Some words on the poetry of Chen Gongbo, former Mayor of Shanghai and Nationalist Government Ministry of Industry, who joined the Dark Side of pro-Japanese collaboration in the 1940s.
Read MoreFull Tilt: An Online Journal of East Asian Literature and Poetry in Translation
The Summer 2007 issue of Full Tilt: a journal of East-Asian poetry,
translation, and the arts is finally online at the following website:
Shanghai Baby Redux
A conversation with blogger Mikkitaro on Shanghai's notorious "Baby"
Read MoreBattle of the Sexes: Shanghai Baby vs. Foreign Babes in Beijing
It recently came to my attention that Wei Hui's novel Shanghai Baby has been made into a film, starring Bai Ling as "Coco", the novel's protagonist. Meanwhile, Rachel Dewoskin has turned her own non-fictional account of her stint as an actress in a 1990s popular Chinese TV series, Foreign Babes in Beijing into a film as well. Interesting that both stories are being produced as films around the same time and that they both deal with female sexuality in China during the same era. In one, Chinese women appear seductive, Western men are virile while Chinese men are weak. In the other, Western women are attracted to virile, artsy Chinese men. What a telling juxtaposition! I'll get back to this theme at the end of this blog, but first, for those of you unfamiliar, here's a rundown of both stories.
Read MoreOn Translations of Popular Chinese Literature
I recently read a novel, written by the Chinese author Zhang Henshui, called _The Shanghai Express_. The original title in Chinese is pinghu tongche 平滬通車. The plot is fairly sentimental, and for that matter, implausible. I won't give away the story, but suffice it to say that a wealthy Beiping banker (Beiping was the name used for Beijing after Nanjing became the national capital in 1927) falls for a beautiful young southern woman while traveling on a train from Beiping to Shanghai. What made this such a great read was the author'seye for detail.
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