Photos of Zhang Jie

Doing research on short stories, I came across two photos of Zhang Jie, who is widely (and mistakenly) thought to have written the first love stories after the Cultural Revolution.

Above, she's with Henry Miller in New York in 1986. (Another love story writes itself!)

Below, with a writer named Harrison ___ (I can't make sense of the last name yet. The Chinese is Suo-er-si-bo-li.) Who's the girl on the left? Zhang Jie and her publishers did not make a note. (Another hidden story!)

Pro Translation: Chinese Technology Development Plans

Free-lance translation is a great way to make some extra money, and also helps give some small sense of what global capitalist development means in China. One thing it means is a certain kind of rhetoric, a deep pride in the step-by-step completion of initiatives directed at catching up to Western technological levels.

Here is a brief sample of this developmentalism rhetoric:

On May 31, experts from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology National Remote Sensing Center conducted mid-term inspections of the Beijing Normal University-lead initiative of the 863 Plan, “Global Epicontinental Parameter Product Manufacture and Applied Research.” The meeting was hosted by National Remote Sensing Center Director Li Jiahong, with participation and lectures at the mid-term inspection meeting by BNU Vice President He Jianping, National Remote Sensing Center Assistant Director Zhang Songmei, and others.

The initiative is being led by Beijing Normal University, with the participation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, and other units, 11 in all. Among the initiative's assembled personnel, Program of Global Experts specially recruited Professor Liang Shunlin to report on the overall state of the initiative: the initiative has collected global remote sensing satellite data, product data, climate ecology station and surface observation data, totaling to 500 terabytes; it has established inversion algorithmic systems for global surface epicontinental special parameter products based on multiple sources of remote sensing data and possessing the highest international standards; it is establishing automated manufacturing systems for global kilometer-scale products, and also beginning automated production of five kinds of high precision global long-duration sequencing products. It has taken the first steps to implement CoLM-DGVM and transformational systems for assimilating the surface data of remote sensing data. After the team concluded the general report, 5 task force groups presented reports on the state of their tasks, and the experts gave their feedback on the progress of these tasks, yielding up valuable opinions and suggestions.

TED China x 2

Last night I watched two TED talks on China, one on the political activism and artistic agenda of Ai Weiwei, the other, Martin Jacques's summary of his book When China Rules the World.

China is a place where freedom of expression is severely limited; China seems set to be the world's largest economy within 10-20 years; how do these two propositions add up?





Update and note: my sense of Jacques's presentation is much the same as in the Telegraph review by Adrian Michaels: "...the book’s general thrust is undoubtably correct," even if not all of his individual propositions are.

Who is Ye Gongchao?

A note for later:

Qian Zhongshu’s failure to return to Southwestern United University in the fall of 1939 is controversial; rumors abound that Qian thought the school was beneath him. One biographer, for example, relates that Qian said, “The Southwestern United department of foreign languages simply wasn’t satisfactory; Ye Gongchao was too lazy, Wu Mi, too stupid, and Chen Futian, too coarse.” Ai Mo 爱默, Qian Zhongshu zhuan gao 钱钟书传稿 [Draft Biography of Qian Zhongshu] (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 1992).

Chen Futian 陈福田 (Ching Fook-tan, 1897-?)

Chen was born in Hawaii and obtained a PhD from Harvard in 1923. In 1948, he moved back to Hawaii. Possibly he is in the photo above, but which person is he?

Wu Mi -- the romanticist; apparently he is seated third from the right -- the guy with the pocket square, I guess?

Ye Gongchao, standing, at right in this 1940 photo of professors and students from the Southwest United department of foreign languages (thanks to Wu Xuezhao, Wu Mi's daughter).

The Injustice Done to Tou Ngo

Whenever and wherever a Chinese is in trouble he calls upon Heaven...The Chinese are never religious, but superstitious. They play with religion. Fatalism is the one and only belief to which they hold whole-heartedly. It is their only salvation, and enables them to suffer everything willingly and without complaint, and it brings a stability to their emotional life in their journey through this mortal world.

-- Liu Jung-en, Six Yuan Plays

I cry Injustice! let Earth be moved, let Heaven quake!
Soon my spirit will descend to the deep all-embracing Palace of Death.
How can Heaven and Earth not make complaint!
There the sun and moon hang by day and night,
There the spirits and gods dispense life and death.
Heaven and Earth!
It is for you to distinguish between right and wrong,
What confusion makes you mistake a villain for a saint?
The good suffer poverty and want, and their lives are cut short;
The wicked enjoy wealth and honour, and always live long.
Heaven and Earth!
You do but fear the strong and cheat the weak,
You too take the boat the current favors.
Earth! you cannot distinguish good and evil, can you yet be Earth!
Heaven! who mistake the fool for the sage, you are Heaven in vain!
Oh, nothing is left to me now but two streams of flowing tears.

-"The Injustice Done to Tou Ngo" by Guan Hanqing, translated by Liu Jung-en

Listmania

I just spent an inordinate amount of time tweaking my LaTeX/Bibtex code so that I can print out lists of things which run through my head and might possibly make work a little more productive; for example: 

Some Chinese Short Stories 

1. Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman,” in The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: the Complete Fiction of Lu Xun, trans. Julia Lovell (New York: Penguin, 2009), 99–99

2. Lao She, “Black Li and White Li,” in Reading the Modern Chinese Short Story, ed. Theodore Huters and Marston Anderson, trans. Don J. Cohn (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990), 121–136

David Remnick's Profiles, I

David Remnick's Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker (2006) profiles several authors who spend their entire days and lives writing or thinking about writing. The need to write. The responsibility. And less attractively, the anger the author reserves for readers who decline to entertain literature outside of their comfort zone.

"No Longer, Not Yet: Don DeLillo" originally published in The New Yorker, 1997, reveals a writer with more equanimity than Roth, yielding an insight into writing that is strongly reminiscent of what Stanley Fish would say in How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One in 2011: "At some point, you begin to write sentences and paragraphs that don't sound like other writers.'"

The task of the critic, as I now understand it, is to figure out what is unique about those sentences and paragraphs I choose to study. The "social issues" in the work are secondary, though an important secondary.

We Serve God by Enduring Suffering

John Milton  (1608-1674)

Sonnet: On his blindness

When I consider how my light is spent,
    Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
    And that one talent which is death to hide,
    Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my maker, and present
    My true account, lest he returning chide,
    Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?
    I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
    Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
    Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best, his state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
    And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
    They also serve who only stand and wait.

Yang Jiang submits that the poem should assuage people with any kind of deformity or incapacitating illness: "If they follow the intentions of Heaven and accept their pain, this too is service to God; similarly it is moral accomplishment, because it is the refinement of the soul, the improvement of the self in the midst of bitter pain."

I suppose she's right that suffering requires a supporting logic -- at bottom, this is what the German psychoanalyst and self-help writer Victor Frankl meant, yes? But if we apply the formulation too strictly, we will never take Tylenol ("Your headache serves God, dearie.") and we may well become the sort of worshippers who flog themselves, or worse ("This body part amputate I, in remembrance of Thee, o Lord..."). So the thought seems incomplete

Thanks to Weed's home page for the text of the poem.