You couldn’t get to grips with fate, but the enemy you could see and touch was your own body
In the sixty ninth episode of The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast we are riding with The Women, the Camels, and the Dholes, one of the stories contained within the Selected Stories of Xue Mo (雪漠小说精选 / Xuěmò Xiǎoshuō Jīngxuǎn). Two women are joining me on this trek: audiobook producer Nicola Clayton and voice actor Sarah Lam. In this tale we get material, we get Buddhist, we get into self-help, we get really close to death, and we take up a rifle loaded with… weirdly sentient bullets. It will make sense when we explain it… maybe…
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// NEWS ITEMS //
- BUY: The Paper Republic Guide to Chinese Literature
- LISTEN: Craig Clunas on Sigmund Freud’s Chinese Collection
- LISTEN/WATCH: Jing Tsu & Dan Russell on Kingdom of Characters
- READ: Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature: Imagined Landscapes and Real Lived Spaces
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// WORD OF THE DAY //
(生存 – shēng cún – to exist, to survive)
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// MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE //
- Nicola’s cinematic pairings: All is Lost (2013, dir. JC Chandor) and Tracks (2013, dir. John Curran)
- Angus’ musical pairing: 万物生 Alive – 萨顶顶 Sa Dingding
- Gansu – Xue Mo’s home province
- The Holy Monk and the Spirit Woman – the book Xue Mo wrote about a figure from Tibetan history who inspired him. Note that this link leads to a page on Xue Mo’s own website
- The Inspector Chen Mysteries – the BBC Radio 4 series featuring Sarah!
- The Leeds Centre January 2022 Author of the Month (it’s our guy XM)
- Xue Mo’s: Twitter, and Instagram, and Pinterest, and his entry on Paper Republic
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The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast 