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Beijing Lights

A photo essay by Jens Schott Knudsen

 

Ed: These photos will be exhibited at Ju Er space (no.8 Ju’er hutong, Beijing) with an exhibition opening this Sunday April 24th at 4pm

"Peking is like a grand old tree, whose roots stretch deep into the earth and draw sustenance from it. Living under its shade and subsisting upon its trunk and branches are millions of insects … How can a Peking resident describe Peking, so old and so grand?"

- Lin Yutang, 1940

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Festival of Ghosts

New Chinese literature – a story by Zheng Xiaolu, read by Tiffany Lam

 

Ed: We're delighted to bring you a new kind of feature: audio stories. This is thanks to Anna Savittieri, who got together with her college friends Tiffany Lam and Jacob Spitzer to produce a reading of "Festival of Ghosts", a haunting story by the Chinese writer Zheng Xiaolu about family planning, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping and the text was originally published on Words Without Borders here. Anna has also done a Q&A with the author at her blog here and we've reposted it below. As Anna writes, "Translation is a huge barrier to accessing Chinese literature, but it still seems strange that so little is available in English ... Without access to contemporary culture, we forget the people, combining the state and its citizens under our notion of 'Chinese'." We hope you enjoy listening.

 

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Red Mark

My childhood during the Cultural Revolution – by Jianguo Wu

 

In my early days at nursery school, in the late sixties, my teacher was Mrs Nian. She was a kind person. When the nursery school couldn’t offer any food to the children except boiled water, Mrs Nian sometimes brought fruit from her own home for us. But later she was denounced by the other teachers and was forced to stop teaching. I saw a meeting taking place in the school office, where Mrs Nian was standing at the front with a board hung around her neck.

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White Monkey

Living it large as a laowai performer – by Eli Sweet

 

I was already a rapper when I arrived in Chengdu in the fall of 2006. I had started rapping in high school, around when I started studying Chinese, and my identity back then was largely defined by those two hobbies. After I graduated college I recorded two hip hop mixtapes, which were released to underwhelming public response. Hip hop had begun to look like a long shot; China seemed increasingly promising by contrast. So at the suggestion of a former study-abroad classmate I hopped a plane for Chengdu.

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King Cobra

A poem by Tim Tomlinson

 

The dog’s barking woke them –

a cobra had entered the house

 

and now, reared up, hood flared,

the snake stared down the barking dog,

 

who snapped and pawed and feinted. 

Roy, from Chicago, froze.

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