I just finished 我的母亲做保洁 “My Mother is a Cleaner” by Zhang Xiaoman 张小满.

The book portrays, in a blend of (self) biography, journalism and ethnography, the precarious lives of the author’s mother and many of her peers in the small army of migrant worker aunties and uncles that keep Shenzhen clean.

I just finished the Duolingo Mandarin to Cantonese course.

I am a little annoyed that there wasn’t a nice achievement screen to screenshot and share.

Wonder what to do next, Glossika, perhaps? I’m still far from being able to handle native content like movies and podcasts.

Now playing: Frederic Rzewski: The People United Will Never Be Defeated. Marc-André Hamelin (piano) Yes, this is ‘modern’ ‘classical’ music, but in this multifaceted work some passages sound jazzy, some sound like electronica and many sound like metal but for solo piano instead of rock band. 🤘🎹🎵

Andrew Rule lists his favourite Chinese fiction of the first half of 2025. His hot take: there actually is interesting Chinese fiction.

I’m not nearly well-read enough to judge but the works he lists all sound appealing to me.

Just finished the very interesting The Man Awakened from Dreams (Henrietta Harrison, 2005). It describes how a Confucian scholar (and his community) had the psychological, social, ideological and economic rug pulled out from under him by the societal transformation from the Qing empire to the ROC.📚

I’m sad to learn of Tom Lehrer’s death.

He was one of my big heroes: science nerdery, political snark and plain absurdities, he had you covered.

I have far to many favourite songs to pick one so just go and listen to his albums (he put them in the public domain a few years ago).

I finished 逃走的人 “The Ones That Got Away”. A book about young Chinese that go to live in low-cost cities to escape a high-pressure life. Before reading I’d (naïvely) imagined them to be a bit like hippies or punks but the ones portrayed here just seem exhausted and alienated. 📚

A new volume of the De Gruyter Library of Chinese Humanities!

The Finest Souls of Our Rivers and Alps

A parallel text translation of the only extant contemporaneous poetry anthology from the High Tang (completed ca 753 CE).

I finished Why on Earth Do We Have Libraries. An academic is seconded to start a public library, despite bureaucracy and corruption. Reads part like an officialdom novel 体制内文学, part like cultural essays through the lens of selecting books for the library and the people serving as subject experts.

History: A Very Short Introduction (Arnold, 2000) is a delightful little book. It contains a brief “history of history” and beautifully written essays on doing history e.g. “Is the past fundamentally different or similar to the present?” and “What is truth in history”. 📚