published, not you found a publisher, but as in people, we’ll soon be able to actually buy it soon. The, the, the publication date is supposed to be September 30th, but we’re recording this on the 24th, and I still have not, we still have not finished the process, so it’s gonna be probably early to mid-October.

I’m guessing if, for those of y’all who are listeners out there, if y’all are wondering why hasn’t it been sent. Why? It’s just there are a lot of cool aspects to dealing with a smaller publisher. You get to know the people much better you, you know who’s actually doing the work. And the publishers I’m working with are Unsung Voices books.

Amy and Don are both incredible. There’s a book called A People’s Guide to Publishing by Joe Bele. He’s a Portland publisher, so based in Portland, Oregon, just. A little bit north of where I am and he talks about small presses and how cool they are, but also like some of the, the downsides. So I’ve got a copy, a copy of John Irans and Seated translated by Jeremy Tang.

It’s published by Penguin and you know, I have a physical copy that they sent me probably in like July. And the publication day was, I, I guess the publication date has passed. It was sometime in September. But like they have physical copies long before, before things are actually published. Whereas when you’re dealing with a small press, it’s kind of.

A run and gun offense, you know, this very, yeah. Not, not corporate, which you have the, like pluses of not being corporate and the, the right minuses of not being corporate. Yeah, exactly. It’s been a fantastic learning experience for me, but it, it’s, I, you know, learning in both the, the positives and the negatives.

Hmm. Well that’s, that’s what learning is, right? I mean, you sometimes have to learn through stuff that’s really difficult, so. Spoken like a true teacher. Yeah, exactly. Or, or someone who’s been through academia. Right. So I’m curious though about the, the pro, the project. ’cause as I’ve read bits and pieces of the book, it does read very differently than when we were working on, not differently, not a hundred percent differently, sorry.

But obviously differently It reads differently, right? No, no, no, no, no, no. I, I, sorry, I was trying to, oh, see, I was like. Am I being corrected? No, it’s just a terrible joke. That’s what it is. Oh, right. It’s someone who doesn’t know how to tell a joke. Right. I got that. Okay, cool. It’s a, it is a very English joke, so if you went across the channel, know, I’m sure it would be faster.

I’m sure people would be like this anyway. But it does, sorry to interrupt your question. It’s, it’s, it’s a very different kind of book than what I remember. So as it’s evolved, have you have. Altered the style or have you done things to change it consciously, or has your writing style just kind of evolved naturally?

And this is just sort of where, where it landed more? The latter. I don’t know. I, I would be curious. You see how how much of a journalist I’m, I’m trying to be, I’m gonna ask you a question when you ask me a question. Yeah. I’d be curious to hear how you thought it changed. Because, I mean, ’cause it totally did change and I saw tons of ways it changed, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t ever intentional, you know, when we first started working on it.

The Hong Kong section, which is the last section in the book. It was the section that we worked on. So you, me and Brandon project that section so many times. I think we workshopped it eight or nine times. Yeah. Dozen, something like that. Yeah. It kind of, we got sick of it almost. Hmm. And then, yeah, I think we were thinking at that point the, the, the framework of the book would be kind of, how does the American media get China wrong?

So that was very much the theme of the Hong Kong section and then actually the economy section. I don’t know if you got a chance to look at that. Yeah, I read, I think I read that draft once. Once or twice. Yeah. I wrote those kind of with y’all in mind. The the economy section was also written because I was doing something with Mercatus, the think tank that I worked with outside of dc and then.

I got a job as an adjunct professor at the UL teaching and I actually wasn’t sure at that point if the book was even gonna get published. I was, I was really a kind of in a almost Dante esque wilderness situation, wandering around, not sure where I was going. I was quite literally, I. At the midpoint in my life.

And just like Dante, it was, I turned 40 that year, and then Don Russo reached out to me out of the blue. You and I had, when we were working on the book, we had talked with Don, he’s a fan of the podcast, and he told me, Hey, you know, I’m starting at my own publishing company. Would you like to join? And, you know, bring, bring China’s, China’s backstory as our, one of our first books.

Mm-hmm. And I was like, mm-hmm. Heck yeah. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. And so it felt really like, again, getting rescued from purgatory and Right. I don’t know why I’ve got Dante on the mind. I was about to say it’s very dramatic, but it did. You know. It did. It did. It did feel like that, like I remember in.

October, I think it was, of just thinking about giving up on the book and I wasn’t sure if it was actually gonna take off. ’cause if you don’t have a publisher, it’s really hard to pursue. You can self-publish now and that has become more respectable. But it still doesn’t have the same, you know, it doesn’t have the same cache first off, honestly.

Right. And you don’t get the same respect and, and honestly, like having gone through the publication process. Don as an editor brings so much. I remember reading the copies that I, the, the, the text that I turned into Don the Taiwan chapter and being like, this is, I, this, I don’t think this, I don’t know if this is good enough to be in a book.

And then Don works his magic and what comes some really good writing. Yeah. And so the editorial processes is a big thing. Yeah. That’s why it reads a little different. I’m gonna say different this time, not differently. So we don’t get in our, in our old not interesting argument. I think I can, I can see the, the fingerprints of the editor in there in a good way.

But what I was, I think I was specifically curious about something I read in the introduction and I didn’t, I wrote the actual phrase down. I might be able to find it again, but it’s, it’s a pretty forthright stance against what feels like against academia. Like all that stuffy stuff. Yeah. I’m not that stuff.

I’m gonna do this other thing over here. I couldn’t tell if that was, like, if that had been something you had intended all along or if over the process of writing the book made you consciously go. Because I remember, I, at least, I think, I remember when we were all working on it together talking about trying to market this as sort of like a, a, a classroom text.

Like people just getting involved with China stuff and don’t know anything. Hey, this could be a great book for them in the introduction. It sounds like you’ve almost moved away from any engagement in that, and you’re just like, no, I’m done with this. We’re going over here. Am I misreading that, or was that a conscious stance?

No, you’re absolutely right. Okay. So a couple of things happened. First, I got really frustrated with academia. I think we were all frustrated with academia and the way things work. I imagine why. I’m just so shocked. So Luke, I know right? Luke Haad, who you and I have, have both had him as a teacher. He made this speech in 2017, March, 2017, was this very impassioned call for a.

Us as academics to come up with ways to do a better job of speaking to the public. You know, I, I took that seriously to heart. Mm-hmm. And I don’t think we’ve come up with a better way for academics to speak to the public. There’s like this very hard membrane between scholars and the rest of the public.

And I, I think, mm-hmm. What I was trying to do with this book was. I don’t know, break through the membrane or get on the other side of the membrane, probably break through the membrane. ’cause I wanted to speak to a non-academic audience in a very scholarly, not in a scholarly style, but with a kind of the, the, the positives of scholarship that is, you’re grounded in evidence-based research.

And so the, the book itself is very much evidence-based. You know, there’s very few of the claims I make that I don’t back up with a quote from a Chinese source or some other scholar. But rhetorically, this is not your grandma’s. History of China. Honestly, I curse. I dropped the F bomb. I hope I don’t do it gratuitously, but it’s meant to be this kind of, you know what?

I’m gonna take as much of the good parts of academia, this sort of evidence-based humanist research, and I’m gonna take that and package it in. A rednecks guide to China almost at one point as I was, you know, thinking about the title I was, I was almost thinking like, you know, this should be maybe framed as a rednecks guide to China.

Just, just to make it so that it’s something that anyone feels like they. Can pick up so many books. Mm-hmm. Written by scholars where they’re like trying to write to the public. They don’t, they don’t. Lev Nachman and his co-author have a book where they’re trying to explain Taiwan to outside of academia, to, to the public, and they start out with a.

Reference to Fuco, Michelle Fuco, the, the famous French philosopher who’s all the rage in academia right now. And I’m just like, that’s not how you approach the public. Come on, it’s a good book. Other, like, there’s, there’s lots of good stuff in it, but it’s just like really, really hard to break out of the academic mindset.

So one of the ways I did that was just use different words. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, Rob, you’re from Texas. I sometimes speak with a southern accent. When I’m trying to explain things in a non-academic way, just because there’s, it’s very hard to, to rhetorically keep to that stuffy academic ease.

When you’re speaking with a southern accent, it just, mm-hmm. Mentally it just doesn’t work. I was writing this book with a southern accent. That’s super weird. Although I think now I’m waiting for the audio book to come out. I hear you read the entire thing. I No, but what you say is I, I can see that in the book.

I, when I say it’s a different, a little bit different style, it reads for me, and maybe this is just, it’s just bias ’cause, ’cause I’ve, I’ve known you long enough, but it reads almost journalistically and I feel like journalists, very good journalists. Are kind of at the midpoint between academic and popular, because good journalists still have high enough rhetoric that it, it kind of pushes you a little bit, but ’cause it’s not a blog.

Right. But it’s still accessible. Like people can still read it. And so it reads to be a lot like an extended, ’cause you’ve written a lot for the Economist. Like if you, if the Economist had said to you, listen, we’d like you to write us like a 30 page article, it it, it feels to me a little like that. I think, I think your point’s well taken.

I think that in terms of books, at least in terms of communication, you have to choose whether you’re gonna be writing for academics or not. There’s no way to write for both. And this is, I should, you know, you and I, I think, see eye to eye on this one, but academics tend to, they’re their own worst enemy most of the time.

They, they write. So that no one else will understand them, but the top experts in the field. Because if you’re publishing research that everyone can access and clearly it’s not advanced or groundbreaking enough as you have to go back to the drawing board. And I remember, I remember reviewing a book a couple years after I got here and it was about French Chinese writers as in Chinese writers who are writing in French.

And it was a pretty good book, except it kept trying to position it as this high theoretical intervention. And my review was basically like this book’s, like the way it actually reads these writers is incredible. But the moment it starts to tell us, Hey, you know what you can do with theory, you, you think, well, you could do that, but why would you want to, like, what’s to be gained from that?

So I, I think, I think your stance is probably pretty well chosen because at some point you gotta pick a side. You’re not gonna be able to do both the need in academics to always make a theoretical intervention. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, because like that, that gives you prestige within academia, right. But it also makes it unapproachable for.

For anyone. You can’t make high theoretical stances and also expect the public to get behind you. You just can’t. But anyway, we’re, we’re, we’re starting to, to, to turn this into a dump on academia podcast. We’ll, I need to get back into the book. So you’ve got, uh, I need to go back and check the chapter listing again, but I believe you’ve got all the chapters we talked about before.

You’ve got Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang. Oh, those have have been, lets see, those have become sections and I, because of publishing thing, so we’ve converted, we’ve, we’ve turned like the chapter division as a smaller division. But yeah, basically, yeah. Yeah. If you hear me referring to the Taiwan section, that’s what, that’s it we used to talk about as the Taiwan chapter.

So what for you, do you have a favorite part of the book? I loved that the fact that I was able to. Do this really complicated history of Xinjiang. Hmm. Which is an incredibly, it’s a very kind of, the, the history is so sedimentary. I loved, I was able to do that in a non academicy way. I have a drinking game in there where every time someone gets beheaded, you are, the reader is encouraged to take a shot.

And I’m doing lots of different stuff just to make it fun. So there’s a point where the, a religious figure from Kashgar goes flees to Tibet and has a magical dual with the D, the fifth Dalai Lama. Nice. That’s, that’s not, obviously, that’s not historical, but that is the story that we get from the, that particular Islamic tradition is that they had a, the fifth Dalai Lama and this Muslim leader had a magical dual and he convinced that he defeated the Dalai Lama and then convinced the Dalai Lama to have his Mongol allies.

The Zarian Mongols. Come down and put him in power. Of course, what really happened is that he flees to Tibet, makes a deal with the fifth Dalai Lama, the fifth Dalai Lama. Fifth incarnation of the Dalai Lama goes to his, his allies, the Zung and Mongols, and it’s like y’all can. Take a cut of the taxes that these people are gonna levy, and as long as you keep this dude in power, you’ll be fine.

So it’s this really interesting kind of discussion of history, but done in a really fun manner. Cool. I mean, I think. I, I think people are not gonna have trouble wading through any of the chapters ’cause they’re not gonna be doing much waiting. Although if they do complete the drinking game, it may be kind of, it slog afterwards to focus.

I have to, on what’s happening. I have to, I have a point in the drinking game where it’s like three beheadings on a single page or something. I’m like, so is there anything in the book that you feel like might be right on the edge of a little too much? Yeah. I don’t know if you got the chance to read the Passage, and this is a family friendly podcast.

We’ve always kept it that way. Right. But the book is not We’re we’re, we’re, we’re sponsored by Disney, so we have to, you know, keep it clean. Hopefully they don’t pull us off the air for saying this. Oh, right. Sorry. Exactly. All right. But so, you know, like the, the kind of family friendliness of the podcast.

Contrast with the book a lot. There’s a part, a chapter called the Most, and I’m not gonna say the actual word, but you can, y’all are fans of the Chinese Literature podcast. Y’all can read between the lines. It’s the called the Most Important Mother Flipper in Taiwanese history. It’s about Jji, a guy who in the 1670s has a sex scandal where he is having a sexual relationship with.

His little brother’s wet nurse. So the Chinese text tells us that he is a little weird, even though he’s in his twenties. He likes middle to older women. I’m not making this up. This is just straight from the Chinese text. He likes middle age to older women, and he is ha in this relationship with his little brother’s wet nurse, which in Chinese, in Chinese culture, your wet nurse is in a, what’s called a fictive.

Familial relationship. You know, it, it, it’s not biological, but it, socially it’s the same thing kind of as being a mother. So your younger brother’s wet nurse is your younger brother’s kind of mom. Mom. Therefore, your, your relationship to her is also kind of Right. Yeah. So it’s very, a very icky kind of relationship.

Jung Jing doesn’t care. He has this relationship with the Wener and it causes a lot of tension in Taiwan. But Jung Jing is, you know, he’s large and in charge of Taiwan in 1679, he actually rein invades China as a part of the three Atory Rebellion against the Ching Dynasty. The Ching Dynasty. Rob, you know this, but I should just say this so that we’re kind of covering our bases.

The Ching Dynasty is Manchu, they Ching Dynasty is established in 1636 up in Manchuria. They sweep down, take over China in 1644, but there’s still a lot of ethnic. Tensions because they’re Manchu. They’re not Han Chinese. There’s a rebellion in the 1670s called the three Atory Rebellion. J Jing jumps in and tries to rein invade China to kick out the ching.

He fails, then he dies in 1681. He has two sons. One of them is the product of said mother Flippery, and one of them is just a cool, good leader. He asks. That the cool good leader gets put in charge. Some people behind the throne assassinate the cool guy and put the product of said mother Flippery in the throne.

And so Taiwan is in this really weird position where they’ve got a guy who came onto the throne who nobody likes, and he came onto the throne in a way that nobody likes. And the Ching. Decide to invade Taiwan and Taiwan just sort of gives up. So there’s this real question of had it not been for the sexual scandal and the results of it, would Taiwan have actually ever been Chinese?

Hmm. So it’s a, it’s a, ah, I’ll have to use the word anyway, because people are reading between the lines. It’s a titillating chapter and, but anyway, so. I’ll ask another quick question. Let’s, let’s imagine, right, that you’re, you’re, you’re walking with somebody, you’ve got 30 seconds. They’re like, Hey, you’re writing a book.

Oh, you wrote a book. What’s the book about? And you tell ’em, how could you sell people on the book in like 20 seconds? What could you tell ’em that would be like, yes. You gotta, you gotta read this book now. And I, and I’ll specify my challenge here is not just people who already really dig, kind of, I wanna learn more about it.

People like, so in your intro. You mentioned talking with a guy named, you call him Hawk anyway, who’s basically the redneck, you’re sort of referencing sort of in implicitly throughout. Imagine you run into Hawk again and he goes, oh wow, you wrote a book. Why should I buy a book about a country I don’t care about?

What? What would you, what would you say? You may not care about China, but the US China relationship is the most important relationship in the world right now. Taiwan, Xinjiang, the Chinese economy, Hong Kong. These are the four topics that are driving that, that news that you need to care about. This is the history behind them told in a no nonsense way that won’t put you to sleep.

Hmm. That’s a good one. Were you practicing that or do you just create it just now? No, I just created it. I’m gonna have to write it down. Well done. Well, I was about to say, well done. You should write that down. That should be, that should be the thing on the back to sell the book. Like why should we care?

This is why you should care, which is, you know, teaching in university at least, I was always this way. That was always my favorite thing is to have a room full of people who were like, Ugh, poetry, why should we care about poetry? I’m like, Hmm, good. Let’s start at zero. This is great. I love this challenge.

So what’s next? So the book is coming out. Do you have any follow-up stuff planned or is it just kinda wait and see what happens? I’m not sure. You know, marketing, this book is actually a huge. Task, just because I’m reaching out to tons of people to try and get word of the book out there. Once I’m done with that and kind of the book launches completed, I have thought about doing another nonfiction work on Taiwan, and I’ve also thought about doing a spy novel actually on, again, on, on Taiwan, US China relations.

Hmm. So, yeah, I’ve been kicking both of those ideas around in my head. Or you should write a high academic theory book just to throw people off your trail and they never heard from him again. Yeah. I, I really don’t know. It’s one of those things, uh, I mean, I’ll keep doing the podcast. Mm-hmm. It’s fun. Yeah.

So, just to kinda wind things down here, it’s China’s backstory by Lee Moore. It’s coming through Unsung Voices, books. It’s available online from the publisher right now. You can now pre-order it and it will be sent as soon as it is actually hot off the press. It should be available on Amazon as well. And you could wait and watch the movie version.

I’d recommend reading the book first. But anyway, congratulations. I hope, and I think that’s about, I mean, I, we, we could get into an extremely long extended discussion about the little nitty gritty bits and pieces. That’s not the point of the podcast. The point of the podcast is to talk up the book and get people to go figure it out.

So hopefully by the time you hear this, it will be launched and you will be able to buy it. I’ll keep you the podcast listener updated, but until then, I’m Lee Moore. And I’m Rob Moore, and this is the Chinese Literature podcast.

Today, I get to speak with Professor Emily Mokros about her fascinating book, The Peking Gazette in Late Imperial China – State News and Political Authority. The book is about a media outlet in the Qing Dynasty that published discussions that the emperor held with his bureaucrats. 

The book is available for purchase here at the University of Washington Press.

This episode, the podcast takes a look at a poem Mao Zedong wrote in February 1936, after he and his party had undergone the near-death experience of the Long March. Yet still, Mao has the gumption to imply in the poem that he would be the greatest ruler China had ever seen. 

My Translation:

Original Poem

沁园春·雪

北国风光，千里冰封，万里雪飘。望长城内外，惟余莽莽；大河上下，顿失滔滔。山舞银蛇，原驰蜡象，欲与天公试比高。须晴日，看红装素裹，分外妖娆。

江山如此多娇，引无数英雄竞折腰。惜秦皇汉武，略输文采；唐宗宋祖，稍逊风骚。一代天骄，成吉思汗，只识弯弓射大雕。俱往矣，数风流人物，还看今朝。

AI Generated Transcript:

  My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature podcast. Today we have a very cool episode for you. It’s a poem written by a dude. His name is, hang on, let me, let me check my notes here. But Ong, he wrote a poem called Spring in a Soaked Garden Snow. So kind of a two part name there. Spring in a Soaked Garden, snow Re.

But before we get into the discussion of that MAO poem, I first want to remind y’all my book China’s Backstory, the history of Beijing doesn’t want you to read, is coming out September 30th. I’m dropping this podcast either at the end of July or at the very beginning of August. I recorded this in July.

It was meant to be a July podcast, but I’m actually waiting on Word from my publishers Unsung Voices books. They’re finishing up right now as I speak with getting the pre-order page ready before. When I came onto the podcast, I would say, Hey, pre-order my book. But you weren’t really pre-ordering it, you were just giving my publishers your email.

So now at this very moment, you can go to the website and actually hand money to my publishers. I know this because I’m not gonna let this podcast drop until we have all our ducks in order, and y’all can do that. So if you go to the podcast website, that’s chinese literature podcast.com, you click on the button at the top that says, pre-order my book exclamation point.

That will take you to the publisher’s pre-order page for those of y’all who’ve already quote unquote, pre-ordered by giving unsung voices books your email address. So I think they’re gonna send you an email just letting you know to go to the site, and it should be available for you to, to actually give them your credit card information.

But if you are eagerly anticipating the book coming out, you can head over there right now. The book is called China’s Backstory, the History Beijing doesn’t want you to read. It takes a look at the four most important China related issues winding up in the news feeds of most Americans, Xinjiang, Taiwan, the Chinese economy, and Hong Kong.

This book is written by me, an expert if I do humbly say so myself. It’s, it’s not written for experts, it’s written for everyday folks. There’s no jargon. You don’t need to know anything about Chinese history though. If you’re listening to this podcast, you probably already know quite a bit about Chinese history.

The book is written to be fun. The Xinjiang section has a drinking game embedded in it. As I go through the history of Xinjiang, every time someone gets beheaded or otherwise loses their head, you if you are playing the drinking game. You’re supposed to take a shot and the history of Xinjiang is so violent that there are gonna be some sections you need to be careful about driving.

After reading the history of Taiwan section, I have a segment that’s titled The Gay Taiwanese Pirates Who Changed History. It’s how a group of Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese pirates, I don’t know how they would describe their identity, but rumor has it that they were literally in bed together, and that is.

Partially responsible for Taiwan. The island becoming a Chinese island. There’s another section titled, actually, I can’t really say it on the podcast, ’cause unlike the book, the podcast is family friendly. I try to keep the podcast clean, but this is a chapter in the Taiwanese section of the book. And if y’all listen to the podcast regularly, y’all are gonna be pretty good at reading between the lines.

So this. Segment in the Taiwan section of the book is called The Most Important Mother Flipper in Taiwanese history. All of that is to say this is not your typical, well-researched, boring China book written by an academic. This is a well-researched, funny, irreverent book on China written by an academic.

So go take a look at the website, chinese literature podcast.com. Click on pre-order. My book, exclamation Point, the book is coming out September 30th. If you pre-order now, we’ll send it out to you. Okay. I’m sick of promoting myself and bragging about how awesome me and my book are. Let’s turn to today’s poem, which is by Mao Zong, and it’s all about Mao bragging about how awesome he is.

So as I mentioned before, the poem’s called Spring in a Soaked Garden Snow. The poem was written in. February, 1936, though it was not published until November 14th, 1945. That was the first time it was published, but obviously Mao was still not in power until 1949. Uh, it gets republished in 1957. Let’s zero in on the.

Period in which it’s written. 1934, the Chinese Communist Party was in a bind from October, 1934 to October, 1935. The Communist Party participated in what’s. Called the Long March. They were forced to abandon their main base in southern China as Chiang Kai-shek successfully. Finally pushed them out of that base there, that, uh, Ong had been a leader in the CCP, didn’t know what to do.

They spent the next year marching from southern China to southwestern China. Then across the eastern edge of. Tibet and then they dropped into that communist base in North China. In Yan. Early on in the long march at the Sunni conference, Mao became the unquestioned leader of the CCPA position he would maintain for the rest of his life.

The CCP marched for a full year at nearly every turn. They were almost destroyed. The main CCP Army, that is the first red Army, they left their main base in southern China with 86,000 members in October, 1934. By the time they arrived at Nan, they had only 7,000 people left, so they had lost about 90% of the people in their army.

Looking back on this period, we can see this long March as a success story for the CCP because despite their massive losses, they found this new base in Northern China that kept them away from their main enemy. That was Chiang Kai Shk, and it gave them a chance to fight the Japanese who were. Gonna become hated colonizers.

The base that they found was isolated, which allowed the CCP to become this very powerful organization. A decade later, when the Japanese were defeated by America at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the CCP would emerge from a very strong position. They would come out of World War II hitting very hard and eventually.

They were able to take over the country and push Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan. But at the time, in 1936, it didn’t look like that. In February, 1936, Mao looked like he was just barely hanging on five months before his ragtag army of communists had limped into Yan. If I were a betting man, I would not in February, 1936, have put my money on Mao.

Looking back, it’s easy to underestimate how precarious the CCPs chances of survival. Were So, Mao writes this poem in classical Chinese Spring in a Soaked Garden snow. It is a poem that’s a style of Chinese poetry that became popular in the Song Dynasty. So from around nine 60 to 1279. In English.

Sometimes we call that a lyric or a song lyric, and here song is referring not to the dynasty, but to the thing that she’s sing. It’s all very confusing, but it makes for great puns. There’s a section in my book on the Song Dynasty. I called that section, new song. Same old tune. Sorry, I’m a dad, so I have to make dad jokes.

Okay, back to mouse poem. I’m just going to read you mouse. This is a poem here. This is my own translation. Spring in a soaked garden snow, the North Country scenery, frozen over for a thousand miles, snow floating for 10,000 miles. I look inside and outside the Great Wall of China. All that remains is Boundlessness, up and down the Yellow River.

It suddenly has lost its surging vigor. The mountains dance like silver snakes, the plains gallop like white elephants. I want to compete with heaven and see which of us is taller. I must wait for a clear day and look at the snowy landscape wrapped in red and white. It’s really but witching the rivers and mountains of this land.

They’re so pretty. It has brought out countless heroes to compete and to serve the nation. Pity the first Chinese emperor and Han Wdi, the greatest Han Emperor. Their writing ability ain’t all that good. Tongue tied own. The Greatest of the Tongue, emperors and Song, the greatest song Emperor. They kind of lack style.

Those northern barbarian rulers like Gingis Khan, all they knew how to do was shoot arrows at big eagles. Those guys are all dead. If you want to count the true bad mamma Jammas look. To today, so this is made up of two parts. If you want to put eyeballs on the original, along with my translation while I’m talking about it, check out the website, chinese literature podcast.com, so you can see the, the form of the poem if, if that helps you.

Obviously, if you’re driving or. Making love or something. You don’t have to actually about that. I had a former student and a fan of the podcast imply that that is what he and his girlfriend did. They would leave the podcast on while getting it on, they broke up. I’m not sure what that says about my podcasting skills or his sanity.

I’m just gonna leave it at that. Okay, now let’s get back to Mao. This to the poem is divided into two parts. The first part, Mao praises the landscapes of Northwestern China. Remember, he just arrived in Northwestern China a few months ago. Mao is from Hunan in South China, a very different landscape. He’s lived in Beijing, which is.

In the north, but it’s on the plains there. He worked as a revolutionary in Shanghai, which again is at the mouth of a river right next to the ocean. As best I can tell, Mao has never been to China’s ancient, relatively isolated northwest. This is a landscape that’s both new and foreign to him as foreign as New England is to Florida or as Sweden is to Italy.

But I think there’s something in that he’s landing in this new landscape. He’s drinking in the beauty of Northwest China. That region is really beautiful. If you haven’t been there. It has this ancient beauty, these massive never ending hills that are carved up over millennia by Chinese farmers as they try and make that area land that they can farm.

Mao praises this beauty, but there’s also something wrong with this land. The Yellow River has lost its surging vigor. The snow here in the first half of this poem comes off to me as a symbol of some sort of somnolence. It’s as if. This land Northwest China, the country itself is somehow asleep and that half of the poem ends with these lines.

I must wait for a clear day and look at the snowy landscapes wrapped in red and white. It’s really bewitching. When I was translating, I was wondering, wait, what is he actually waiting to do? What is he planning to do on a clear day? Is it what he alludes to before in the, the lines right above it, which is trying to compare himself to heaven and see which is taller?

I, I think that’s probably the correct answer, but that also struck me as incredibly maniacal. And that’s actually a good way to set us up for the second half of the poem. ’cause the second half of the poem is focused all on Mao’s pridefulness. So first half of the poem ends there with that line on. It’s really bewitching.

The second half of the poem shifts from this praise of landscape to this praise of the heroes that, that the landscape has produced. Weirdly, simultaneously, he’s dissing, he’s insulting those same heroes that the landscape has produced. The first two lines of the second half of the poem, the rivers and mountains.

Of this land are so pretty, it has brought up countless heroes to compete and serve the nation. That sounds like praise, but then you drop one stanza and he says, pity Han the first Chinese emperor and Han Wdi, the greatest Han Emperor. Their writing ability ain’t all that good tongue. The greatest Tongue Emperor and song, the greatest song Emperor.

They’re kind of lacking. In. Those northern barbarian rulers like Genghis Khan, all they knew how to do was shoot arrows at big eagles. So except for Song Tzu, all of these Chinese leaders are closely associated with the Northwestern region that Mao is now in Tzu. I have no idea why Mao threw him in there.

Other than that he founded the amazing Song Dynasty, but he’s not clearly associated with the Northwest whatever. So Mao says, this beautiful landscape of Northwestern China brought out all these people. They became heroes and served the nation, but they aren’t all that good. They can’t write, they’re lacking in style.

They only knew how to hunt eagles. And you know what, all of those guys, they’re dead. It’s just, it’s so conceited. I don’t know what to do with it. I mean, it’s, it’s just. The, for lack of a better word, it’s very ballsy. He goes, if you want to see Northwestern China’s greatest heroes, you know what you gotta look to today.

I. What is he saying there? The way I read this poem, and I, I think this will probably be controversial, I think that he is saying, I am China’s greatest hero. I am better than Xin. Huang, the first emperor of China. I am better than Han Wti, the most famous emperor of the Han Dynasty. I am better than tongue, own the second emperor.

Of the TNG dynasty and the architect of tongue greatness, I am better than Gingis. Kahan, the man who, along with his sons and grandsons strung together, the largest land empire ever witnessed in history. On his deathbed, he had the cojones to say, purportedly quote, life is short. I could not conquer all the world.

You will have to do it. Mal was saying, you know what? None of those guys are as good as me. None of them are as good as me. As I read this. I was just like, wow. What an incredible ballsy statement to make. He had nothing but a ragtag army behind him. He was nearly eliminated by Chiang Kai-shek the greatest loser in all of Chinese history.

It turns out he was right. You know, we can debate the historical merits of MAO compared to those other emperors, but I don’t think anyone would tell me, you know what? There was a Chinese person in the 20th century who is more important to history than Mao. I don’t, I, I don’t think that that person exists.

Mao is the most important Chinese person in the history of the 20th century, but at the time, he had no way of knowing that. He had no way of knowing that he was gonna be the most important Chinese figure in the 20th century. The only thing he had telling him that that was true was his bloated sense of self-confidence and self-importance.

So this is a great poem to look at because it displays Mao’s poetic virtuosity. He’s a decent poet in classical Chinese. He’s not great. You’re not gonna be writing home about this and comparing it to Tongue Dynasty or Song Dynasty grades, but his poetry is not that bad either. But this poem is also fascinating because MAO is able to produce poetry that depending on how you view Mao in the process of history, it’s either overly confident or justifiably confident.

Okay. I’ve been banging on for a really long time. I’m gonna leave this poem where it is. Let me know what you think of the poem in the podcast, Chinese Literature [email protected]. You can go to the website, chinese literature podcast.com, read my translation of Mals poem along with the original. You can also pre-order my book, which I can modestly say is better than any of the writings of WAN or hamoudi.

My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature podcast.

This episode is a special one. The podcast has a conversation with Fox Butterfield, the first correspondent for the New York Times after 1949. Mr. Butterfield set up the Beijing Bureau for the New York Times in 1979 and was the bureau chief from 1979 to 1981. 

Mr. Butterfield started studying Chinese in 1958, and was a student of John Fairbank. 

In this episode, I got the privilege of interviewing Mr. Butterfield at his home. We talked about his experience with John Fairbank, his friendship with Senators John McCain and Joe Biden, his work on the Pentagon Papers and many other topics. We also talked about his book, China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, an excellent work of reportage on China at this crucial transition.

AI Generated Transcript

 My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature podcast. Today, on the podcast, I’m gonna be hosting a special guest. His name is Fox Butterfield. He is the man who in 1979, opened up the New York Times, first Beijing Bureau in the period after the communist took over. From 1949 to 1979, the New York Times did not have a bureau in China.

Fox Butterfield is the one who actually. Opened it up, so I did an interview with him. We’re gonna have that interview on this podcast, and because of the format of the interview, be a slightly different formatted podcast. Before I get started with everything and talking with this fascinating figure, Mr.

Butterfield, I just want to do a quick plug for my book, China’s backstory, the history that Beijing does not want you to read. We’re planning on having it come out September 30th that day. May change. My editors are still kindly beavering their way through the book, trying to make the book stronger. If y’all are interested in keeping up with the progress through the publication process of this book, go to my website, lee harris moore.com.

Click on the link up at the top, China’s backstory, and that should take you to the page where you can. Quote unquote pre-order the book, which is just to say you’re signing up for emails to be sent your way as my book comes out, and if you’re interested in getting an advanced. Reader a copy of the book, send me an email, Chinese literature [email protected].

My editors have asked me to find smart folks who are willing to read an early, mostly edited copy of the book, and once they read it, post it about it on social media, X tiktoks book talk wherever you post stuff about books. In an effort to, of course, gen up some buzz before publication. If you’re interested, send me an email.

Chinese Literature [email protected]. Okay. Now that I’ve gotten the necessary self-promotion out of the way, let’s talk about who this podcast is really about. Fox Butterfield for the podcast. I’m planning on doing some interviews, not focused on literature per se, but on talking with experts who had unique and incredible platforms on which to observe Chinese culture.

China’s. Politics and how those things changed. The first of these interviews that I conducted is with Fox Butterfield. Mr. Butterfield was the first New York Times correspondent allowed into Beijing. After the revolution, Mr. Butterfield got to China in 1979. He reopened the New York Times Bureau in Beijing, which had been closed since 1949.

Then he wrote a book about his experience. The book is called China Alive in the Bitter Sea, derived from a Chung Yu Hai. The book is a fantastic on the ground sort of look at China in a period where it’s pivoting from maoism to deism. Now, as y’all can probably guess by the fact that there is a Chung Yu in this book title Fox Butterfield is not just any journalist.

He’s not just some journalist parachuting in to China to report on it. No. He has a deep, deep knowledge of China. When we were setting up. The meeting for this interview, he told me he still actually dreams in Chinese sometimes. Fox Butterfield started studying Chinese in 1958. He was inspired by a speech he heard from John Fairbank.

That is the John Fairbank, the Dean of China Studies in America. The man who the Fairbank Center at Harvard is named after Butterfield. Heard the speech by Fairbank and was intrigued by China, a place that he hadn’t really engaged with before to go and spend the rest of his academic career studying China.

Something he’ll talk about on the podcast. Of course, at the time China was closed off to Americans. Pretty much all Americans, not completely, but. All but a handful of Americans, there were almost no journalists in China during the 1960s. Most of the Americans or Westerners in China during the 1960s were communists there who had wound up in China for a variety of reasons.

Mr. Butterfield was working in Taiwan studying Chinese history at the time He entered journalism. He largely leaves behind his graduate studies in the China studies field. He lets that. Expertise that he has developed life fallow for a bit. That’s not to say that he was unproductive during this period.

He goes on to be a journalist first. He’s brought on as a copy boy at the New York Times, and then he’s elevated to a reporter and as a still fairly young reporter, Mr. Butterfield was brought into a New York hotel room filled with file cabinet upon file cabinet of documents that had been collected by Daniel.

Ellsberg, those documents and the reporting that Mr. Butterfield and others in that group did eventually became known as the Pentagon Papers, and they changed history. Mr. Butterfield received a Pulitzer for his work on the Pentagon Papers. Our understanding of Vietnam was completely revolutionized by the things that Mr.

Butterfield and other reporters like. Neil Shehan did, and of course, the impact was felt beyond just the Pentagon Papers. When the Pentagon Papers came out, the administration of President Richard Nixon tried to sue the New York Times, the Supreme Court case that resulted in that has been an affirmation of the protections of the press and their ability to.

Report on scoops, even if the government in the United States does not like it. He was sent to Hong Kong and that’s where all China Watchers were at the time. He was there reporting on China. But of course, as y’all know, if you listen to the Chinese literature podcast enough, several earthquakes occurred in China around that time.

Some literal, some metaphorical. At 3:42 AM on July 28th, 1976, Han CBE was rocked by an earthquake. 7.6 on the Richter Scale. Probably 300,000 people died in Chinese tradition. Natural disasters usually presage political disasters. In January, Joe and Lai had already died on September 9th, 1976, just a few months after the Han Earthquake.

Mao Zong, the man who remade China several times, died. Shortly thereafter, the US would come to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing, abandoning Taipei and moving its embassy to Beijing. Shortly thereafter, the US established diplomatic relations with Beijing abandoning Taipei and who. Was it, who was the first New York Times correspondent to go to China to report on China?

It’s none other than Fox Butterfield. Before Mr. Butterfield arrived, there had been no American correspondents in mainland China. Uh, there had been a handful of, uh, reporters who had passed through a lot of them. Uh, connected somehow with the Communist Party, but there had not been any regular American reporters at mainstream newspaper outlets before Mr.

Butterfield and, uh, his, his. Colleagues from the AP and the Washington Post arrived. Of course, having done graduate work in Chinese history, Mr. Butterfield was the perfect reporter to work in China as the New York Times is opening up. Its Beijing Bureau, Fox Butterfield reported on China for that period from 1979 to 1981.

I’ve talked on a bunch about Mr. Butterfield. Now let me explain a little bit about how this interview was carried out. ’cause it’s a little different from normal podcasts that I’ve done. Mr. Butterfield lives in Portland, just a two hour drive away from where I live here in Rainy Eugene, Oregon. For about the past year, he and I had been talking about doing an interview.

I contacted him first in the summer of 2024, but I was actually still working on China’s backstory. The book got turned in a few months ago. And in March, Fox and I reconnected and we spoke more seriously about doing an interview this Memorial Day weekend in 2025. I just happened to be up in Portland with.

My family, Mr. Butterfield was able to make some time for me. I went to his house. He has this beautiful place up with a fantastic view of much of the city of Portland. We weren’t recording in my podcasting studio where I have my. Fancy $60 microphone equipment. I just use my phone as a microphone. It’s my first time doing that.

Okay. That’s enough of me talking. I’m gonna give over the rest of this podcast to letting Fox Butterfield speak this podcast ’cause it’s such a fascinating interview. Occasionally, I’m gonna step in. And guide the listener and explain the topics we’re discussing, particularly during transitions. The first thing that we discussed when I first got to his.

House is how Mr. Butterfield got into China studies. He talks about how John Fairbanks made the speech that I alluded to earlier in 1958. It lured Mr. Butterfield into the China field. Went to hear John Fairbank. Yes. So 1958, September, 1958 at the beginning of my sophomore year at Harvard. The United States had been in the Korean War, and China was behind the Korean War, so we’d been fighting a war more or less with China.

But in 1958, there was a fear that the United States was gonna go to have another war with China over the two little islands called and Matsu, Chima and Matsu, which were really sitting in the mouths of mainland harbors in Fuji Province at very low tide. You could walk across. And there were, the Shelly was going back and forth from those two little islands up into mainland towns and villages and vice versa.

And it looked like that either the, the, the national sources on those islands were gonna attack China, or China was gonna attack them and the United States, because we had a mutual security treaty with nationalist government under John Kajak that we would end up in, in a big war with China. Harvard’s China expert at the time was John Fairbank, who was professor of History and had just started an undergraduate course on China.

He gave a public lecture that early in September as we were about to choose courses, and I went to hear it and he said to us that we should know something about China. That was the country, the oldest country in the world with the oldest history, and it had the most people. It would be ridiculous for us to go to war with this big country over these two specks of land we had no interest in.

And I realized listening to him that here was this enormous country with an old history and I knew nothing about it. So I began to audit his class on Chinese history and I was really the only undergraduate in the class. And at the end of the year, I did my exam and I. And that was in those days at Harvard to find out what grade you got.

You put in a self-addressed stamped postcard with your exam book clip, and then, and the professor would send it back to you with your grade. And I got the, the, the postcard back and it was from John Fairbank professor. He, he didn’t tell me my grade. He just said, please come to see me in my office next Tuesday or whatever day it was in Widener Library.

So I thought for sure that I had failed the exam and I was in trouble. Mm-hmm. So I went to see him and instead what he said to me was, Fox, you know, you wrote a wonderful exam. Have you ever thought about majoring in Chinese history? Hmm. No, I had not thought about it, but he had a wonderful way of encouraging interest in the field of Chinese history.

So I decided I would take another class with him, which I did, and pretty soon after that. He said, Fox, you should start studying Chinese. And he said, the problem is that right now Harvard’s not teaching spoken Chinese, so you have to go to Yale to study spoken Chinese. And Yale was only teaching spoken Chinese because they had a contract with the Air Force and they were teaching Young Air Force recruits who 18-year-old, 19-year-old kids.

All boys at the time to monitor Chinese Communist Air Force traffic. Was Yale the only place in America that taught Chinese? Well, there were probably a couple of other places, but when I finally finished up at Harvard and I was thinking of graduate school, Berkeley was another place that might have been teaching spoken Chinese, but there were, they just didn’t have the Chinese language facilities.

People were not taking it. Yale had, with, at, with this contract they had with the Air Force or the US government, they had developed some very, very good, uh, a textbook system, which still was not a, a book was not published, but we had mimeograph pages that we could use and they, they also had a rudimentary language laboratory, which was.

The, the, the big old fashioned tapes that were about this big, and you, you, you couldn’t take those things home. You went into their language lab and to listen to one of their enormous recording devices. So it was very rudimentary, but it was way to actually listen to the, the language. In your book you mentioned when you went into the Harvard Library to ask for some tapes.

The librarian was like Chinese, right? That’s a dead language. Right? But when I came back with AF after the summer school at Yale, I came back to Harvard in the fall and I went into the, the Harvard then had, what were they called? The language laboratory, which had recording devices in these old fashioned reel to reel tapes.

And I asked them if they had Chinese and the woman sitting behind the counter, she appeared at me over her glasses. She said, Doug, man. She said Chinese is a dead language. True story. Oh, that’s so fantastic. From that fascinating discussion. We also discussed Mr. Butterfield’s first trip to mainland China by this point, and we’re skipping around in time, so we’ll go back and forth.

That’s part of why I’m butting in here to guide you. So by this point, Mr. Butterfield had lived in Taiwan. He had started but not finished his a PhD in Chinese history under John Fairbanks. He’d become a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. And then in 1979, he was sent by the New York Times to China for the first time in three decades.

The New York Times is gonna have. A journalist there in Beijing. He went initially with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to China. He roomed with a man who you may have heard of. His name is John McCain, Fox Butterfield. Also, while he was there in Beijing, he. Ran with another man who you may have heard of.

This was a young man on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His name is Joe Biden, and Mr. Butterfield had some interesting things to say about that. Early 1979, US and China were making efforts to establish relations in China. Was about to open up to, I mean, to itself as well as to as the rest of the world.

First thing they did was they invited the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to send some of its members to come to China. And they allowed two journals to come in with them. China had a severe shortage of hotel rooms, so they made everybody room with somebody else. The Chinese assigned me to room with the Navy liaison to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who was a Navy captain whose name was John McCain.

And what makes up was a particularly interesting was when I first started working for the New York Times when I was a stringer in Taiwan, I managed to get a visa to go to Hanoi during the war in 1969. Wow. Right in the middle. In the middle of the war. I was the first New York Times correspondent to get in and I was, I was just starting the Vietnamese conference.

Government allowed me into the, the prison where they were keeping the American POWs and John McCain was there. He was in a hospital bed. Because when he was shot down, he was badly wounded. They couldn’t fix him for several years. His father was the commander in chief of Pacific Fleet, also named John McCain, and his father was a big shot.

He was the highest ranking admiral in the Navy and they were using McCain as kind of a propaganda tool, but they were regularly torturing him and he really badly, badly wounded in the back. So I was able to go into the prison where he was and see him, and I was able to report that he was alive, although very badly wounded after a number of years later to have John McCain as my roommate was.

And we got along really well. ’cause I spoke Chinese and I would say to him, John, let’s, let’s get away from these guys and well, let’s go see what real Chinese are saying and what people are talking about. So we would, we would ditch our handlers and we’d just walk out in the street and go into restaurants.

China was still very, very close place, so it was. It was really something. And he, he really enjoyed this. He, he was a contrarian person and he, it was just great to break away. So we became real buddies. We spent two weeks, one of the other members of the Stand for Relations Committee was a, a freshman senator from the state of Delaware.

Joe Biden and McCain and Biden were buddies. So the three of us hung out all the time. And the extraordinary thing that I learned about Joe Biden was he was not very bright. So all the discussion now about him. Was having trouble when he got older and he lost his memory, his ability to think, actually, that’s the way he was going way back.

He was a very, very nice man, but Barry could remember what country we were in. It was rather shocking, but he had very, his staff was very good. I always suppose it was because he was from a very small state. Honestly, it was just not very bright, even back then. But he was very, very, very nice man. And being able to speak Chinese made a huge difference.

So were they essentially leaning on your Chinese skills to get them around? They being Joe Biden and John McCain. We had Chinese handlers who were taking it. We had our meals and meetings, but I would. I’d take them out and say, let’s just walk down the street and see what let’s go do. It wasn’t easy to get into a restaurant ’cause you had to have special credentials even to do that.

Hmm. Couldn’t just walk in a restaurant. But we found that some people were actually happy to talk to us. Anybody we could find on the street to talk to us. It was exciting and Chinese hadn’t been able to talk to anybody for so long. They couldn’t even talk to to each other. Hmm. You didn’t know who was gonna report to and what would happen.

In 1961, Mr. Butterfield got a Fulbright to study in Taiwan. He’d finished up his undergrad at Harvard and he gets this Fulbright. He is the only student on the Fulbright to Taiwan at the time, who’s not a graduate student. Everyone else was much older and was finishing their PhD. Surprisingly, Fox Butterfield was also the only one of the four Fulbright students who spoke Chinese and who actually bothered to learn the Chinese language.

It’s hard to wrap your brain around how weird this world was, but a lot of the experts in China studies. Those folks who today are, are retiring from the field of China studies. Many of them did not learn to speak Chinese. They might be able to read Chinese, but oftentimes they didn’t speak Chinese. No one expected them to learn Chinese.

Mr. Butterfield pushed himself to speak the language, but that was counter to what was expected of him. When you first went over the Pacific, you went to Taiwan, right? Yes. When I, when I graduated, I was very lucky. I got a scholarship fellowship and they were, in those days, they gave out four of those a year to Taiwan.

The other people who had them were all graduate students who were finishing the work on their PhDs from different universities. Cornell, Berkeley, Michigan. But, uh, here I was, I had just graduated and I hadn’t yet entered graduate school, and I was funded through the American Embassy in Taiwan. Hmm. And there was a Fulbright section, so I had to report to the embassy to get my money and to go in to see them.

And they assumed that I should be finishing my doctoral dissertation because that’s what other people were doing and they kept What’s wrong with you that you wanna. ’cause I, I asked, I said I want to, I want to take Chinese language lessons. And they thought this was just bizarre. Why wouldn’t anyone wanna speak Chinese?

But there was a very small program that was at that time in, in Taibei that had four Chinese people who were teaching spoken Chinese, and they had four American graduate students who were. The other, the other three were all quite a bit older than I was, and they were finishing the work on their doctoral dissertations.

I was 21 and they were in their late twenties, early thirties. Did they speak Chinese? No.

They were there with their wives and some of ’em had young families with children, Uhhuh, and they, they were really just finishing the research on their doctoral dissertation. So they were at a whole different stage of their educational experience than I was. Hmm. And what I really wanted to do was learn Chinese, but there, there were really no American studying Chinese at the time.

Hmm. There were a few American missionaries in Taibei. Hmm. But they were there to Christianize the Chinese. Hmm. And that was it. Where did you study Chinese at? So there was a, a small program that was actually, it was called the Cornell School, and I’ve never totally understood who funded it, but it was theoretically run by Cornell.

And the guy who administered was also was finishing his doctoral dissertation. He was an American who, who was married to a Chinese woman and his Chinese spoken Chinese was quite good. And they had four Chinese teachers who were probably refugees from the mainland at that time. People would had come from in 1949 and fled China.

The Taiwan, and they were all from, from Northern China. So they spoke good Mandarin. Because it would’ve been hard to find good Mandarin speakers. Well, there were still people who had come from the mainland at that point. Hmm. And they, and they were younger. So I had four different teachers who thought it was kind of funny as a kid, in their view, wanted to speak Chinese.

But I just loved it from the beginning. I had no idea why. And I lucky to have had this background in the Yale program. Mm-hmm. Which really did emphasize spoken Chinese. They were trying to get people to really be able to speak so they could monitor Chinese commun to Air force traffic. Where did you live in Taiwan?

So, when I first went there, I, I explained to the, the, my handlers at the US Embassy that I wanted to live with the Chinese family. If I could, I forgot exactly how I found it, but I was able to live with a family of, the family was from Beijing. They come as refugees in 49. So this, since I was there and you know, I graduated 61 from Harvard.

So it was still 11, 12 years after the people had come to the main come to Taiwan from the mainland. They all thought they were going back. Mm-hmm. And pretty sure they would recon the mainland just a few more years. Just a few more. That’s a long time ago now. That’s 60 years ago. Yeah. So I was able to find a family and.

And I was able to pay them to do it ’cause they, it was a commercial exchange for them. I wanted the experience of living with the Chinese families so I could speak Chinese. And they were just wanted the money. Hmm. And they had a couple of older Chinese people who were by themselves who fled to Taiwan.

And they were just by themselves who were living there. And they had a, a, a Japanese guy who was same age as me, who had, was enrolled in the Japanese foreign service. Hmm. And he wanted him to learn to speak Chinese. And he also, he ultimately years later became the Jeff Pat’s ambassador to the mainland.

What was his name? Oh, so long. No. Okay. And, and we actually, we were roommates in this Chinese house That’s cool. In, in Taiwan. It was an interesting, you know, mixture of cultures. Hmm. But he was very good at spoken. He was, uh, unlike most Japanese, he was very good with languages. Hmm. Japanese have a lot of trouble with foreign languages.

As you may notice. We hung out together a lot and we, I went to audit some classes at, at, at Taiwan University. Hmm. Uh, and I was able to sit in on several classes and I was able to meet some young. Taiwanese writers and Chinese intellectuals in Taiwan. Now, this is the Chinese Literature podcast, and even though this interview is about this fascinating history that Fox Butterfield witnessed, y’all know that if there’s a literature angle, I have.

Have to have to explore it. So here it is. Fox Butterfield knew both Chen ROI and al famous Taiwanese writers. In fact, and I didn’t know this until I did the interview, Mr. Butterfield revealed that he dated Roshi while he was in Taiwan. I haven’t done a podcast on either the works of Li or Chen roi, but both are pretty important.

Taiwanese writers, both of whom I really do want to do a podcast on their works, Chen ROI is particularly interesting. She’s this Taiwanese author. She goes to an American college or a couple of American colleges, then. Though she’s Taiwanese, she marries a man in Taiwan who’s from mainland China who had fled the communist and the two of them, along with their kids, actually moved to China in the mid 1960s and the, their family got stuck there during the cultural revolution.

She wrote some stories. About living through the cultural revolution that I read in my Taiwanese literature class in Taiwan way back in 2013. The, the story being Jing Jing. I’ll probably do a podcast on that work by Chan Roshi at some point. But let’s turn back to what Fox Butterfield has to say about that fascinating experience.

You knew Lee Al and I knew I, that’s how I met Lee Al. And who was the other? But Ro she ro she and Ray, she was my girlfriend. Really? Yes. You dated what, what was it like knowing Ro she and Leo, I mean, so long ago I would be making stuff up. Hmm. She ro she and I were the same age. She just graduated from college.

I just graduated from college and her father was a carpenter and she lived in a house relatively close to where I lived in Tai Bay. And my daily bicycle route from the house where I lived to the school I was going to, took me right by her house. Hmm. And I’ve forgotten exactly how I met her, honestly. I just forget.

’cause that was 1961. Hmm. And we, we hung out a lot together and she very much wanted to get to the United States to go to graduate school. And I was able to help her apply. And she got a, a scholarship at Mount Holyoke. Hmm. And she came to the US the next, the following year. Hmm. And when I was, uh, at the end of my first year in Taiwan, I went back to graduate school.

Hmm. I wanted to stay in Taiwan, but my professor, John Fairbank kept sending me letters saying I had to come back and get serious, stop studying Chinese and studied Chinese history for goodness sake. Mm-hmm. So I, I came back to, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I used to call her Lucy, Lucy Chen. Got, got her scholarship from Mount Holyoke.

She was still writing stories in, in Chinese and that that was very hard for her to get published in Taiwan. Hmm. She was a woman. And Taiwanese, she had always strikes against her. Hmm. Yeah, she was on the left too, right? Well, she came on the left, but she was, she was an incredibly smart, interesting person.

Hmm. And Li was a he, he would like to be a Chinese scholar, wear his robes, but Taiwan was about to emerge into the modern commercial era. But it was still, a lot of, it was quite traditional. Hmm. I mean, it’s very hard to picture, Taiwan did not become a business success story for another 10 years. Hmm. It was quite backwards at that time.

And when you say backwards, do you have an example? Well, well, there. There was no business investment yet. The, the, the powerful force was the nationalist government, which had had its army and police. The Chinese nationalists were, they would’ve liked to be more like the communist, but they, they were less successful.

So after he’s a Fulbright student there in Taiwan. Mr. Butterfield goes back to Harvard. He becomes a PhD student of John Fairbanks doing research on Chinese history, and in 1967 he went back to Taiwan on a different. Scholarship. He gets to Taiwan and he describes the difficulty of actually getting access to the archives that he needed to do his research for his dissertation.

He was working on the political situation after Sun Zen died, researching a politician who. Thought he was going to take over the KMT party and the state of China after Sun Sen died so Sun Sen dies in 1924. This guy, this politician Han mean thinks that he is going to be Sun Sen’s. Successor Han mean did not succeed.

Sun, as most of y’all probably know, the guy who did take over. And this name is much more familiar, Kai. Chiang Kai-Shek, of course, in the late 1960s was still in charge of Taiwan. He had a beef with MAO that he didn’t win, but he was able to retain control of Taiwan at the time. Mr. Butterfield is trying to carry out his research, so y’all can imagine that the archivist in charge of these papers.

Not super cooperative. I came back to graduate school at Harvard under the influence of my professor, John Fairbank, said to get serious. So I came back and was trying to get my dissertation done and I had a topic that I was researching that re required me to do research in the Chinese Nationals archives in Taiwan.

So. I got a, a Ford Foreign Area Fellowship and I got back to Taiwan the second time, 1967. And it was while I was living there the second time and trying to do the research on my dissertation that I discovered this really wasn’t for me. Hmm. One problem was that the, that the archives that I wanted to use ’cause I was writing about a man who thought he would succeed Sun Sen as the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party.

Hmm. He was a, a sort of traditional Chinese politician, and what he didn’t understand was that you needed an army, you needed a political party in organization, you definitely needed an army and police, and he didn’t have that. He had a very traditional following of people in dark robes who were very good at scholarship and the Chinese nationalist archives, they brought all these documents from the mainland, but they were kept in a vaulted like archives library.

But they put it out in the middle of rice patties in a village in central Taiwan, outside of TJ Capital of Taiwan province. Hmm. From the city of tj, you had to take three different buses to get out to this very small village where the archives were. Hmm. So I tried doing that for a number of weeks and months, but I had to live in Taiji and then I had to go out and live in this local village, and it was really daunting when you got to the archives.

They kept asking you what you wanted and I would say, I want this or that. And they said, well, they didn’t have that. Actually they did. They just didn’t wanna show it to me. So I had this contest of wills. I would say that I wanted this and that document, and they would say they didn’t have it. So they would give me something else, which sometimes would be interesting.

And after six months of that, I realized this dissertation was going nowhere. Why were they so resistant? Was it they didn’t want you to know? It was, it was, you know, the thing about secrecy? Yeah. What, you meet me, everything is a secret. So it was very hard to get access to the through documents from the late 1920s and early 1930s things that happened in back in mainland China, and I wasn’t supposed to see it.

It was very, very frustrating. So Fox Butterfield. He encounters all these problems doing academic research. Those of y’all who are in academia probably know what he’s talking about, although it sounds like his experience was pretty extreme. Good news. It was during this period that Mr. Butterfield found his calling journalism.

We talked about how Mr. Butterfield got into journalism and also how Taiwan played this role in the Vietnam War that America waged. In Asia, it’s often forgotten that Taiwan was America’s whorehouse during the Vietnam War. In my book China’s backstory, I actually talk a bit about how Taiwan’s sex industry played a role in the Vietnam War.

So of course, I was particularly interested in that topic and what Mr. Butterfield witnessed. In this next section, we’re gonna talk about Taiwan’s role in the Vietnam War and how Mr. Butterfield being in Taiwan at. The height of the Vietnam War positioned him to write for the New York Times. I came back to Taiwan the second time in 1967.

It was really the middle of the Vietnam War, and American soldiers were coming from Vietnam on r and r to Taiwan, and they were coming for a, the part of the package was if you, if you were sent off to Vietnam, you got one r and r while you were there, most soldiers were there for a year. That was the, the tour was a year.

Hmm. And they would get this one all expenses paid tour to Taiwan, which was really a chance to sleep with Chinese girls. I was gonna ask, is this That’s what it was? Yeah. It was a, it was a prostitution r and r Was it, I mean, was the US government closely involved in that or, well, not, they weren’t, they didn’t organize the brothels.

Okay. That was not that. But they, they provided the airplanes to get people to Taiwan and they, they, they paid the, the soldiers with soldiers had to pay for that. I mean, as, as I remember it was the soldiers had to save up some of their money, which they were you, ’cause there was nothing spend on in Vietnam.

So they would say they would save this money and a hundred dollars would, you know, take a couple, take a week’s worth of girls. Hmm. So they were coming pretigious numbers. They also eventually had some going to to Thailand and if maybe if few went to Cambodia or to Laos. But most people really wanted to come to Taiwan.

Why Taiwan? The local businessmen were figured out a way to make money, and they turned this into a profit center. It’s, it’s a different time. So the US US government, the US government didn’t organize this to encourage prostitution, but they were trying to keep the troops happy. Sure, sure. And a few of the soldiers were mostly officers, had wives, and they were able to, uh, a few of them were able to bring their wives to Taiwan from the us and the military paid for that.

Hmm. Okay. So if they had wives and children, they did that. Hmm. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t just for the local girls. Hmm. But Taiwan was a, was a easy spot to, it’s a friendly spot. The government was friendly with the US and it was safe. Hmm. And it was a pretty short flight to Vietnam. Hmm hmm. While you were in Taiwan, they were working on your graduate studies.

You, someone, a reporter came through and you got an article in the New York Times. Right. One of my friends, another American graduate student, said to me, Fox, you spend so much time reading newspapers, you should become a journalist. Hmm. I had some journalist acknowledge, because my father was an American historian, but his two brothers, one older, one younger, both worked as journalists, one kind or another.

My father’s older brother, Roger Butterfield, had his first job was, he was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Hmm. And lived in Philadelphia and ultimately became worked for the Saturday Evening Post, which is a very successful magazine and became a star writer at Life Magazine, which was a really big deal in those days.

He wrote a very popular book, which sold very well, called The American Past, and because he was a big star at Life Magazine, he got, he was on very good terms with Henry Lu, who was the publisher of Time and Life and a a, a big deal in American journalism. Hmm. And when I was in Taiwan, I, and I was started to get interested in journalism.

I was able to come home for one visit to the United States, and I went to see my uncle in New York and he took me to meet Henry Lu. So who encouraged me to become a journalist while that I didn’t know, really know much about it, and the only place I could find a book on journalism was at the. USIS library.

You know what USIS, United States Information Service Library. And they had a wonderful library in Taiwan, English language library with books. And it was open to people in Taiwan, as well as Americans. And they had one book that I found, it was an elementary textbook on how to be a journalist. So I went in and checked it out and, and basically memorized it.

I learned what is a lead in a story. Hmm. And had you read his story and how do you outline a story? These very basic things, which I knew nothing about. Hmm. I’d always been able to write because my, my family was full of writers, but I was never in a school newspaper, and Stanley Carno was a star.

Washington Post reporter came a Taiwan and I heard he was coming, so I went and looked him up. I found his hotel room, went to see him, and he said, would you like to be my stringer in Taiwan? I said, sure. He explained to me what I did and. So I wrote a couple stories for him. What I didn’t realize was when he said he wanted me to be a stringer was that he wanted me to send him story ideas and he would come and write them.

Hmm. So I was sending these story ideas and he would, that he would write the stories. So that wasn’t working out very well.

So I was in, I was in invited to attend a conference on China, but. They were inviting people who were actually from the mainline, but you couldn’t do it in the United States at the time. ’cause the US and China did not have relations. So it was in Montreal. Hmm. In Canada. And I met a very senior distinguished correspondent from the New York Times, Harrison Salisbury, who was interested in China and he was hoping to go to China.

And I explained that I was living in Taiwan and I would, would love to be a journalist there and said, well. Send me some stories. Hmm. So, I, I had this bad experience with the Washington Post, so I wasn’t quite sure, but he said, no, we, we will figure it out. So I sent him a story and without my realizing it, he sent it on to the New York Times and my parents sent me a telegram a day later.

’cause that’s how you communicate. There was no phone service and they said, Fox, what are you doing? Your, you have the story on the front page of the New York Times that has your name on it. Hmm.

So like that you were a journalist that was Well, so I thought I was a journalist. It’s that, that was the first step. So yeah, so it was just, it was a story that I had heard about that John EK’s son, John Jinga, who he was kind of growing to be his successor was who had emerged in control of the secret police in Taiwan.

Hmm. Uh, was, was going to be going to become the successor eventually of John Khe died. But you were not allowed to talk about John Khe dying. ’cause Chinese are very superstitious about death. And if you even talked about somebody succeeding, somebody that was a major crime, people would go to prison for things like that.

Just people, Taiwanese who wrote things like that would be big trouble. So I said that, that gen guy, she was in essence grooming his son. Who was running one of the police agencies to become his successor, and that was the story that ended up on the front page of The New York Times with my byline. Did that get you in trouble while you were living in Taiwan?

Well, people ask questions about it, but, and I was so excited and I thought I was a New York Times correspondent. No, not quite, but sure, sure. But it, it was a sign that I could actually do something. And after about 10 or 12 of these stories. I got, I got a, a cable, as we call ’em in those days, I got a telegram and invited me to come back and work at the New York Times.

At this point, we’re going to transition to talking about Mr. Butterfield’s actual career at the New York Times, how Mr. Butterfield won a Pulitzer and went on to be this incredibly successful journalist whose career, at least for a bit of time, had very little to do with China. I thought they wanted me to be a correspondent, which wasn’t really quite true.

They wanted me to come back and start as a copy boy working in the newsroom to learn the craft. Hmm. So in, in late December of 1969, I found myself in New York and I walked into the newsroom and they should be where to sit, and I started as a copy boy. But they were very nice and they said, you know, if I could come up with some topics and I could write some stories in my own time.

Hmm. So I’d stick around on at night and weekends and started writing stories. Hmm. And after about six months or so of that, I got a, a, a message from the, from the secretary to the managing editor, which was the, who was the boss at that time? E Rosenthal. Em Rosenthal. I. And she said that Mr. Rosenthal wants to see you in his office.

I thought, oh no. I’ve done something wrong. Just like with Fairbanks, he said, Fox, you’re doing a nice job. We’ve got hold of the secret story of how the United States got involved in Vietnam. Neil Sheen’s got all these papers. We’ve got rooms at the New York Hilton Hotel. We’d like you to go join Neil uh and work on this project.

And that was the beginning of the Pentagon Papers. Wow. Mm-hmm. So I was still, you know, wasn’t on staff as a reporter, but I got invited to join and at that time it was Neil and they had two editors and a person who was a researcher at the New York Times, a young woman who was very good and me, and we had three rooms in New York.

Hilton Rosenthal invite you because of your experience in Asia. Well, that’s what I thought at the time, which was, I mean. In some ways, right. But it was really, as I came to realize, it was because I was so junior. If I disappeared from the newsroom, nobody knew I was missing because they were, they were very afraid that everybody, all the competitive newspapers, the Washington Post in particular, would be looking and if somebody’s byline disappeared for a long time, they must be working on a special project.

And Neil Shehan was a star reporter at the paper who had been in Vietnam. And actually I, I had met Neil earlier. And I, when I was still registered at Harvard and he had come and stayed with me once when he, he came up to give some talks, a group that I had organized of people who were interested in China and Vietnam to, to talk in the Boston area.

He’d come up and stayed with me. So I had known him when he was a young reporter and I was still very much a graduate student. So it was thrilling to be asked to be part of the project that he was working on. And none of us knew exactly where the Pentagon Papers was going. Hm. But we did have a, a suite of rooms at the New York building file cabinets full of these papers that e had been able to photocopy.

Hm. That project Ultimate was two months. I had to just disappear from view for that period of time, and nobody missed me. I had to tell my parents that I just, I’m working on something. I can’t tell you what it is. You’ll see me when you see me, but I wasn’t married and. Nobody missed me during this period.

Mr. Butterfield was based in Saigon. He wrote extensively on Vietnam, and this was when he first met Kim Fuk, who was running from the Nepal attack in that famous photo. Mr. Butterfield was also there on the last day in Saigon when the helicopters evacuated the US Embassy. When the Pentagon Papers were finally published in June, early July, I forgot it was, uh, 71, I got another message from Mr.

Rosenfels secretary who said he wants to see you in his office. So I, I went to see him in his office and again, I really was concerned, oh, what this was. He said, Fox, you did a nice job on the Pentagon paper. So we’re sending you go to Vietnam. I wanted to go to report about China, but. Vietnam was as close as I could get in those days.

Hmm. So I went off to Saigon. Hmm. How long were you in Saigon? So that was August of 71. I, I’d been to Vietnam twice before that. I’d been to 1962, was a graduate student, and then again in 69 when I got into North Vietnam. But I was there from, from August of 71 until April 30th, 1975. Hmm. Which we just said our 50th anniversary of the fall of Saiga.

Yeah. Which I did not go to, although some, my still alive colleagues went to friends. ’cause I, I didn’t see anything to celebrate about the fall of Saiga. No, not much. Well, the guy who was my photographer during that time, David Burnett was just came. I got a call from him the other day. Just came back. He had a good time, but would’ve made me very sad.

Yeah. Too many people’s lives that I, too many people that I knew whose lives were destroyed by that Saigon fell. Mr. Butterfield was evacuated to a US Naval ship, and almost immediately the New York Times sent him to Hong Kong to report on China. This is 1975. Western journalists were still, for the most part, not allowed into China.

Hong Kong was where you did your reporting on China from. Let’s hear more from Mr. Butterfield. I was gonna ask you, so I think we were talking about Taiwan and Vietnam. How did you get to China? Because you’re, you’re a reporter there in, in Saigon until 75. So how did I get into China? Yeah. At the end of the war of Vietnam.

I got left on a helicopter on the last day. Okay. And the helicopter dropped me off on the Navy ship. The USS Blue Ridge, which is Admiral’s flagship for the seventh Fleet. Hmm. In the Pacific. And I was one of the, uh, obviously a number of people who were evacuated who got dropped there. And then I eventually got transferred to, in a marine amphibious transport ship, the mobile USS mobile, where it was for two weeks.

And when they allowed me to. Send a, a cable ’cause again, again, there was no telephone service at that time. And I sent a message back to my editors in New York and I, I, I wrote a story that’s a short story describing, uh, evacuation, what happened last day. And I got a message back saying that when I got off the ship and I got back to the US they were sending me to Hong Kong.

So my reward for escaping from Vietnam was. Go to Hong Kong, which is where I wanted to go, which is where we covered Chinatown. And it was a fascinating, wonderful, very busy time to be live in Hong Kong. Hmm. And I had a wonderful apartment on, in Puls Bay, looking at the ocean. Mm-hmm. And a great office. I was very lucky to have a, a change assistant who’s who, who came from in cat town area and was very interested in.

What was going on in the mainland. Hmm. And he had all kinds of contacts and he was kind of a, a paid assistant to the New York Times. Hmm. So I would talk to him and there were a small handful of foreigners who were not all Americans that were of various descriptions who were interested in the mainland, but bizarrely enough, China was so closed you could, you couldn’t learn that much.

There were very few people you could talk to. We also briefly talked about the two to three years that Mr. Butterfield ran the New York Times Bureau in China. Here are some of his, his observations. Was it Abe Rosenthal who invited you to open up the Beijing bureau? Yeah. Did he just send you a, a cable or no?

Well, it was, no, that was. That that was done with as us and China were normalizing relations. Hmm. So I, so I, we were talking about that, that first trip that I took where I was able to go in with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mm-hmm. That was a very big deal for me. It was a big deal for us and China.

That was important part. Hmm. And that was followed very quickly by actual establishment of diplomatic relations and in the US being able to start opening an embassy in pg. How long were you there that first time when you were there? You mean how long was they there on that trip? Yeah, that Senate Foreign relation, probably 10 days.

10 days? I don’t remember. 10 days or two weeks. So a very short period of time? Yes. It seemed like a lot. Well, we went to the, we went to Guangdong, we went to Shanghai, we went to Beijing. I don’t remember where else we went. Hmm. But we, we met with Big Deal. Big deal. What was dunk chop like? He’s very small.

He was a tiny little man. Yeah. He had a very typical accent. Were you able to understand him at all? Yeah. Okay. And he had a mischievous smile, but he was a very short man. That’s, that’s irrelevant, but it’s, I mean, it it is and it isn’t right like that, that does. The, those kinds of impressions a billion times that affects how someone leads this massive country.

He, he had obviously had a big personality and a big brain, but he was physically very different, very kind of irrelevant in some ways. Yeah. And he had a funny accent. You went to China in 79. Yeah. And then the New York Times established a, a bureau that Well, when we were finally, yes, I was able to go because the US and China had the, the key to getting in was to.

For American correspondence. That wasn’t just me, it was any, any American correspondence was the establishment diplomatic relations. Hmm. So the AP and UPI at Washington Post, that was a small group of us at first who went there. Hmm. But I was the only one who spoke Chinese. That’s so crazy. I assumed that that allows you to get a better in depth understanding.

Uh, just very lucky. Yeah. I could go out and talk to people. Everybody else had to have an interpreter. And they were local interpreters. So they were, at that time, they were gonna be government agents. Were they working for the psb? Pretty much, yeah. Well, the Chinese assigned me a interpreter slash haer slash my local policeman, who was helpful in some ways, but not helpful in other ways.

Huh? He was there to watch me. Yeah. Were you able to slip? I had to, yes, I would figure out ways to get away from him, but then he would be disappointed. And it was a constant game. I dunno, it’s, it’s, it was a very different system. Hmm. And initially when, uh, I went there, the only place we could live was in the, in, in Beijing hotel.

’cause there weren’t, there were very limited number of apartments for. For foreigners. I was there more than a full year before I could get my own place. Hmm. And before I could set up, so then I could bring my wife and two young children. Hmm. Who were really babies still in Hong Kong. Right. They’d been in Hong Kong.

You mentioned in the book that you were considered anti-Chinese fanis. Oh. Was there a particular reason for that? Well, I, I, I, I can’t tell you the chapter verse No, that be really sorry. But just anytime I would write something that they didn’t like, that would be fanis. Ah, and if I, if I found, if I was able to penetrate something, it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s, those things are in the book.

Mm-hmm. You mentioned you. You know, you dated in Taiwan and in the book you talk about how dating foreigners is kind of a no-no. Is very strict. You mean Chinese? Yeah. Yeah. Chinese. I mean, I, I knew you were at that point married, but you talk about other foreigners in the kind of, or there was a lot of concern about any contact with foreigners.

Well, there was so many things, you know, this whole notion of is Yeah. But everything was, was secret. Mm. And you were not supposed to know this, this, or that. Mm-hmm. There were just sort of things about daily life that you, where do you get your food? How much are people paid to lose your secrets? Mm-hmm.

What’s the word for something would be a secret? And if you, and, and one of the things was, I, I knew that the, the guy who was my handler was every, every few days had to go and report on me. Hmm. And I would sometimes overhear a conversation where he was explaining what I had done. I had done this and done that and said this and said that he was making it up.

No, he just, he was reporting everything. Hmm. But that’s what they, that’s what it was about, was the system of total control. Hmm. But again, I’m, I apologize, but it’s just, it’s so long ago. No worries. I’m trying to think of any other interesting things I. That I wanted to ask you, do you remember you talk in the book about the disco tech that they had?

I really don’t remember much about that. No worries. It’s just such a, a, a kind of fantastic detail in the book. Oh, that was cool. Did you ever go skiing? You said you wanted to do the first foreign or to ski in China. Did you ski over there? Not really. I’m trying to remember the, well, it was one of those things where.

I would hear that the China had a place to ski and then night go, but I couldn’t go there. Mm-hmm. That was one of their frustrations. They limited foreigners from going there. I, it was someplace where foreigners was not supposed to go, but when we talked about his actual reporting in China, he would often point me to the book if the listener wants to know more about that.

Period. It’ll probably be better just to get the book, and I think that’s actually a pretty good place to end the podcast, Fox Butterfield and his book, China Alive and a Bitter Sea. It’s an excellent book of reportage from a period where China is transitioning. Y’all can get copies on Amazon. I highly recommend y’all go out and take a look at this one.

I’ll put a link to it in the podcast page. This has been a really long podcast. I normally cut podcasts much shorter than this, but I just couldn’t do that with this interview. It was such a great interview. As y’all know, if you’re a regular listener, I usually try and end the podcast with a Chung Yu.

This podcast, the Chung Yu, is gonna be pretty obvious. Chung Yu k Hai that is alive in the Bitter Sea, the subtitle of Mr. Butterfield’s book. Another way to translate that might be. To be living in the sea of bitterness. As with most Chinese Chung Yus, there are just about half a dozen ways you can translate them.

Okay. I hope y’all have enjoyed this, this podcast, little bit of a different format, but such a great interview. We got to hear the voice of someone who was there. He had his finger on the pulse. He literally met de champing. He was there when everything in China changed. My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature podcast.

In today’s episode, we look at a work that tackles the controversial topics of aborition and the One-Child Policy. Today’s story, by Nobel-Prize Laureate Mo Yan, watches a father/government official after his wife becomes pregnant with a son. Their first child, a daughter, is not good enough for the official’s dad, he wants a son. But the official is tasked with enforcing the One-Child Policy, China’s draconian rule that each family was only allowed to have one child. We watch as the official forces his wife to get an abortion while explosions happen all around them. 

The book is out of print and hard to get on Amazon, but you may be able to find it via your library:

“Folding Beijing” is one of the most talked-about science fiction stories to come out of China since Liu Cixin, Hao Jingfang’s story is about a Beijing divided into three parts. First Space is for the rich, Second Space is for the middle class and Third Space is for the poor, who clean up after First and Second Space Beijing. The three spaces never exist simultaneously, but rather when First Space is open, Second and Third Space are folded up and put away.

A man, struggling to put his daughter through school, agrees to take up an illegal job to smuggle a message from Second to First Space. 

This is a story that is fascinating because it is all about class, even though China has been run by the CCP for almost a century. Join the podcast as we get folded into Third Space and find ourselves in a new world. 

Want to read Folding Beijing online for free? Click here for the English version. Click here for the Chinese version.

AI Generated Transcript of this episode: 

 My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature podcast. I’m here in Eugene, Oregon. Spring is bursting forth here as I’m recording this podcast, more like mid-April. It’ll probably come out in later April. I’m finishing up working on that book that I’ve talked about. China’s backstory. It’s sep to come out September or October of 2025 if y’all want to sign up to get notifications on that book, and its pilgrim’s progress through the.

Painful publication process. Go to the podcast webpage, chinese literature podcast.com, and I have a thing that’ll take you to my publisher’s page, their Unsung Voices books, and you then click on something that says Pre-order. That just means you give them your email and they will update you when it gets closer to coming out.

Also, if you’re interested in getting an arc, an advanced reader copy of the book, send me an email at Chinese Literature [email protected]. My publishers ask me to find folks who are willing to read the book before the publication date. Post stuff on social media, Twitter, Facebook. Good reads. If you’re interested, send me an email.

Okay, that’s enough self-promotion for right now. Let’s get into. Something else. Farts. No. Unlike last month’s podcast, which was a very stinky podcast, I had a, a friend and fan of the podcast Tell me I will not do a podcast on farts this month, though, I was tempted to, like I said, lots of folks thought lot Month’s podcast on pu, and the most famous fart joke in Chinese literary history was far too stinky.

So I’m not gonna do another podcast on Chinese fart poetry, at least not this episode. But I will tell you, I have found other fart poems in Chinese literature. If you remember in the last podcast I mentioned that I had reached out to a professor of mine who’s an expert on Pspu, and in the podcast I said he did not get back to me about whether or not Psur was actually the.

But of this fart joke, well, after that episode aired, he did get back to me, I assume, because all of his family and friends are fans of the podcast, and they realized who I was talking about, even though I didn’t mention his name, and they emailed him incessantly telling him he had to respond, or maybe it’s just because he is a really nice guy, and so he wanted to be a good person.

He eventually responded. To, to my email, despite the farty uns scholarly nature of that email. Okay. His first email was very short. It just said, I have no other information on this. Whether or not that’s true, I just don’t know. Bye mic draw. And I was a little worried ’cause I had, in asking him about this very stinky topic, I was worried that I offended him.

He’s a really cool scholar. I, I don’t wanna. Offend him and we have a good relationship. So I sent him a follow up email, just kind of meekly apologizing for broaching the topic and he was like, oh no, it’s no problem. Also, have you seen this? And he sent me an article where someone in France translated another Chinese fart poll.

This one is called this Rhapsody of the Stinky Fart Fu, and this stinky fart Rhapsody poem is even stinkier than the PS pole fart joke. So I guess what I’m saying is if I hear a cry from more fart poetry or if I’m just, or if I’m just struggling to be inspired by something other than fart poetry, Yahoo may hear another fart podcast, but not this month.

This month we are going to talk about a short story. It’s kind of a novella. It’s a long short story or a short novella. I’m not, not really sure which. The story is called Folding Beijing. It’s by Howing Run. The story created quite a bit of stir in China a couple of years back. So Ho Jing Fang, let me briefly introduce her.

She has won several. Major awards, the Galaxy Awards, the Nebula Awards. Not only that, she’s quite the smart cookie. She was at Chinua University as an undergrad. Chiqua is kind of China’s, MIT. The, the equivalency is not exact, but that just kind of gives y’all an understanding of how highly ranked Chino is amongst Chinese universities.

How did graduate work again at Chinua, this time in astrophysics and she has a PhD in economics, in management, also from Chinua, and she works in a think tank most recently. So a really smart person folding Beijing is her most famous work. Uh, was a finalist for the Hugo Award and the Sturgeon Award. Both major awards.

In the science fiction community I’D a dystopian sci-fi novella. The story goes like this, it said in Beijing. Here’s what’s surprising though. The story is highly critical of contemporary Chinese society from a class angle. The story is about a Beijing that’s constructed out of three different spaces and all of these three spaces.

Occupy a specific period of time over a period of two days, and each of the three gets its period of time every two days. So that allows these three different segments of Beijing, which are really three different segments of Beijing society to exist at different times. There is a rich. Beijing, that’s called First Space.

It has about 5 million people. It lasts from 6:00 AM of day, one of the cycle to 6:00 AM of day two of the cycle. First space gets lots of time. Half of this two day cycle is given over to. First Space It is. First space is for rich folks. Those 5 million people who live in First Space Beijing are all rich during this time.

That first space is in existence. It’s not folded up. It’s open The. Two other spaces, space two and Space three. That is middle class. Beijing and poor Beijing are essentially shut down and everyone who lives in in second space and third space is, is asleep and their Beijing is literally folded up. So middle class Beijing, that second space wakes up at 6:00 AM on day two, middle class Beijing second space has 25 million people and it occupies the time period.

6:00 AM on the second day to 10:00 PM on the second day. Like I said, this is called Second Space, first Space. Beijing and Third Space Beijing are asleep when Second Space is open and running. The final space is third space. This is poor Beijing. It has about 50 million people. The time period that it’s open is only from 10:00 PM On the second day of the cycle to 6:00 AM on the first day of the cycle.

Poor Beijing is forced to clean up after both first space and second space. So that’s the setting of folding Beijing. You have these class. Oriented spaces. And when one of them is open, the other two are closed down and it, it’s very much about class, like First Space has lots of time and it’s Rich.

Second Space has less time and it’s middle class. Third Space has almost no time and its poor Beijing also. Third Space is. Really dedicated mostly to cleaning up after first and second space. So when we jump into the narrative, the story begins with a guy named Lauda. He works in a waste processing station in Third space.

Remember I said third Space is mostly dedicated to cleaning up after first and second space. Beijing Laal works from 11:00 PM to 4:00 PM so he has only three hours every two days that he can take. Care of personal matters, stuff like eating, buying anything he needs. That’s it. Five hours of work every two days, three hours of of personal time, and then the rest of the time he is in third space, folded up and asleep.

Initially, the scene that the author Hoing Fung paints for us when we enter the story, I. We’re in third space, Beijing, and the the portrait that how offers us is of an older Beijing. It’s one that for those of y’all who went to China before 2010, y’all will immediately recognize this as a Chinese urban space that’s still fairly poor.

You have food hawkers, you have plastic tables. People are bargaining over how much something ought to cost. This feels like an old. Beijing, or really like a second or third tier city, Lauda, the protagonist. He’s been skipping meals in order to pay for his child’s kindergarten. Suddenly he comes upon a way to make a lot of money.

All he has to do is do something that’s illegal, that is go and carry a message from second space to first space. In order to pay for his daughter’s kindergarten, he takes on the job, he’s gonna get paid something like a hundred thousand. A REM B for this. That’s a lot of money. Even today. That’s nothing to shake a stick at.

So for someone living in third space, Beijing, that’s really quite a bit of money he takes on the job he’s offered initially a hundred thousand REM MB. That’s $1,370. At the moment that I’m recording, and if he is able to get a message back from First Space to third space without getting caught, then he’s gonna get double that.

So 200,000 MB or 2000 something dollars. So he finds a guy who’s. In Third Space, who he knows, he has this connection to a guy named P Li, a 60 something year old guy who has been to First Space before. He tries to find out from him how to go in between the worlds and P li tells him, Hey, you have to scramble to a part of Beijing where the worlds are actually being folded.

This allows for you to move between spaces. Of course. This is illegal and it’s closely monitored by the police, so you have to be very, very careful. The message he’s carrying is from a man in second space to a woman in third space, and of course it’s about love, no surprise, but the real seduction that this story focuses on is the love of money, particularly for poor folks who don’t have money.

Those poor folks who are in Third Space, I’m just gonna read you a quote. He looked at the money again. The five thin notes were spread on the table like a broken fan. He could sense the power they had over him. They were baby blue in color, distinct from the brown thousand yen note and the red hundred yen.

Note. These bills looked deeper, most distant somehow. Like a kind of seduction several times he wanted to stop looking at them and leave, but he couldn’t. What’s so fascinating about this story is it’s clearly a trenchant criticism of class in modern Chinese society, and this is a society that’s run by a communist party, a party that took over China more than seven decades ago promising it would eliminate class and make the country a classless society.

Of course it didn’t. As the story points out, class is still very much a thing and that’s one of the reasons why this story has taken off and become so popular and made Hoing Fung so famous. Another thing that’s fascinating about this story is this is a criticism of, of. Class in modern Chinese society and the CCP is generally not fond of criticism.

It has a censorship regime that can normally censor criticism like this. So how is it that Hoing Fang is able to get away with this? As far as I know, this story has not been censored at all. Why? So Megan Walsh, who is a friend of the podcast, she was on an episode we did way back in 2022. Walsh has a great book on contemporary Chinese fiction called The Subplot, where she argues that there are two reasons that Chinese science fiction has found a place on the bookshelves of Western readers, whereas other forms of.

Chinese literature haven’t really gotten to the bookshelves of Westerners quite as much. One of the things she argues is that the science fiction genre in China is less censored. So stories like folding Beijing are to censors in the CCP not as threatening, despite the fact that this is clearly about. A real world.

It literally has the name Beijing in the story’s title. But because it’s not about the real Beijing, it’s about some made up futuristic Beijing. It’s not dealing in the realism of typical literary fiction, but rather it’s, it’s, it’s basing the setting on a science fiction form of Beijing. That somehow makes it less threatening to the Chinese state.

I’m not gonna say too much more about this story, it’s fairly long. You should definitely go check it out. Link in the podcast [email protected], where you can find a free translation of it. There’s a science fiction magazine where it was translated in. There’s also a, a collection of short stories where it’s been translated in which you can buy if you like.

I’ll put both of those up. This is a good place to start. To wrap up the podcast. If you liked the show, send me an email, Chinese literature [email protected]. If you hated it, also please send me an email at that same email address. Normally I end the show with a Chung Yu. This time I’m gonna end with something that’s technically not a Chang Yu.

It’s a famous line from a poem. This is from a FU poem called

The Line, and I’m translating it here is within the red gates. The booze and the meat are rotting and going to waste. Outside on the road. There are the bones of those who have frozen to death.

This is a poem that is commonly brought up when Chinese writers want to criticize economic inequality in the poem. The rich have so much that, that they’re letting it go to waste while just outside the poor are struggling so much that they’re there freezing to death. It’s a fascinating poem and like how Jing Fong’s folding Beijing.

It’s a criticism of economic inequality. That’s a good place to end it. My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature podcast.

Today, we are looking at Chinese Literature’s greatest Fart Joke. This involves Su Dongpo, one of China’s greatest poets, and a monk who punctures Su Dongpo’s self importance.

Here are some of the things I mentioned I would put on the podcast.

Su Dongpo’s Poem on the 8 Winds:

I bow my head to the heaven of heavens

That tiny ray of light that is Buddhism shines on the vast universe 

the eight winds cannot move me

I sit up straight like the purple golden lotus

稽首天中天
毫光照大千
八风吹不动
端坐紫金莲。

Here are some of the Buddhist, Chinese-language sources for this story:

https://books.masterhsingyun.org/ArticleDetail/artcle10512

https://www.lifeweek.com.cn/article/70294

Here is an AI generated transcript of the podcast:

 My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature Podcast. The last two episodes, I’ve had some amazing guests. Today I wanted to get back to the old fashioned way of doing a podcast. That is just me talking about something from, from Chinese literature. Hopefully I’ll have some more guests coming up pretty soon, but we’re gonna go back to the old ways today.

In today’s podcast, we’re gonna look at something from the Song Dynasty, something that I don’t think you ever expected to hear. We’re going to examine the greatest fart joke in all of Chinese literature. This is a fart joke between UR and a Buddhist monk named Buddha’s Stamp. But before we get to all that really quick update on my book, China’s backstory.

I know some of y’all have been asking about it. I’ve been working really hard, as I mentioned, at the year end episode of 2024, I turned in drafts of the book to my editor and I thought, wow, that that was a lot of work. Now I’m off the hook. I can go skiing a bunch. Nope. Turns out there’s still a lot more work to do.

No surprises, really. I’ve been editing those drafts again and again. In fact, for the last three or four weeks, I just spent. Every weekday reading and rereading and rereading those drafts, I’m getting some comments from, from some friends. I turned it over to my editors. This is coming out on the last Friday night, Saturday morning of March.

About a week before that I turned in something kind of close to a finalized draft, or it’s the final draft before my editors actually sit down and, and hack that draft to pieces. So they’re right now hopefully looking over. The book and going through it with a fine tooth comb. We’re looking at a publication date in late September or early October.

By the way, if you’re interested in signing up to get news of the book, you can navigate over to chinese literature podcast.com. There’s a button right there on that page. You can pre-order my book. You don’t actually. Pre-order it, you’re, you’re really just giving my editors your email address. One thing people have been asking if you’re interested in doing more for the book, contributing a little bit more to it.

My editors at Unsung Voices books actually ask me to find people who are willing to read and advanced reader copy. That’s an a RC. So at some point, probably in the summer of 2025. If you agreed to do this, what we would do is we would send you a version that my editors have looked over. It’s not quite, quite the final version, but it’s pretty dang close.

So we would send you a digital copy of that. The book would be in an almost perfect state that the point of the. This is all that you read the book and then you give us a blurb that Unsung Voices books can use on its social media promotion campaign. Again, hopefully you put it out on your social media feed so that other people see that.

If you’re interested in getting an advanced reader copy and doing that, reading the book and providing your comments on the book, send me an email at Chinese Literature [email protected]. Okay, that’s enough of my own personal marketing farting. Now let’s get down to the main business of this podcast.

Bart Jokes. Today we are going to look at the greatest fart joke in all of Chinese literature. One of the greatest poets in all of Chinese literature. He’s from the Song Dynasty. Just in case you have forgotten the song Dynasty goes roughly from nine 60 to 1279, and we could debate those dates. Ur himself lived right in the.

Sort of middle of that 10 73 to 1101 SPO was a poet. We’ve talked about him before on the podcast in the summer of 2021. Way back when Rob and me were doing the podcast together, we actually had a discussion of a couple of Spol poems, and in December, 2023, I actually did a podcast by myself on PS PO’s poetry trials.

He was actually put on trial in a sort of kangaroo. Court in the Song Dynasty for some highly political poems that he wrote. He did not get executed, but he was pretty much on trial for the the rest of his life. I should hasten to add that Suun Poi is not just a poet. He was also a powerful politician in the Song Dynasty, he’s a song Dynasty bureaucrat, a very high level song dynasty bureaucrat.

There are some economic debates that begin around 10 69. These economic debates are hugely important to China’s economic history. PU comes down on the side of the economic conservatives, and part of the reason that he was punished was just ’cause the partisanship. I. In the, this period of the song Dynasty is so brutal.

His punishment oftentimes, and, and this happened repeatedly, his punishment is that he was exiled to the south, the emperor sin deeper and deeper into the malaria wilds of China’s. South, and this actually kind of went back and forth. Dupo was sent down to the south and then brought back into power, and then sent down to the South again and again.

This happened many times. Another thing I should point out about Dupo. Dupo is not his given name. He’s. I think more frequently known as Ur. His last name is Sue, or excuse me, his, his surname is Sue. That’s his family name, but his given name was not ur. That’s a name that he chose for himself. Like most intellectuals in China, he had a bunch of different names depending on the situation he was in.

PO is kind of his rap name or his stage name. Just as Chris Bryan Bridges is not. Normally called Chris Brian Bridges, except for those who know him closely. His rap name is Ludicrous, so Su PO’s birth name was, but he chose his rap name of donor, which just means Eastern Slope. He chose that name. While he was in exile, he was situated on a farm called Eastern Slope, which you can guess which side of, uh, some mountain it was situated on.

So I’m gonna call him, but keep in mind you might see sources when you’re looking him up. Say Suha. Both are correct. Today’s text that is the fart joke occurred when Ur was working as a politician in the city of Gu Jo that’s on the North Bank of the Ysu River. It’s just south of modern day Yang. Joe Yang Joe is, by the way, where fried rice comes from that, that particular dish.

So if you, you enjoy fried rice, it’s a great place to go. I had some fried rice there. It was phenomenal. Obviously, Cuatros not much of a city today, but back in the day, it was a relatively large port on the Yanga River. While he was there as a politician, ginned up a friendship with a Buddhist in a temple in the city of Jinjiang.

Jinjiang is just across the Ysa River on the South Bank of the Yanga River. The monk’s name was Zen Master Foin. Ian, I don’t want to kind of get into the politics of naming, but the, the term we use in English that is Zen in China, that’s called Chan Buddhism. So the Japanese pronunciation of this exact same word, the, the exact same word, is zen, but in China, in, excuse me, in modern Mandarin, the pronunciation of that word is Chun.

And since most westerners call it zen, because it was transmitted to. Areas outside of Asia via Japan. Japan kind of got to name the English word for that. They’re pretty much the same thing. You know, obviously Japan is going to have its own take once it creates this thing called Zen Buddhism. But when you’re looking at the early Zen Buddhist Masters, if you go back in a time machine, 7, 8, 900 years, none of them would’ve said.

Oh, what we’re doing is different from what they’re doing in China. Japanese nationalists today may say that, but certainly Zen Masters of a thousand years ago would not have ever made that claim. But there is a kind of politics to this, but I’m gonna call it Zen just because I’m, I’m speaking to an English.

Forward audience. So Zen Master Foing, Zen Master Foing. That’s just Zen Master Buddhist stamp. It’s literally what his name means. Most Buddhists, when they became monks, chose new names that were derived from Buddhism. So Zen Master Buddhist stamp is not all that unusual. One thing you need to understand about Buddhism to get this part joke is that.

Zen Buddhism has a concept called the eight wins. These eight wins are things that can blow you off your course as you’re trying to be a good Buddhist and achieve enlightenment. Those eight things, the eight wins are praise, insults, defamation, honor, profits, loss, bitterness, and happiness. Not quite sure what the difference between insults and defamation are.

Honor and praise also. Pretty similar. I mean, they’re different words in Chinese when I was, when I was doing the research for this podcast, they’re, they’re clearly different words, but they kind of seem like the same thing to me. They, they’re. Synonyms, but there you are. There are eight wins. Those are the eight wins.

If you are influenced by these eight wins, you are blown off your course to being a good Buddhist. Remember, in Buddhism, the goal of the religion is to recognize that everything in this world is false. This is samsara. Everything is just this endless cycle of birth and death, rebirth. It’s all pain, and all of this is an illusion.

If you can, using spiritual techniques developed by Gaab Buddha, you can. Short circuit the cycle and achieve enlightenment. Stepping out of this cycle, that’s the goal. So Supo is over at Gua Jo. He’s studying Buddhism while he’s working as this official in that city. He’s hanging out talking with his friend on the other side of the River Zen Master Buddhist stamp.

SPO comes to believe as he does his Buddhist studies. He comes to believe that he’s made some real advances in terms of his personal moral development. He is. Thinks that he has conquered the temptations that one might get from those eight wins. And he writes this poem talking about how awesome he is, how much of a Buddhist bad mamma jama he is now that he’s kind of advanced in his study of Buddhism, he’s.

Come to believe that he’s a great Buddhist. Here’s the poem that he writes. I bow my head to the heaven of heavens. That tiny ray of light that is Buddhism’s shining on the vast universe, the eight winds cannot move me. I sit straight like the purple Golden Lotus. A couple of things to note about this poem that Spol writes.

He starts out, I wouldn’t say he’s humble, but. At least he’s not talking about himself in that first couplet, those first two lines, he starts out saying he bows his head. So there’s this kind of sign of submission to Buddhism, whatever that entails. The second line, he’s talking about how awesome Buddhism is.

He’s not talking about himself. In that second line, there’s this kind of sense that this tiny ray of light, just a single ray, a symbol of Buddhism itself, this tiny ray of light is able to shine. All over the vast universe. It’s not a humble start to the poem, but it, it’s, he’s not flattering himself in any way in this first couplet.

But then there’s this real shift in the second half of the poem, line three, all of that humility is gone. It’s out the window. Now, PSPU is talking about how awesome he is now that he’s such a great Buddhist. He says, those eight wins the temptations. That Buddhism warns its practitioners about praise, insults, defamation, honor, prophets, loss, bitterness, and happiness.

Those things don’t move him anymore. He’s just too great of a Buddhist to be moved by that. When reading this, you’re like, oh, wow. He’s. Super prideful and line four is even more prideful. He essentially compares himself to a purple Golden lotus, which is in Chinese Buddhism, a symbol of enlightenment without actually explicitly saying that.

He’s saying that he thinks he’s pretty close to enlightenment. He’s there standing straight, like the purple golden. Lotus Now he’s getting really proud. So, okay, pu is super proud of himself. He sends this poem off to his friend, Zen Master Buddhist stamp. He’s so proud of himself that he’s like, ah, let me write, let me send this poem across the river to, to my Zen master friend on the other side of the river.

He sends the poem across. The river. And pretty quickly his servant comes back and SPO goes, well, what did the Zen Master say? And his servant goes, he didn’t say anything. SPO goes, well, why’d you come back so fast? And the servant goes, well, ’cause he wrote something on the poem and goes. What did he write?

And the servant goes, I don’t know. UR says, Hey, let’s open it up. He opens it up and all over Su PO’s poem. The Zen Master wrote one word, fart. FG P. That’s it. Supo is super angry. He goes, why did my friend this zen master write fart on my poem? This is an insult. I’ve been nice to him before. And he goes and does this.

Supo doesn’t wait. He. Gets in a boat and Carrie goes across the Yang Zoo River. He marches into the temple and he says to his zen master friend, Hey, what’s up with writing fart on my great poem? And the Zen master replies with this famous line. You said the aid wins cannot move you. But with a single fart, I was able to get you all the way across.

The Yanga River, I was able to blow you all the way across the Yanga River.

Wham. In one sense, there is this great joke. Here’s talking about how great he is. How great of a Buddhist that he is. How the eight winds of Buddhism cannot move him. And the Zen master makes a joke about breaking wind and the joke in English translates pretty well into Chinese, that connection of wind to farts.

But there’s this larger philosophical and religious message gets de. Buddhism and he comes to think that he’s God’s gift to God. He writes this poem that’s very highly praising of himself when the Zen master. Write on on this vain, glorious poem, just the word fart. The master was trying to puncture that sense of pride and also simultaneously show dupo how little he had learned.

Remember, one of the eight wins is insults. Dupo proved that he was moved by one of those eight wins, even in this poem, about how he can’t be moved by those eight wins. I’m gonna start to wrap this podcast up. Hopefully this is not the last fart joke of the podcast ’cause this was actually pretty great.

One thing, one question that hung over this whole episode as I was doing the research for, did this really happen in history? I’m sure y’all are wondering that as well. My answer is. Maybe so when I was doing research for this podcast, most of the sources that I found on this particular event were from Buddhist text.

Now, I didn’t go diving into the archives, but I didn’t find anything from non-Buddhist sources. I. About PU and this far joke, I reached out to a professor of mine who’s an expert on PU and he didn’t respond, maybe because he didn’t take this seriously, or maybe there’s some other reason. Mm-hmm. I really do wonder how historical this is, ’cause it’s such a perfect Zen Buddhist parable and it makes me wonder was it true?

Maybe, maybe not. It’s hard to know either way. It’s a great story and what I can tell you is that. Yeah, there are lots of Chinese language Buddhist sources that talk about it as if it’s true, but I have not been able to find any non Buddhist sources that talk about it. I’m gonna put some of those sources up on the podcast webpage, chinese literature podcast.com.

You can go there and find this episode and, and take a look. If you read Chinese, see what you think as. I often try and do, I’m going to end this podcast with a Chung Yu. There aren’t too many Chung Yu about farts, but I did find one.

This Chung Yu literally means dog farts make no sense, and it refers to something that’s utterly illogical or absurd.

So this article is nonsensical dog fart. It has no logic. That’s how that sentence would literally be translated. I’m gonna see if I can use that. Chung Yu this week watching the news. I can think of a lot of things to describe P

as usual. If you liked this podcast, if you thought it was completely f.

Whatever. If you were indifferent to this podcast, send me an email. I will get back to you. It takes me a while, particularly if you have the word fart in your subject line. It might take me a little bit longer to cross the yxi. My email is Chinese literature [email protected]. If you want to be an advanced reader of the book, send me an email.

Like I said, I’ll put links up in Chinese to the story. I’ll also post my translations of. The poem that wrote, so you can take a look at that on the website. Okay. That’s enough for me. I’m going to go, go, go do some farting. My name is Lee Moore and this is the Chinese Literature podcast. I.