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eileen chengyin chow

@chowleen

8 Jul

Another woman artist - though not Chinese - whose self portraits I return to often is the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907). She died at age 31, shortly after giving birth.

My favorite:
"Self-Portrait on the sixth wedding anniversary" 1906.

We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting each other go. For holding on
comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

Rilke wrote "Requiem for a friend" over the course of 3 days alone in the Hotel Biron, mourning her death.

[PMB, Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1906]

@parisreview

I can hardly think of any writing by Rilke that does not evoke intense love in me, or at least the remembrance of having loved it once, intensely.

But "Requiem for a Friend" is yet again, something else.
full text at @parisreview theparisreview.org/poetry/3205/re…

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eileen chengyin chow

@chowleen

24 Jun

On the fifth day of the fifth lunar month—#端午Duanwu—we commemorate the death of the poet-minister Qu Yuan 屈原.

Exiled from the kingdom of Chu for his fierce opposition to Qin (which did indeed demolish all, in its imperial ambition), he drowned himself in the Miluo River. 1/

Legend has it that fishing boats set out looking for the much-beloved Qu Yuan. When he could not be found, food was thrown into the river to prevent fish from consuming his corpse.
Hence Duanwu is also known as the #DragonBoatFestival & sticky rice packets (zongzi) are eaten. 2/

'The Songs of Chu' 楚辭, attributed to Qu Yuan (but more likely by multiple authors) are densively allusive poetic laments dating from the 3rd c BCE collapse of the Chu kingdom.

To quote David Hawkes, Chuci 楚辭are the poetry of tristia and itineria —the laments of exile. 3/

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eileen chengyin chow

@chowleen

19 May

@ourobororoboruo

@ourobororoboruo @intewig quick response to a fascinating question! 文人 wenren is of course the older term, but had a whiff of disrepectability to you - 賣文為生 was not a positive descriptor. Li Yu of the Ming Dynasty is most famous of a self-consciously professional class of writers - Patrick Hanan's +

@ourobororoboruo

@ourobororoboruo @intewig book on Li Yu is excellent if you are interested. 作家 is an older binome that becomes repurposed in the 20thc once the term 專家, and -家 for expertise, become common - I assume it is a Japanese reconstruction of kanji for a modern purpose.
作家 as profession is also gained +

@ourobororoboruo

@ourobororoboruo @intewig via translation - with late Qing Lin Shu translations of Dickens, Dumas, et al., they become published as 世界作家. But progressive May Fourth writers were never fully comfortable with the term, bc of its association w commerce - doubly so when Mao basically posits 作家 and 革命+

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eileen chengyin chow

@chowleen

4 Feb

“Wuhan’s direct entanglement with the world beyond Hubei province’s borders is nothing new. Caravans took tea overland to Russia.”

An account of Wuhan-in-the-world and its colonial history from the nineteenth onwards, by Robert Bickers robertbickers.net/2020/02/03/wuh…

My stepfather grew up in the French concession in the cosmopolitan port city of Hankow 漢口. His father and grandfather were both engineers, and the Chow family played a critical role in the construction of the Beijing-Hankow Railway.

[19thc British map of trading routes]

As a result of growing up in Hankou in Wuhan, LY Chow became deeply enmeshed with and fascinated by the larger world — before he went to study international relations and political science at Yenching U (now Beida), and long before he made it his lifelong scholarly discipline.

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eileen chengyin chow

@chowleen

14 Sep 19

離人無語月無聲
明月有光人有情
別後相思人似月
雲間水上到層城

唐。李冶 Li Ye (Tang dynasty)
#everynightapoem #moon #中秋節

[Qi Baishi, Moon in Dream, detail]

The Tang woman poet Li Ye 李冶 (730?-784)’s father darkly predicted that she would be a “unruly woman” from her precocious poems, and thus dispatched her off at age 11 to a Taoist nunnery.
Li Ye embraced her unruliness and became known for her poetic output and her love affairs

Only 16 Li Ye poems are extant, but traces of her exist in literary anecdotes & others’ love poems.

At the height of her reknown she was offered an imperial consort title, though she did not stay long at court. In 784 she was put to death for writing poems criticizing the Tang.

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eileen chengyin chow

@chowleen

29 Jan 19

The past few times I’ve spoken on immigration, I simply walk to the front of the room and start to deliver my lecture...in Chinese. (I’ve done this speaking on other topics too-incl to 200 1st years in the @DukeEnvironments masters program)

Students: 🤔😦😅
bemused, alarmed

1/

I wait to see who is willing to interrupt me, to suggest that I’m in the wrong classroom, or that I got a different memo about the lecture topic. Students who understand the language are usually beaming; I ask them if they’d be willing to interpret. Others are tuning out.
2/

I do this to make my audience think about how language informs but also discomfits, how we always have differentiated access - and how reluctant we are to challenge existing power structures (here, the prof in front of the class)-

And, how migrants feel every single day.
3/

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