“You can give me your empty words if you like; I’ve come to fill out the forms permitting us to withdraw from society.”

In the seventy seventh episode of The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast we are turning our cheek to Lenin's Kisses (受活 / shòu huó) by Yan Lianke. Yes, I’m finally dealing with him – and not alone. Piotr Machajek is here to show me how to Liven, as we look into the pros and cons of entering and retreating from a society that just cannot leave things be.

// NEWS ITEMS //

Wang Xiaobo’s Golden Age gets a retranslation & a spot in the NYT
Mildly interesting: a 2005 poll comparing expert & popular rankings of Chinese authors
Wang Shuo appears to enter Twitter and announce a new book
Paper Republic profiles Fujianese poet Wu Ang

// WORDS OF THE DAY //

(狗带 - gǒu dài - go die)

(入世，出世 - rùshì, chūshì - enter society, withdraw from society)

// MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE //

Angus’ musical pairing - Nevergreen by Emancipator
Piotr’s musical pairing - The Perfect Revival Plan by Zhang Ling - 我是老张BIG JOHN
Jiayang Fan in the New Yorker: Yan Lianke’s Forbidden Satires of China
the concept of ‘habitus’ in Bordieu’s thought
the concept of ‘biopolitics’ in Focault’s thought
Reference News - a heritage PRC newspaper covering ‘the outside world’
the commodification of Mao Zedong & Maoism

Ep 77 - Yan Lianke and Lenin’s Kisses with Piotr Machajek