Reading Adultery in the Criminal Records of Late Chosŏn Korea

Jisoo Kim, George Washington University

This presentation introduces the records of criminal cases in the Simnirok (Records of Royal Reviews), a collection compiled during the reign of Chŏngjo (r. 1776-1800). This collection includes 1,112 judicial precedents related to homicide, economic crimes such as counterfeit and theft, and social crimes such as arson and gravesite dispute. The majority of 1,004 crimes are related to homicide (964 cases) and suicide (40 cases). This presentation will first explain the source and translate the few selected homicide cases related to adultery. While translating the cases, it will also discuss sex crime in the context of eighteenth-century Korea.

CCCC is a reading group for students and scholars with an interest in premodern Sinographic text.

All are welcome, at any level of experience with classical Chinese. Please email us to register and receive the log-in credentials.

At each session, one participant presents a text in classical Chinese. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, and work together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.

Presentations include works of all sorts, from the earliest times to the twentieth century.

No preparation required: all texts will be distributed at the meeting.

In Search for a Cure: Trust and Social Inequality in Contemporary China

Presenter: Xisai Song, Ph.D. candidate, Anthropology

This paper unpacks how social inequality shapes patients’ trust in medicine in contemporary China. In particular, I examine how rural low-income patients struggle with chronic kidney disease (CKD).

ROUGH WORK: Discussing research in progress, hence the term, rough work. This rough work session is hosted by the East Asia Program's Graduate Student Steering Committee (GSSC).

"Bones, Brains, and Meridians: Animated Anatomy and Image-Text Analysis"is the title of this Classical Chinese text-reading with Lan Li of Rice University.

"Bones, Brains, and Meridians: Animated Anatomy and Image-Text Analysis"

This discussion interrogates the representation of the brain in a 1956 reproduction of the early modern print Zang Fu Mingtang Tu 臟腑明堂圖. Despite its vague genealogy, this 20th century version of Zang Fu Mingtang Tu 臟腑明堂圖 was often associated with either a set of meridian maps from the early fourteenth century, or with an even earlier set of Inner Canon (neijing 內經) or Inner Vision (neijing 內景) treatises. What is curious about this image are the inscriptions in the head, which read: “The ocean of Yin bone marrow penetrates all the way down” 髄海至隂之在通尾骶. This suggests that inside the head/brain through the spine/back was bone marrow, not the brain--that inside the skull was not a wet, chunky lump of grey matter, but suihai 髓海 or “bone marrow sea,” which was one of the “four seas” listed in the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Cannon. By bringing together approaches in the history of medicine, art history, and science studies, this discussion opens a visual and philological study to understand the ontological implications of the brain in 臟腑明堂圖. What kinds of things were solid? What kinds of things were fluid? Was the distinction between solid and fluid a matter of scale? A matter of relative movements? How does this elaborate on the history of anatomy in classical Chinese texts?

All are welcome, with any level of experience with classical Chinese.

At each session, a participant presents a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.

No preparation is required, all texts will be distributed at the meeting.

Presenter: Tinakrit Sireerat, Ph.D. candidate, Asian Studies, Cornell

This paper is a reassessment of the claim that the natural environment of Hokkaido is ideal for livestock production.

ROUGH WORK: Discussing research in progress, hence the term, rough work. This rough work session is hosted by the East Asia Program's Graduate Student Steering Committee (GSSC).

Speaker: Bin Xu, Associate Professor, Sociology, Emory University

Chairman Mao’s Children: Politics, Generation, and China’s Difficult Memory

In the 1960s and 1970s, about 17 million Chinese youths were mobilized or forced by the state to migrate to the rural areas and the frontiers. In his forthcoming book Chairman Mao’s Children: Politics, Generation, and China’s Difficult Memory (Cambridge), Bin Xu tells the story of how this “sent-down youth” (zhiqing) generation, including China’s top leaders, have come to terms with their difficult past in various forms of memory in the past 40 years, including personal life stories, literature, exhibits, museums, and commemorative activities. At the core of this lasting memory boom, however, is their struggle to deal with the tensions between two entangled aspects of memory: their desire to remember their youth and confirm their worthiness on the one hand, and their difficulty in evaluating the controversial send-down program and other political upheavals in the Mao years on the other.

Their memory is used by the state to construct an official narrative, which weaves the leaders’ “adversity-to-success” personal experiences into an upbeat story of “China dream” but avoids addressing the controversial event. The memory boom also marginalizes those zhiqing who are still suffering from the harmful impacts of the program and veils voices of self-reflection on their moral responsibility during the political upheavals in their formative years. This generation of “Chairman Mao’s children” are still caught between the political and the personal, past and present, nostalgia and regret, and pride and trauma.

Bin Xu is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. His research interests lie at the intersection of politics and culture, including collective memory, civil society, cultural sociology, and social theory. He is the author of The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China (Stanford, 2017), which won the 2018 Best Book Prize for Culture and Honorable Mention for Asia from the American Sociological Association. His second book, tentatively titled Chairman Mao’s Children: Politics, Generation, and China’s Difficult Memory is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He is working on his third book The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society (under contract with Polity Press). His research has appeared in leading sociological and China studies journals.

Faculty host: John (Jack) Zinda, Development Sociology

Ithaca Premiere

1979 > Taiwan/Hong Kong > Directed by King Hu
With Feng Hsu, Yueh Sun, Chun Shih
Buddhist spirituality suffuses this restored wuxia (martial arts) masterpiece from King Hu. Rival gangs compete to steal a priceless scroll from a monastery in "a remarkably photographed caper heist... [with an] emphasis on the intriguing battles of wits and minds." (Far East Film Festival) Subtitled. More at filmmovement.com/raining-in-the-mountain
2 hrs

We will start taking reservations one week in advance of a film's first playdate. Requests received before that time will not be processed.

Shuang Shen is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese, Penn State University

This paper situates Cantonese literature in the context of several key programmatic changes of language in the twentieth-century Sinosphere, including language reforms, language movements, or language policies. It aims to show how Cantonese literature critically engages with “accessibility” as a cultural and political issue through navigating through certain fetishized divisions between the classical and the modern, script and sound, the national and the regional, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese dialect. The paper examines a number of cases drawn from a variety of literary treatises and texts, including Lu Xun’s essays on Hong Kong (1927), Lin Shouling’s serial fiction Diary of a Muddleheaded Man (1950’s), and the documents related to the Chinese Language Movement of early 1970’s.

ROUGH WORK: Discussing research in progress, hence the term, 'rough work.' This rough work session is hosted by EAP core faculty member, Andrea Bachner.