Learn Chinese Through Stories: Yu Dafu’s Sinking

Posted on April 9, 2011 by admin

Yu Dafu is our author of the week. His Chinese name is 郁达夫 (Yù Dáfū). He was born December 7, 1896 near Hangzhou and died in Sumatra in 1945.  His father died when he was only three years old and hence his family struggled.  Early loss of a father seems to be common among Chinese writers at this time.  Other such authors are Lao She, Lu Xun, and Ding Ling. He was lucky to secure a scholarship so received a standard education. While Yu Dafu went to university in Hangzhou, he was quickly expelled for protests and then went to Tokyo continued his studies.

In Tokyo, he met other Chinese intellectuals and together in 1921 they created the Creation Society (創造社) whose goals were to promote modern Chinese literature written in the vernacular Chinese. Yu Dafu became famous in 1921 (while still in Japan) after the publication of Chénlún 沉淪, known in English as Sinking. Sinking was published in the Creation Society’s newsletter (创造季刊) and instantly pushed his society and him into fame. Sinking is also the a name of his collection of short stories which also includes Moving South and Silver-Grey Death.

During the Sino-Japanese War, Yu Dafu worked in Hangzhou as an anti-Japanese propagandist.  In 1938 he went to work as a literary editor for a newspaper in Singapore.  When the Japanese invaded Singapore, he fled to Indonesia under a different identity.  However, once his identity was found to be Yu Dafu, the anti-Japanese propagandist, he was most likely killed by the Japanese army.

Sinking is about a young Chinese man pursuing a college education in Japan at the behest of his parents.  In Japan he constantly feels uncomfortable and uneasy due to being alien, being Chinese.  The story frequently has long monologues highlighting the young man’s aloneness.  With its frank descriptions of sex as well as an annoyance with the current Chinese government, Yu Dafu’s Sinking became a hit.

Similar to Lu Xun, Yu Dafu never could seem to break past the short story.  He only wrote short stories, novellas in addition to poetry, literary criticism, and essays.

This week we introduce Yu Dafu’s Sinking for the intermediate/advanced student of Chinese literature.  While modern Chinese literature can be difficult, we believe with confidence and determination breaking into Chinese literature can be done.  Our Learn Chinese Through Stories series features weekly/biweekly installments of famous Chinese authors of modern Chinese literature.

Enjoy and until next week, 加油！

Learn Chinese Through Stories： Yu Dafu’s Sinking 郁达夫 《沉淪》

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A Note on the Tohoku-Pacific Ocean Earthquake

Posted on April 1, 2011 by admin

Today, I am writing to reflect on the earthquake which struck Japan on March 11th, now known as the Tohoku-Pacific Ocean Earthquake.  Three weeks have already passed and northern Japan is still struggling.  The main city struck in the earthquake was Sendai (仙台市) and for those who have read Capturing Chinese Short Stories from Lu Xun’s Nahan would recognize that Sendai is the city in which Lu Xun studied medicine while in Japan.

Lu Xun did not start his career as an author, but instead dreamed of being a doctor and nursing China back to health.  He won a government scholarship and took to Japan to study medicine.  He was the first foreign student in Sendai and the city of Sendai celebrates this fact.

Lu Xun is just one of the many connections between China and Japan.  Hopefully, both sides can use this crisis as an opportunity to heal relations between the two countries.  We all know that China-Japan relations are anything but simple.  Japan has a lot to offer China and China has a lot to offer Japan.

The tsunami and the following nuclear crisis is what did real damage in Japan.  The buildings withstood the earthquake mostly intact.  Schools acted as evacuation centers and business could move back to normal except for a lack of fuel and other supplies.  Japan undoubtedly has some of the best seismic design in the world.  The whole country is seismic territory so they benefit from a countrywide awareness of the danger.

China, too, sits along many fault lines.  The Sichuan earthquake in 2008 exposed that one fault near Tibet.  During the year of Mao Zedong’s death (1976) a fatal earthquake struck Tangsha, which is near Tianjin.  The Tangsha earthquake killed hundreds of thousands and might have been the most deadly natural disaster to ever strike.

Cooperation in seismic design and preparedness is just one way the two countries can continue to move their relations forward.  Here is to hoping so.

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Learn Chinese Through Stories: Lao She’s Teahouse

Posted on March 28, 2011 by admin

This week we are introducing Lao She’s seminal work.  Teahouse (茶馆) is a three act play that is very famous in China  and in the West.  The work was published in 1957 and marks the peak of Lao She’s career as a playwright.  The play is also remembered as a historic work in modern Chinese drama.

The play takes place in one scene throughout the three acts.  That scene is, you guessed it, a teahouse. While being situated just at a teahouse might seem boring, it provided a good base to contrast the historical changes happening in China.  The play has  a total of 70 characters and the play covers 50 years of Chinese history. The play uses a lot of the Beijing dialect and has old Beijing customs like walking your bird its cage.

The first act takes place at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century as the Qing Dynasty was attempting to make some reforms, but was near the end of its life.  The second act depicts the worst of the Republic of China (1912-1949).  He highlights the petty fighting between warlords while the common people continued to struggle.  The third act is about the Kuomingtang’s disgraceful government in Beijing after the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War (第二次中日战争).  The Second Sino-Japanese War began in 1937 and ended in 1949.

A teahouse in Qianmen called 老舍茶馆 has now become a huge tourist attraction in Beijing.  The scene of the Teahouse from the story has become an actual teahouse where you can enjoy some of China’s best tea while watching a variety of Chinese shows.  You can find more on their website: www.laosheteahouse.com.

By reading Lao She’s Teahouse you can learn Chinese through stories as well as learn some important Chinese history.  Since the play spans 50 years, you can read about Chinese life during the imperial Qing, the Republican period, and after 1949.  The best way to improve your Chinese is to keep reading Chinese.  Reading Chinese stories is very enjoyable and you can learn so much abut Chinese culture as well.  Lao She’s Teahouse is one of our favorite stories and will be included as a book in our Capturing Chinese series in the future.  Remember when you are reading Chinese in general, don’t focus on understanding everything.  If a few characters are difficult, then skip them and keep reading.  You might see the Chinese characters in a different context and then remember their meaning.  Your Chinese will get better as you read Chinese short stories, so 加油 and until next week.

Enjoy!

Learn Chinese through Stories – Lao She’s Teahouse 老舍茶馆

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Learn Chinese Through Stories – Lao She’s An Old and Established Name

Posted on March 21, 2011 by admin

Lao She (老舍) is our author for this week.  He was born in 1899 as Shū Qìngchūn (舒庆春).  He is one of the most famous authors from the May Fourth Movement and his most famous works include Teahouse (茶館) and Rickshaw Boy (骆驼祥子 Luòtuo Xiángzi literally Camel Lucky Boy).

Lao She’s father was part of the banner soldiers for the Qing Dynasty government.  During the Taiping Revolution, in which peasants started an uprising against the Qing dynasty and foreigners living in China, his father was killed by the Eight-Power Allied Forces (a collection of European soldiers) during a street battle.  Undoubtedly, Lao She was shaped by these events which he recalls as:

During my childhood, I didn’t need to hear stories about evil ogres eating children and so forth; the foreign devils my mother told me about were more barbaric and cruel than any fairy tale ogre with a huge mouth and great fangs. And fairy tales are only fairy tales, whereas my mother’s stories were 100 percent factual, and they directly affected our whole family.

Lao She’s family was poor so with the loss of his father early in childhood, his mother had a hard time making ends meet.  He worked his way through college, graduated and started work as a teacher in primary and secondary schools around Beijing and Tianjin.  During the May Fourth Movement in 1919, he was inspired to take up writing although he didn’t write his first novel until 1933.  His first novel was called Cat Country ((猫城记) which is regarded as China’s first science fiction novel and was a bitter satire about Chinese society.  Rickshaw Boy and Teahouse were written in 1936 and 1957 respectively.

This week we are introducing a shorter work of Lao She’s which will make the jump into his longer works easier.  The Chinese name is 老字号 which translates as An Old and Established Name.  It was published in 1936.

Lao She’s An Old and Established Name （老舍 － 老字号）

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Learn Chinese Through Stories – Mao Dun’s Silkworms

Posted on March 3, 2011 by admin

Mao Dun is our author of choice for this week.  He is a contemporary of Lu Xun and Zhu Ziqing which means he was also writing during the May Fourth Movement.  The May Fourth Movement is also called the New Culture Movement and was a time when authors were searching through writing the best way for China to modernize and to highlight China’s problems.

The movement gets its name from the day the Chinese government tried to sign the Treaty of Versailles which was marking the end of WWI.  China was not in a very good bargaining position and hence got quite a bad deal from the treaty.  Shandong which had belonged to Germany did not return to China, but instead was ceded to Japan.  Student protests followed.

Mao Dun writes in the vernacular Chinese and so that makes his works more accessible to Chinese language learners breaking in to reading Chinese short stories and literature.  The best way to learn to read Chinese is to read as much as you can.  Well, the best way is with our advanced Chinese readers of course, but the second best is to read as much as you can.

Mao Dun (矛盾) meaning “contradiction” is obviously a pen name.  His real name is Shen Dehong (沈德鴻) and was born in 1896 and lived until 1981.

Silkworms or “春蚕” (Chūncán) in Chinese is a story about the rural life in China which is unique during this time period.  Most stories during this time focused on urban life.  The villagers in the story are hoping to profit from their silkworm business, but find that they are only getting deeper and deeper into debt.  Mao Dun highlights the many troubles that peasants have while trying to make some money and run a business. Silkworms is part of a triology.  The other two books are called with Autumn Harvest and Winter Ruin.  Silkworms is dated as November 1, 1932.

Enjoy and do your best to learn Chinese through stories with Mao Dun’s Silkworms.

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Learn Chinese Through Stories – Zhang Ailing’s Love in a Fallen City

Posted on February 24, 2011 by admin

We are going back to the famous author, Zhāng Ailíng (张爱玲), this week and introducing her most famous piece of literature called “Love in a Fallen City” (倾城之恋 Qīngchéng Zhī Liàn).  Zhang Ailing is popularly known in the West as Eileen Chang since she spent so much of her life living in America.   She left China in the 1955 for America at age 35 and died in 1995 in LA.

Love in a Fallen City was first published in 1944  in her first collection of short stories. A Hong Kong film was made of the story in 1984 by Anne Hui starring Chow Yun-Fat and an English translation was published in 2006.  The English translation is available on Amazon for those interested.

Love in a Fallen City (New York Review Books Classics)

A good review of the movie can be found here: Love in a Fallen City (the movie)

The fallen city is Hong Kong and the war is the Japanese invasion of China.  The story’s heroine is a divorced woman who then falls in love with a Malayan businessman based in Hong Kong.  The two find love in the war torn city.  Please enjoy.

Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) – Love in a Fallen City

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Learn Chinese through Stories: Chinese New Year Special 祝福 － 鲁迅

Posted on February 2, 2011 by admin

Happy Chinese New Year!  February 3rd marks the official start of the year of the rabbit.  People say that the year of the rabbit will be an easy one where we can kick back and relax.  The year of the tiger (2010) is known as a very challenging year with lots of ups and downs. Chinese-American relations certainly had a rocky year so maybe with the year of the rabbit relations will be peaceful.

Lu Xun was no fan of the new year superstitions.  He thought many of these ideas were holding back China to modernization.  This week’s short story is his  祝福 (The New Year’s Sacrifice).  Lu Xun recounts the tradition of 祝福 as he remembers it in his hometown while showing some of the ugly sides of superstitions.  Enjoy.

We wish you a happy Chinese New Year and please continue to join us in 2011 for our weekly Learn Chinese through Stories postings.

鲁迅－祝福

Lu Xun’s The New Year’s Sacrifice

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Learn Chinese through Stories 封锁 作者：张爱玲

Posted on January 28, 2011 by admin

In this week’s reading sample, we are changing gears a little bit. While our first three selections were essays by Zhu Ziqing, this week we are introducing our first piece of fiction. The piece is called “Sealed Off” and was written by Zhāng Ailíng.

Zhāng Ailíng is one of the most famous authors in modern Chinese literature and is most famous for her story, Love in a Fallen City . She is more frequently referred to in English as Eileen Chang since she spent much of her life living in the US. She lived from September 30, 1920 to September 8, 1995.

Learning Chinese through real stories is one of the best ways to improve your reading skills in Chinese so enjoy!

封锁 Fēngsuǒ Sealed Off
Written by 张爱玲 Zhāng Ailíng Eileen Chang

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Learn Chinese Through Stories Zhu Ziqing’s Haste

Posted on January 21, 2011 by admin

We are going to continue with the pieces of work by Zhu Ziqing.  Here is a nice short work of his called Haste.  It was first published in 1922.

Enjoy.

Zhu Ziqing – 匆匆 Haste

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Learn Chinese Through Stories Zhu Ziqing 荷塘月色Moonlight in the Lily Pond

Posted on January 14, 2011 by admin

Here is another piece by Zhu Ziqing and is one of his most famous pieces of work.  The work is called Moonlight in the Lily Pond and was first published in 1927.

Enjoy.

Zhu Ziqing – 荷塘月色Moonlight in the Lily Pond

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