My namesake, the Shanghai writer Eileen Chang 張愛玲, must rank high among the writers to whom I return obsessively. As it is her birthday today (and mine too), a reprise of some favorites.

A few drawings that she made to accompany her and her friends' writings 1/ Born in Shanghai in 1920 to a once lofty Qing dynasty lineage, Eileen Chang always seemed at once latter-born and far ahead of her time - a self-fashioned legend, precocious with the caustic bite of one far older and weathered. 2/

'I want to be let alone' -conjuring Greta Garbo

Tonight is #GhostFestival (#中元普渡, #鬼節, #お盆) in Asian Buddhist/Taoist/folk traditions.

Don’t drink, don’t swim or go near bodies of water, don’t wear all white, don’t shave your legs, don’t touch walls —lest you walk into hungry ghosts

[Anita Mui in 胭脂扣 Rouge, 1987] The 7th full moon of the lunar calendar marks the moment that all hungry, discontent ghosts are let out to roam the human realm #鬼月 #中元普渡

[Spirit Traces 仙跡, Yeh Wei-li 葉偉立, 2019 at Taipei MOCA - photos of
ghostly, abandoned places]

#七夕 : 7th night of the 7th lunar month is, in legend, the one night a year that the separated lovers may meet one another by means of a bridge of magpies in the skies

Tonight is their night: a thread of poems

[📷 Yamamoto Masao] should a love meant to last beyond time
begrudge mere nights and days
apart?

兩情若是久長時
又豈在
朝朝暮暮

Closing lines from the ci 鵲橋仙 ‘Immortals by the Magpie Bridge,’ by Northern Song Dynasty poet Qin Guan 秦觀 (1049-1100)

#everynightapoem #七夕

Mum Bett sued her master for her freedom & won in 1781. “Any time, any time while I was a slave, if 1 minute’s freedom had been offered me, & I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I wld have taken it – just to stand 1 minute on God’s earth a free woman – I would.” Elizabeth Freeman (1744?-1829), born as “Mum Bett,” became the first African American woman to successfully file a lawsuit for freedom in the state of Massachusetts in the case known as Brom and Bett v. Ashley, which in turn led to a series of successful “freedom suits.”

Teaching on storyworlds rather than Chinatowns this term.

But given that the recurrent question of our course is how the stories we tell (and are told) shape the world we see (and don't see) around us -I spent today addressing the latest non-random violence against Asian women. A detour from our current unit on fairy tale storyworlds, yet grimly apropos. After all, in their original tellings, evil is as omnipresent as virtue, and stories oriented towards 'happily ever after' can easily be detoured by suffering and death. Not unlike immigrant stories.

The great pianist Fou Ts’ong 傅聰 passed away last week in the UK, from covid. Many first encountered him not as a lyrical, brilliant interpreter of Chopin (he was), but as the young recipient of extraordinary letters from his father Fu Lei that were later collected: 傅雷家書.

https://twitter.com/amyyqin/status/1344591710244855809

In the sort of happy accident that young autodidacts (avant-Google) often have, I was separately a fan of both father and son without learning of their connection.

Fu Lei 傅雷 was the emblematic Shanghai Francophile: writing on and translating Romain Rolland, Balzac, Rodin.

Returning to Mary Shelley and her *other* tale of loss, written right after her husband’s death, its title from her diary entry: “Yes I may well describe that solitary being's feelings,feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race,my companions extinct before me.” And it was more than Percy that Mary Shelley had lost: her father-in-law forbade her from using the family name.

Hence, “The Last Man” is merely the work of “The Author of Frankenstein.” It is a story of radical solitude, by an author bereaved and effaced. As apt now, as then.

Winner of 2020’s new kanji contest in Japan: the character 座 (seat), ingeniously redesigned as a neologism for “social distance.”

Note the two 人(person) radicals in the original 座are now positioned farther away from one another!

Runners up: sousaku-kanji.com/?fbclid=IwAR2q… I love this one from a 15yo entrant: the character 画 (picture, image) rendered 3-D and folded - to make the neologism for laptop/notebook computer! 😍 so clever.

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]

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/

@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 @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 +

“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]

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

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/

The #WorldWar1 Armistice signing was enthusiastically celebrated in China, too - with street rallies, a military parade, and even a new commemorative gate. It might have been the "European War" 歐戰, but for many Chinese it held promise of redress for colonial invasion.
#WWI100 "The World Will Be Made Safe For Democracy"
"為世界造和平“ Creating Peace for the World
”世界大同“ Great Global Unity
are some of the signs held aloft in November 1918 in Beijing.
#WorldWar1 #WWI100 #Armistice

I always thought this was where it was all headed. Abolishing birthright citizenship for the non-white and non-rich. And why I am teaching United States v. Wong Kim Ark next week.

https://twitter.com/ksieff/status/1034905591402115073

Who was Wong Kim Ark?

At this juncture, it is particularly important to remember him. In 1898, as a result of a case successfully brought on behalf of 25-year-old Wong Kim Ark’s right to habeas corpus and to birthright citizenship (he was born and raised in San Francisco) 1/

The great modernist Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang 劉以鬯 passed away today. Peripatetic, diasporic, cosmopolitan - Liu's life and work embodied a lesser known trajectory of modern Chinese literature. Wong Kar Wai's IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE was inspired by 2 of his best known stories. Wong Kar Wai brought Tony Leung with him to visit Liu Yichang - he wanted him not only to understand Liu's stories better, but also capture something of Liu's style in his creation of the character of Chow Mo-wan, lovelorn journalist and pulp fiction writer.