Kaiser here.

Let me apologize profoundly for mispronouncing Tom Pellman's name not just once but two or three times in the course of this podcast. It's Pellman. It's not a difficult name; I'm just an idiot.

@rodguttorm, added, thanks:

http://popupchinese.com/data/1473/sinica-while-were-here-china-stories-from-a-writers-colony.mp3

"Bullfighting, bullslinging and bullsh*t" is what Zelda Fitzgeral is reported to have said of "The Sun Also Rises". I had a similar reaction to this podcast. Here's why:

1. The stature of the literature by produced expatriot writers livining in continental Europe during the interwar period is debatable. We read them self-consciously as classics, rather than living, breathing works of art. But even accepting them as all being good to great for the sake of argument, they don't compare to the works produced by native Europeans of the same era, Kafka, Schulz, Mann, Proust, Musil. You tried to shoe-horn Joyce into one of your categories, but even though he lived in Europe, he was writing about his native Ireland. When the smog clears from the skies of reform era China, a similar truth will hold and the best writers will be found to be Chinese.

2. Everyone is at pains to explain the absence of the great foreign expat novel from our shelves. But it is not clear to me why there should be one in the first place. There are certain superficial similarities between Beijing in the 90s and Paris in the 20s, but the differences are more significant. American writers were engaging with Europe in the shadow of war (one just ended and another impending) as well as with currents of European modernism. They could do so because they fought in these wars and were fluent in the language and culture of Europe. At best, foreigners have stood outside as observers of the massive cultural and political upheavels in recent chinese history. (How many of those complaining about expats not properly engaging can themselves easily read a chinese novel in the original language? So, really, whaddaya expect?)

3. Guys, c'mon, you have to stop swooning over the name Peter Hessler on this podcast. The extravagant claim that he's a great thinker on the same level as real historians, anthropologist and socialogists working in China is something of an insult to people like Ezra Vogel or Rachel Murphy. Even comparing him with journalists, he's still nowhere near someone like Graham Peck. Rivertown was written after he'd only spent two years in China and it shows.

4. There are also ethical questions about Hessler's writing that prevent me from fully enjoying it. If I were a Chinese peasant, I would be very wary of doing the neighbourly thing and inviting him to dinner. Because a quarrel with my wife would be sure to be mentioned in the pages of his next book together with an overbearing analysis of what he thinks are the real reasons it arose. One notices that he never subjects his foreign friends, who are likely to be able to read the book in the original, to the same kind of scrutiny. I thought the worst example was in Rivertown, where he speculates (without knowing or finding out) on the motives of a student who committed suicide. What grieving parent wouldn't be aghast at coming across that kind of intrusion. No wonder in his article "Return to Fuling" he considers the possibility that he wouldn't actually be welcome back.

That's all for now, though much more could be said about the navel gazing of expat writers.