Dylan Levi King
As seen in:
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The National Law Review,
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Covers:
Politics and culture, with a focus on East Asia.
Writer and translator.
Articles by Dylan Levi King
Against Wagyu | Dylan Levi King
I knew that Ayumi had no feelings about the American toothpick flag stuck into my steak. We were at a down-market, bistro-ish steak house after strolling in Kagurazaka. She put up with my commentary—she’s the mother of my child—but I also knew that she preferred I cut a slice before the filet cooled, which she could chew until it turned grainy in her cheek and needed to be rehydrated with a slug of cabernet sauvignon.
A Short Stay in the Woods | Fiction
IV Song Zhen untied the cord around the chicken’s neck. The hen had been acting strange. Earlier, it had walked across the path and for the first time entered the woods. A short time later, after the hen returned, there was a burst of noise from among the trees. A couple of squirrels leapt out from the branches, chittering excitedly. Song Zhen looked on from a distance. The noise had sounded mechanical to her. Her first thought was to rush back to her house.
The Record of the Magnolia Grove: A wuxia story inspired by Great Shun and Su Dongpo’s poems
As the bandits went on down the path, flowers and grasses grew even denser. The warm spring sunshine steamed their perfume into the air. When the path continued to twist and turn, Li Kui and his men worried that they had stumbled into a maze, but it was soon clear that they were still climbing into the hills. They crested a ridge on the Formless Hermitage’s blue tiles and white walls, above which rose the tops of a stand of giant trees.
Moon Theory: Tibetan writer Jiangyang Cairang’s witty portrait of life on the modern prairie
It was a moment worth savoring. Purtsa wore a panicked expression, like one of his own wives caught breaking the lock on the tsampa bin. Gyalo and Döndrup looked like they’d just woken up after their wedding—to another set of twins, naturally—and realized they slept with the wrong woman. Purtsa felt around in his pocket and drew out a white khata. No, wrong one. He rummaged again and came up with a yellow one. He breathed a sigh of relief as he held the khata between his two hands.
Make a Wish: A Sci-Fi Tale of a Small-Town Woman and a Wish-Granting AI
Li Yingmei could not imagine staying vegetarian for three years. She had loved meat since she was a girl. When she got the job at the pork plant, it felt like destiny. To give up all meat for three years seemed too weighty a sacrifice—and she wasn’t even sure it was the sort of thing she should be encouraging as the Supreme AI. If vegetarianism spread, not only would the pork plant go under, but she would no longer be able to eat her favorite food. “Bring my son back to me, Supreme AI.
Is China’s Post-1978 Legal System a Mirage?
As Mao’s newly fledged People’s Republic of China came into being in 1949 and the world fell into the deep freeze of the Cold War, a new generation of American China specialists with no prospect of going to mainland China came of age, forced to plumb the conundrum from afar. One of the Titans of this decoupled generation was Jerome “Jerry” Cohen, a scholar who pioneered the study of China’s legal systems at a time when most people doubted such a system even existed.
The Jade Pendant | Historical Fiction
When Gongsun saw the men enter, she clutched her purple robe tighter around her shoulders and called for the waiter to see to them. They were a small group, each looking fierce, and wearing mutton chops. Their leader was a thin man with a sword in his fist and a dagger in his belt. His was not the build of a wasted itinerant, but the wiry frame of a martial arts master. Behind him came a stockier man with rippling muscles and powerful haunches. Their cruel intentions were obvious.
Eastern Promises
The yen is low, and everybody is coming to Tokyo. If that sounds familiar, it’s not because I’m being coy or hedging my bets; it is the only information to be found in most English-language coverage of Japan’s capital in the aftermath of the pandemic. I can’t stop reading these accounts.
What Comes After the Pigs? | Fiction
The pigs increased. There were big ones and small ones, light-colored and dark-colored, male and female, and almost all of them related in some way. They pressed against each other. They knew what it meant when they saw Ah-jun coming down the slope. The piglets kept to the margins, knowing they would not be able to press themselves into competition with the larger swine. Primordial intuition sent them clinging to their mothers’ teats.
Can Xue: The Experimental Voice of Chinese Literature
Although details suggested a Chinese setting, the small town in Five Spice Street evoked the no-place of dystopian cinema, or an austere stage for a Bertolt Brecht play. Characters in the book refuse to take shape. Madam X, who the narrator places in the spotlight, is never truly known.
Don’t Write Off the Mao Dun Literature Prize
The Mao Dun Literature Prize (茅盾文学奖) is arguably the biggest book award that most people haven’t heard of. Apart from an anodyne bulletin on the English website of China Daily, coverage of last year’s winners in languages other than Chinese has been all but nonexistent. The prize, awarded roughly every four years since 1982 to three to seven titles, has the power to transform the fate of a book.
Is China on Track for Another Nobel Prize After Mo Yan?
Most importantly, to the Swedish Academy, Can Xue is nearing the end of a brilliant career that has not been sufficiently celebrated by other prizes: apart from being long-listed for the Man Booker International Prize a couple of times, her work has been overlooked by both Chinese and international prize juries. Weighing up other factors to the horse race, there is pressure to send the Nobel Prize to Asia.
Before “Black Myth,” Other Games Tapped into Chinese Culture
A gamer’s pale cheeks reflect the glow of a screen lit by the introduction to the hottest game of the season. For the first time, the player will be in control of Sun Wukong’s famous staff, will crush the skulls of hideous yaoguai, and clear a path to India for their master. No, this is not a contemporary story. The gamer is not playing Black Myth: Wukong. It is the summer of 1984. Ronald Reagan is in the White House. The Soviet Union is going to boycott the Olympics.
Revisiting “Monkey,” Arthur Waley’s Translation Masterpiece
When Waley embarked on Monkey, he was reaching the peak of a long career, having already tackled Tang poetry, The Analects of Confucius (1938), and Japanese literature, The Tale of Genji (1925 – 1933). Monkey is the most accessible of his translations, befitting his view of Journey to the West not as a religious allegory, as other scholars held, but as a gleeful picaresque.
Ishiba and a world without Japan
ChinaTalk’s Tokyo correspondent with an essay on the future of the LDP and Japan. The runup to the election for the new leader of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had few electrifying moments, but one came when the princeling Koizumi Shinjiro dropped his radical, hopeless manifesto for changing the country.
Shuang Xuetao, One of a New generation of Chinese Writers, Breathes Life into China’s Rustbelt
At the center of the collection is “Bright Hall.” Shuang’s stories often resist easy summaries, but in a nutshell, it’s a story of how two motherless sons collide.
Casa Batlló: A Tale of Migration and Missed Connections
How did I meet Nguyen Nhu Quynh? I have been staring at the row of sycamore trees in front of the Casa Batlló for about half an hour, waiting for someone. The sycamores grew to the fifth floor of the Casa Batlló. As if by agreement, they all stopped at the sixth floor. This was pointed out to me by the owner of the jewelry store behind me, who said this remarkable coincidence was discovered one summer ten years prior.
Sinopharmacology | Dylan Levi King
In 2004, when I was seventeen years old and invested in the idea that young people should experiment with psychedelic drugs, I checked into a motel on Albert Street in Regina, Saskatchewan; sprinkled a research chemical called α-Methyltryptamine from a tinfoil wrap onto a pair of Wendy’s chicken tenders; and rinsed the foul taste out of my mouth with a pony of Black Velvet rye.
Talented Chinese Author Ah Yi’s Story About County Policing | Fiction
But from Qinglongshan police station, I worked my way up to the county public security bureau and the county government office. That somehow took five years. Over that period, my former chief was only sent to Baihu county at the same rank. One day, the chief and I were sitting at a mahjong table with the head of residents’ affairs and his retired predecessor. We were four generations, seated at each edge of the table.
A Countryside Police Station | Short Story
It was time to redirect the investigation. Back at the station, the aura of Sergeant Zhao’s “Outstanding Reconnaissance Soldier” award was beginning to fade as he got frustrated with himself. After a long time, he stopped grasping his hair and, in an exhausted weak voice, said: “The goods aren’t at the plant. If this was an inside job, we need to account for external involvement as well.
A Brief History of China's Guerrilla Ads
Evolving with cities When I spotted the ads as a student, it was already a decade since their first appearance. By the 2010s I saw advertisements, nearly identical except for the phone numbers, in Lhasa and Lanzhou, Datong and Dalian. In Nanjing, they advertised official seals and massages; in rural Jiangsu, they sold fake documents and Viagra.
How a Rifle Helps Predict the Future of Chinese Military Deployments
Jon of Asianometry is visiting, and we’ll be co-hosting a meetup in New York on February 15 at Pier 57. I’m heading down to DC to hold a meetup on February 21st. Let me know if Also…ChinaTalk is hiring analysts looking to cover China and AI! Consider applying here. Now to Dylan Levi King for some gun talk. The PLA are not given to providing martial or poetic names to their small arms. The rifle that these two young women are holding is called simply the Type 191.
A Translated Chinese Essay About Pressures of the College Entrance Exam
In Lingnan, people often say: To children, the dragon-boat rains are the immortals draining their bathtub. Children are innocent. They don’t mind the humidity. The heavy rains are an excuse to play. All they care about is having fun in the water. To those a little bit older, on the verge of adulthood, however, the rains are unwelcome. The torrential downpour rakes the eaves and adds to their problems. The rains come, after all, at the same time as a major event in life: the college entrance exam.
Heretics in the CIA: Predicting the Sino-Soviet Split + Oxford Meetup Thurs
ChinaTalk meetup in Oxford on Thursday night, RSVP here. Policy predictions often flatten into creeds. And so, we have the Truman Doctrine, which placed America in 1947 in opposition to a new postwar authoritarian bloc. Ronald Reagan’s 1985 State of the Union updated the idea. David Frum produced for George W.
Film Review: ‘No More Bets’ (孤注一掷) by Ao Shen
The victims of human traffickers are forced, in turn, to victimize others. To earn their keep and escape beatings at the hands of supervisors, they must ensnare countrymen—the elderly, often, or the lonely and isolated—in fraud schemes that play on their emotions and fears. Their reward for draining bank accounts with romance scams or rigged online casinos is minimal, as most of the money flows to organized crime or local governments on the take.
Cheng Huizi’s Translated Short Story About Son Preference in China
There were all sorts of people on the bus. One man pulled his mask down to his chin and stuffed himself with a fried dough stick. Beside him, an older man, perhaps his father, with gray hair sticking out from under his cap, smacked his lips and ate a sticky rice and chicken dumpling. He meticulously licked up stray grains of rice from the steamed lotus leaf that the dumpling had come wrapped in.
‘Kidney Slicers’: The Nasty Business of China-Myanmar Telecom Fraud
As the Burmese junta launches new campaigns against the ethnic militias of the Shan State, the flames of war in Myanmar have begun licking at China’s southern border, but tamping down chaos in the borderlands has occupied the Chinese state for most of its modern history. It was to the wilds of Burma that the Nationalists fled in the 1950s — the same destination for restless Red Guards in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as black-market entrepreneurs in the 1990s and 2000s.
Karl Meets Confucius on Hunan TV
If Karl Marx and the ancient sage Confucius were to sit down in twenty-first-century China and shoot the breeze with pink-cheeked students and history professors — hey, what would that be like? Would Confucius be intriuged by the eternal science of Marxism? Would Marx vibe with socialism with Chinese characteristics?
Karl Meets Confucius on Hunan TV
If Karl Marx and the ancient sage Confucius were to sit down in twenty-first-century China and shoot the breeze with pink-cheeked students and history professors — hey, what would that be like? Would Confucius be intriuged by the eternal science of Marxism? Would Marx vibe with socialism with Chinese characteristics?
Acrobats, Tai Chi, Kids: What Makes a Chinese Opening Ceremony?
State media Xinhua News called the ceremony “a celebration of unity in diversity,” and highlighted the Games’s “green and sustainable” credentials. While the digital fireworks provoked some consternation among locals expecting conventional pyrotechnics, the zero-emissions substitutes were lauded in green circles. Mainly, the show communicated a message about China’s enduring place in a pan-Asian community and the country’s technological prowess.
Will ChatGPT Kill the Chinese Translation Industry
ChatGPT, however, represents a major breakthrough in AI. I’m confident it will become widely used by almost everyone in the foreseeable future. The reason: it’s based on texts and big data in the English language, sufficient and scientific enough to lead to pretty effective solutions. Amazingly, ChatGPT’s translation results match the original text in style. It can choose to be academic or colloquial as the need arises. A domestic version of ChatGPT has recently been released.
The Next World War Will Be Economic — Even If The Weapons Don't Work – The China Project | FUTHN
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The next world war will be economic — even if the weapons don't work – The China Project
Some of these programs are minimalist: a Dongbei good ol’ boy running a casino in Laos gets caught up in some animal parts smuggling and finds he can’t bank with Americans anymore, for instance. Some never get off the ground: “Crippling Unhinged Russian Belligerence and Chinese Involvement in Putin’s Schemes Act of 2022” is a recent example — a few days’ coverage, then we hear nothing from them again.
Elastic Girls: A New Short Story of Old Shanghai
I. My grandmother made a wish on her eightieth birthday. She wanted to go to Shanghai, and she wanted me to come with her. I was already on my summer break, and I’ve always liked reading novels about Old Shanghai, so I jumped at the chance to help her make her birthday wish come true. I had heard from my mother that my grandmother had never really traveled. In the ’60s and ’70s, she had stewed at home for years on end, not even crossing the threshold, unless someone dragged her out.
China’s war on drugs: From incarceration to rehabilitation – The China Project
In America Against America (美国反对美国 měiguó fǎnduì měiguó), the book Wang wrote about his visit to the United States, drugs made fourth place on his list of American social ills, placing behind only the breakdown of the family, widespread stupidity, and juvenile delinquency. “I fear that illicit drugs are a force far greater than any historical shocks absorbed by the country,” he wrote.
Fantastic Five: The Latest Translated Chinese Fiction from Author Li Hongwei
Almost time. He looks around the room one more time. Three silent bunks. The beds clean, the desks below tidy. His bed—all in order… Not a single crease in the sheets. The blanket folded into a perfect block. On his desk, only a computer. Books on the shelf or in drawers. The only item left out is the mug. It is new. A light blue glaze. Two holographic zebras nuzzling each other and whispering. He reaches out his right hand and turns the mug, so that the zebras seem to move. One of their tails swishes.
Can Male Chinese Writers Write Without Misogyny?
The difference between the lives of the two women might reflect the social progress in China in the 77 years between the works—the avenues open to Hai Ruo were closed to Bai Lius, restricted by social norms, the guidance of her family, and the imperative to remarry—but, somehow, the inner life of Hai Ruo and her sisterhood also seems more barren.
Madame Mao’s Nietzschean Vision
The peasants had starved, the Soviet advisors were gone, and the Communist Party had begun to tear itself apart. 1965 was turning into a bad year for China. But its famous first lady had other concerns. Through the viewing screen of her Hasselblad camera, Jiang Qing studied a young ballerina. In her hands, this dancer was about to become a hero. Years before, Jiang had been on the other side of the camera as a young starlet in Shanghai. But no longer.
Can ‘Hero’ save the genre of Chinese films about the pandemic?
Hero does not, like these Hollywood pictures, take the pandemic situation only as a backdrop, nor does it attempt, like these Chinese features, made while strict measures against the virus were still being enforced, go for a heroic narrative, celebrating personal sacrifice for the greater good. The film’s three segments are connected by time, if not place. They visit Wuhan, Beijing, and Hong Kong in the first two months of 2020.
Yamagami Tetsuya’s Revenge
One July morning, after years of careful planning, drawing up lists of possible targets, and tinkering with gunpowder and plumbing supplies, Yamagami Tetsuya put his plan into motion. He loaded a homemade shotgun into a bag and boarded the Kintetsu Nara Line, bound for Yamato-Saidaiji Station, where he knew his target would soon arrive by motorcade. Abe Shinzo had not been his first choice. The leadership of the Unification Church was higher on his list.
The world according to Lu Xinghua, China’s renegade philosopher – The China Project
But was Rancière the central figure — or perhaps the target — of an elaborate prank? Prior to his trip to Yiwu, he toured shoe factories and carpet shops in Jiaxing, inspected banners with quotes from Wēn Jiābǎo 温家宝, and heard from export industry professionals on the state of affairs in the Yangtze River Delta.
Liberation Day: An Example of Pandemic Literature in China
The neighboring stores opened up one by one. Nobody wanted to wait until nighttime. Each time the lockdown was lifted before, Mingming had rushed through cleaning up the office, getting back in touch with drivers and contacts at scenic spots, updating her price lists, printing new posters—and then they got locked down again. Two times, three times, five days, a hundred days, back in to open up shop again, clean everything, take down the old posters, send out a message about a special offer...
Prairie Whale: A Newly Translated Mandarin Short Story
The Tropic of Cancer ran through Guangzhou. Although she was not sure what this meant, she remembered how excited her son had been when he told her this fact. The way he said it, she imagined a visible cord, hanging in the air, solid enough to swing from. Or maybe it was like an immense curtain, transparent like the walls of a greenhouse. That was one way to explain why it got so hot and steamy in the city in February and March. In that season, the city was too humid for comfort.
BREAKING: Chinese online left ruptures as Weimingzi launches broadside against Zuoyi23 and disciples in hourlong rant precipitated by denial of Hegel (Bilibili theory vloggers vs. Zhihu left-liberals)
I am an outsider.1 I know Weimingzi 未明子 for his frenetic, theory-heavy Bilibili presentations. He frantically doodles on a sketchpad while talking. He’s entertaining. He’s provocative. He is conversant with 18th and 19th century German philosophy, orthodox Marxist philosophy, Marxian economics, and has also clearly read deeply in contemporary theory. I took note of him after he was criticized for a video on the 996 working hour system.
The Genealogy of Chinese Cybernetics
Those who recalled their time with Qian Xuesen in Pasadena and Cambridge described him as a genius and not much more. He rubbed shoulders with luminaries like Jack Parsons, who would fall to the occult, and Frank Malina, who would be lured away by utopian communism. Qian, meanwhile, cut a conventional figure. He held himself aloof from worldly affairs. He was an engineer; he built what he was asked to build, without too much concern for what uses it might be put to.
“Neighbor”: Newly Translated Chinese Fiction from Zhao Song Tells a Mysterious and Chilling Urban Tale
The next day, I went to her place as soon as I got off work, bringing a few tangerines that I picked up in the night market. They weren’t intended as a gift. I just happened to have some extra. When we got into her room and stood under the light, I noticed that she seemed to be wearing makeup. It gave her a sultry air. She was smoking, too. I hadn’t expected that. There were no signs of it the day before. She held a finger to her lips, signaling me to keep quiet.
“Night Moves”: A New Chinese Translated Short Story by Hu Yuesheng
“Check!” The crisp sound of the chess pieces on the board echoed up into the leaves of the poplar tree. There was a tap and a slide, and another soldier fell. The player whose General was in danger straightened his back. He had broken out in a cold sweat. He stared at the pieces on the board, noting their position, studying the peeling lacquer. He knew that he had lost but he wasn’t willing to resign the game. He was a veteran of these games in the park. In this world, he was a venerable General.
Environmentalism in One Country
The work of Japanese imperial administrators, planners, and architects had been so thorough that, by the time Viscount Sonoike Saneyasu stepped out of the Seoul railway station in the October of 1925, he would have never had the impression of arriving in a foreign capital. Like many of the buildings constructed by the Japanese in Korea, it was a replica of something from the homeland—in this case, Tokyo’s red brick central station.
Trees, Environmentalism and History in Korea
Even here, Kim could see the work of the Japanese. “The Japanese imperialist villains have stretched their grim predatory hands as far as the remote mountain villages here,” Kim Il-sung warned in a speech in 1937 to the people of Pochonbo, a county hundreds of miles north of the capital, “plundering all our precious forest resources.” Read Full Article »
The Dark Room Problem: A Chinese Sci-Fi Short Story by Chen Qiufan
“That’s right. The dark room experience is similar. But it’s more advanced. We turn off your senses one by one, like flicking off lights in a house.” My imagination failed me. It was clearly a common marketing spiel, but it was lost on me. “But I’m still in the room?” I asked. “I’ve seen those videos online where people go to the bathroom and the toilet suddenly turns into a roller coaster.” Xiao Ye was tickled by my response. She gestured at the room: “You’ll be lying down in there.
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