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Hi there, I'm Carla Knappi and this is the new books in East Asian Studies Podcast. Welcome and thanks very much for joining me today for a really funny and really fun book to read. So I just finished talking with she beading about her new translation of Fung-Lung-Lung's Treasury of Laughs. It's called Fung-Lung-Lung's Treasury of Laughs, a 17th century anthology of traditional Chinese humor.
This came out with Brill in 2015. Now what you'll find in the interview to come is a conversation not only about this really fascinating book, but also about the place of this book, this particular treasury of laughs, within a history and larger context of China, of Chinese studies, of humor both within China and beyond, and also some reflections on how this particular kind of work, a joke book, basically, write a book of humor for the 17th century poses opportunities and challenges for a translator. Now not only are you going to hear Beating talk about all this, but stay tuned because by the middle to the end of the interview, you'll also hear her very generously sharing some of the jokes with us. I think she reads about seven jokes from the book and toward the end, they become sex jokes.
So, say for the translation, say for the theorization of humor and Ning China, but also say for the sex jokes at the end. Trust me, they're worth it. And with that, I will leave you to it. Thanks as ever for your support of the channel, for listening, and I hope you enjoy the joke book in particular, as much as I did.
I'm here today with you Beating to talk about her new book, Fung-Lung-Lung's Treasury of Laughs, a 17th century anthology of traditional Chinese humor. Beating, thank you so much for being with me today. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome to new books in East Asian Studies and thanks for both making the time and also giving us such a fascinating and really fun translated book to talk about.
Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Of course. So, let's talk about what we tend to talk about as the first thing in the channel, traditionally.
So, let's start big. Can you talk a little bit for us about how you came to work on China and the academic study of China specifically? What brought you to the field? Okay, when I was in Taiwan, my undergraduate degree is foreign languages and literature.
So, I really never thought that I would make the study of Chinese history my career. And when I came to the United States for graduate study, my first major was comparative literature. I thought that since I have been pretty familiar with the Chinese literary tradition and also my degree was in foreign languages and literature, I could do a comparison. But when I came to this country, I realized that my department, in my comparative literature, as a comparison of two different European traditions.
And that was not what I was interested in doing. So, I transferred to East Asian studies and gradually my interest turned to history. And I thought that China would be a very good field for me to study because when I was growing up in the Chinese society, I knew everything about China. So, China did not particularly interest me.
But after I left a Chinese society and came to an American environment, I felt that when I studied history and when scholars mentioned China, they seemed to inspire me to look at China differently and they got really interested in the study of China because I felt that when you step away from China, you probably can see China more clearly than when you are inside of a Chinese environment. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. So, the book that we're talking about today is a translation of this Falun long work, The Treasury of Laughs.
So, can you talk for us a little bit about how you came to be interested in this particular work? Maybe why Falun long and why this particular treasury of Laughs as the focus of your work here? Yes, I first encountered Falun long's treasury of Laughs when I was contacted in the United States Library. My dissertation title is Celebrating the Emotional Self, Falun long and late mean ethics and aesthetics.
And because the University of Minnesota doesn't have a very good East Asian library, I mean that the collection is good but not very substantial. So, I decided to go to Harvard Indian Library to do my research. Falun interests me because he is somebody who talks about Xinjiang. Emotion driven romanticism or heroism or activism.
So Falun says that he defines human rights by emotion. He said people who don't have emotions, he doesn't think of them as real human beings. And that really touches me because I am a pretty emotional person and I always feel like if somebody is always very serious or indifferent and it doesn't have a lot of compassion or love or of wrong feelings, then it's difficult for me to associate with that person. So I think his Xinjiang emotion driven teaching touches me and I wanted to read everything from a long road, but particularly the part of his writings that touches on selfhood and emotions.
So when I decided to go to Harvard Indian Library, I contacted a friend there who sang with Peter. Peter and I went to the University of Minnesota to do our masters together. And he and I also both worked for Professor N. Watner.
We are her research assistants. I stayed in the University of Minnesota to do my PhD and Peter went to Harvard to do his PhD and when he learned that I was going to his school to do my dissertation research, he said that he would be there to give me more support. So the first book that I picked up at Harvard Indian Library was the Monstradary of Laughs. And Peter said across the table with me and when he noticed that I was making great efforts to suppress my ghettos, he felt very curious.
And he asked, what is it that you are reading? And I said, I'm reading a guest book. And he said, I thought you came here to do your dissertation research. He was there anyway that I was reading something fun.
And then I said, search. And he said, are you serious? How did you get into a proof of such a project? And you even got a dissertation fellowship to do it and you get very envious.
And also yes, don't you regret that you leave this? But I felt that I was sort of taking some sort of risk when I choose a soft topic for my dissertation because as a historian, people usually anticipate you to do research on an important person or important historical event, important institutions, et cetera. And so when I chose law songs, short stories and jokes as the primary sources for my research, I knew that some people might thought that those were not very serious source materials. And indeed, when I went on a job search, sometimes people ask me, you are a historian, how can you justify yourself?
You don't you love those kinds of questions? If anyone's listening, please don't ever ask people those kinds of questions in job searches because they're really not very useful question. But anyway, go out. Yeah.
And then when I was doing my first book, my other professor, Professor Ted Farmer suggested me that my dissertation is about humor, not just humor, but my dissertation is about emotions and personhood. And then the dichotomy between that criticism and romanticism. But he says that a lot of the materials in my dissertation, he said, he has to admit, he's dry. And so he said, what you are turning your dissertation into a big book, please get rid of the dry stuff.
It just focuses on the fun stuff. I suggested that I wrote about humor. And so my first book was entitled Beyond eroticism, a historian's reading of humor in form of child's body. Because a lot of people would know form of thought that of a woman is a person who wrote love stories and love songs.
And so people associated form of with eroticism is something of color. But I feel that it's sort of doing him a lot of injustice because he is also a serious person. But he's a serious person who wants to express his serious ideas in a humorous way. And so I feel that when you look at him simply as somebody who wrote pornographic stories or who had made jokes about sex, that's really just a part of him.
But another part of him is he loves to talk about social set high and political criticisms. And even when he wrote love stories, he actually has a lot of moral lessons. For example, he wants lovers to be responsible for their action. He doesn't want people to be lacking faith.
He wanted people to love somebody, and surely that that person was the full heart. And so I think even when we are looking at his love songs and jokes about sex, et cetera, it's not purely for eroticism. There is a kind of serious undertone of expressing a very humorous and light-hearted way. Thank you.
I think that's great. But also, you know, we're not knocking eroticism in the wordography of love songs, those are good too. Right. It sounds like long, long long.
It's just got it all. And you've sort of hit on a really fascinating set of issues here. OK. So we're talking about the jokes.
We're talking about the joke book. And this translation that we're talking about today, that you've done here for Brill, is part of Brill's series on emotions and states of mind in almost Asia. And really in the book, you talk about being asked to do this translation in the series. So can you talk a little bit for us about how that happened?
How did you come to do this particular translation for this particular series? OK. OK. It all goes back to my dissertation.
A little more than 10 years ago, once I received an email from Professor Paolo Sanadello. And then Paolo Sanadello sent me an email saying that he had read my dissertation and was impressed by it. And he said that he has been doing a lot of research on emotions and states of mind. And he wondered if I could contribute to the field that he has been interested in.
And I think at that moment, I just published my Beyond Eroticism, a historian's reading of humor in Vomon's child's body. So I told him about that book. And he immediately said, oh, send me a copy and I'm going to write a book review for you. And it was wonderful because there was actually all people who refused anybody.
And he said he wrote a very long and quite positive review of that book. And then he also asked me if I had other articles that I would like to contribute to his journal that he has been editing, which is called Minting, Minting, research of Minting and Ching Dynasty. And I said, I have been interested in dreams and so I have, I have done, I have done a seminar paper on the universe of dreams in Vomon's, Sanian. But there was an immature essay and I would like to revise it.
And so he said, fine. So I revise it and I send it to Minting and Ching and Ching and it's about dreams in Vomon's Sanian. And how dreams are not just illusions and not just something that is separate from reality. But sometimes the dreams reflected some sort of reality and dreams can even alter reality.
And then later he asked me if I could contribute to a chapter to a book that he has been editing. Let me just hit the title of that book, Laughing in Chinese. And so I said that I could assemble a few jokes and also doing an analysis of how the jokes reflected self in society. And so I contributed an essay to that volume.
But that volume unfortunately took a very long time to come out here, because he's finding a publisher interesting in it. And finally it came out. And then he asked me, now this time he says, I have been editing this emotions and space of mind in East Asia series for Brea. Would you be interested in doing a complete translation of Vomon's treasury of laughs?
And I said, I think it would be difficult because when I do a complete translation, I cannot pick things that I find interesting and I cannot pick things that I understand. Because even if a joke is difficult to understand or not funny, I still have to translate it. And so I thought it would be difficult. But he says, no, it would be a great contribution to this series.
And I reached to you what he put in the previous about the reason why he edited this series. He says the emotions and state of mind in East Asia series concerns the research and analysis of the representation of emotions in the state of mind. And their collective imagery in East Asia, in this perspective, this new series has opened the way to international publications concerning the topic of the research project that I, meaning San Angelou, started at the end of the 80s. At the end of the series is to gradually build a picture of the mental structures in Chinese history.
All the volumes analyze instances of effective experiences over a wide variety of Chinese texts, either presenting the translation of significant sources and or glossaries from the underlying he's new and the representation of the mental structure in Chinese and other East Asian societies. From the end goes of cultural anthropology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, literary criticism, history and sociology. And I know that usually when he published a volume in the emotions and state of mind in East Asia series, he would do a glossary of the vocabularies that express certain human emotions. But we agree that we are not going to do a glossary of that kind because the because the treasury of laughs really doesn't have vocabularies that that expresses human emotions.
Because every time somebody says something, someone simply says, somebody who says, which means sex. And there are very few words that really talk about emotions. So the emotions of the buffoons can be sensed by the reader, but it's not expressed in words. And so there really isn't a very rich vocabularies that expresses human emotions.
It's just that they even sense that this person goes through a lot of different emotions and then we find his emotional responses quite funny. But the language itself doesn't seem to be funny that way. And so there isn't a glossary. And so he says, because we are not going to be able to create a glossary of the vocabularies of emotions and state of mind, you would have to write an introduction to the literary of laughs to emotions and states of mind.
And so he has to explain why humor is an emotion or is not an emotion. And how humor carries something important that makes it understand the Chinese mental structure better. And so I did an introduction. And this introduction was done in Taiwan when I was automatically, that's the tail end of my research.
I have finished the draft of the entire translation. But because my university is teaching oriented university, we have very heavy teaching load and we don't really have a lot of time to do research. Because I was already a full professor. They felt that teaching relief, they had money for teaching relief, they would get it to junior faculties.
And so when I was doing this translation, I had to do it totally out of my own free time. But finally I went through this seven years. I was up for a sabbatical. And then I also applied for a Taiwan fellowship to do research in Taiwan because I failed it.
I should go to Taiwan to get access to the literature in Chinese so that I can compliment my English language with Chinese language and resources. So I was fortunate to be able to get both the sabbatical and the Taiwan fellowship to do the research. And so when I went to the central library to double check my translation, there are a lot of places where I feel a little bit uncomfortable or uncertain. And I had to check a lot of the dictionaries and little reallusions.
I have to double check a lot of things. And I realized that I made tons of mistakes and that was a shocking. I thought that was pretty good with classical Chinese. But when I checked the dictionaries and when I checked the encyclopedias, I found that there were a lot of things that I misunderstood.
And so I felt they were lucky that I was able to go to Taiwan too. So correct a lot of the mistakes. Great. So let's get right into the book itself to give us a sense of some of the richness of the text.
The treasury of laughs was compiled by Falun long in the 1610s. It includes more than 700 humorous skits and jokes from both elite sources and from popular sources. And Falun long actually rewrote some of them to give the volume a kind of aesthetic and stylistic coherence. So let's talk about this work in terms of significance for a couple of fields.
We'll talk for us a little bit about what you take to be the significance of this text for the study of China. How does this text important for how we understand China for Chinese studies? Okay. Falun's treasury of jokes include more than 700 jokes.
And the source materials really range over several centuries. So in a way we can say that the treasury of that joke book, it is a synthesis of traditional Chinese humor up to the time of Falun long. And after Falun long published the treasury of laughs, this book also becomes a foundation for later joke book authors to use. So it's a synthesis of almost like the entirety of Chinese humor in various categories.
And his materials are very inclusive. For example, he has jokes about old people and he also had jokes about young people. He also had jokes about parents, but he also had jokes about children. He has jokes about the lower class.
He has jokes about the upper class. It seems that he is trying to just knock it all out. He doesn't leave any materials out of the collection because any kind of joke materials that China ever produced. So I think in a way it helps us understand sort of the Chinese mentality and the Chinese humor tradition very well.
And also he is a really good editor because he would, I mean, he apparently consulted a lot of joke books, but he would leave out jokes that seems to be highly, highly elite. He is that very few people can understand. And he also left out jokes that are so profane that it really was offensive to the majority of people's sensibilities. And so he already did some sort of gluing through the materials and shows the materials that are all appropriate.
But it's appropriate for the main audience more than for a 21st century American audience because there are still jokes in this city. It would be too much, especially the jokes about homosexuals who have an sex. And there's a lot of, you know, feasts and those are things. It's very filthy.
But even though some of the jokes seem to be a bit hard to accept from a modern point of view, I think they are still important because they help us understand that political correctness seems to be defined differently in different culture and in different time. And so things that we find very politically incorrect might be politically correct to the main audience. That's why those jokes were included in the treasury of law. So I think it helps us understand the degree of tolerance of the sort of Chinese set of 80s.
Great. So to understand Chinese culture. Great. Thank you.
So you've also talked a little bit about the significance of the text for the study notches of China, but also for the study of humor specifically. So you've already talked a little bit about that, right? Is there anything kind of in general that you'd want to mention in terms of what you take to be, in addition to what you've already mentioned, the significance of this text for the way we understand the study of humor? Yes.
I think that the joke book includes jokes that are more specifically interesting to the Chinese audience, but it also includes a lot of more universal jokes, for example, and high-specificish-ment jokes. And sex jokes and jokes about the relations between the teacher and the students, the relations between the boss and the workers. Even though the specific circumstances differ, still you can make associations and feel that, oh, I can relate to that. And so for example, a lot of jokes about education.
I think it is pretty universal and it can really bring a lack to pretty much everybody who has been in an educational institution. For example, there is a joke about the exam. It's in chapter one, four B of regular maps. Did you want to just kind of look at that now?
Page 44 of the exam, one point four B. A student of the directorate of education, sometimes translated as the Imperial University. A student of the directorate of education passes by the door of the academy, and here's the professor is publishing two students who have enraged him with a serious offense. He asks the door and the punishment is a fine, a beating, or a confinence.
And learns that the professor is giving the students an essay exam. The students have indignantly, whatever they've done. They don't deserve such an excessive punishment. I don't show some of my students with what's sayest and thing because my essay exams are difficult and they say, oh, this is a punishment.
I love that. I'm going to use that, but I'm probably actually not going to show my students. But I think it's a joke that with entertainment professors more than the student. But there's yet another idea in about me.
There's yet another story about teacher and student relations. On page 71, 2.11a and the title is Sleeping During the Daytime. A teacher does this off during class hours in broad daylight. When he wakes up, he makes up a story.
I was dreaming of the Duke of Joe, like Confucius. The next day the student also does this off during class. The teacher was a referee, a firmu, and those teams. How could you fall asleep?
The student says, I too was dreaming of the Duke of Joe. The teacher challenged him. Oh, really? What did the Duke of Joe say?
He said, he did not see you yesterday and served as students. So, Jog is all about the student and about the teacher who, you know, does off during different times in the class. And I think this joke is important because sometimes my students do those during my lecture and they always got very angry. And I thought, oh, maybe I should remind myself of this joke and then I would not be so angry.
Well, that's great. Thank you so much. That's great because also I think it gives listeners a sense of two of the many, many, many, many really great jokes. You know, this is a really fun and funny book to read.
So, in the introduction, you actually talk a little bit more in some detail about Falmung Long's notion of humor, like the way he treats humor, the way he thinks about humor, and its connection to morality in various ways. So, in the intro, you suggest that Falmung has a particular way of connecting jokes, humor, and morality in which he advocates. And you've already talked a little bit about this in your introduction, actually, to this interview. He advocates that people, in the words of the book, be true to their genuine feelings and moral conscience in both their mindset and their actions.
And you talk in particular in the intro about the value of something that we might translate as youthful fancy. And it's a connection to humor here. So, can you talk a little bit about that for us for you? What's interesting for us to understand about this idea of youthful fancy and humor, and the kind of morality that Falmung Long is thinking about promoting here?
Okay, yes. The treasury of laughs is actually the third of a series of three volumes that Falmung Long's etiquette. Collectively, they are called puncture. And in my first book, I translated puncture as child's falling.
And that is a pretty conventional translation. I think that borrows the term from some of my predecessors, who has done research on Falmung. But then I became a bit unhappy about this translation. Yes, but a translate, a translate, a translate, a translate, a child's falling.
And people say, oh, this is children's literature, but apparently these are not children's literature. This is a separate story for children to read. And Falmung also has negative connotations of, oh, these are human follies, and we should try to get rid of any emotions that is expressed in this trio. Now, puncture has three volumes.
The first one is squattrier, hanging tweaks. And so it's popular songs. We usually love songs in the cities. So the squattrier hang tweaks.
And the second volume is Changa, Hillsong's or Mountain Songs. And so these are folk songs sung by workers in the mountains and on the hills. And the third one is Shoutful, treasury of laughs. And so I noticed that in hanging tweaks and Hillsongs, Falmung is praising those singers expressed their emotions in a very spontaneous way.
And so men and women sing about their love, and sometimes their love is to for be the love. The love that is not approved by the society, the love that is not approved by the parents. So young men and young women are in love and they talk about how they are affected to each other in their songs. So these seem to be more positive examples of how people bravely think about their passions and show this regard for social expectations or for social norms.
But in the treasury of laughs, it's the opposite. People are doing foolish things or say foolish things not because they have passion, but because they suppress their passions or suppress their emotions and they suppress their spontaneity. And so they would do things that are very hypocritical or do things that are very calculating. And so there's a lot of jokes about people who are stingy, people who are chauvinistic, people who are overbearing and people who show a lot of false pride.
And so these are some negative examples of how can my emotions are suppressed and then maybe twisted. And so Falmung, I think Falmung and his preface to Shofu or treasury of laughs say that he wants to use the jokes to stimulate people to think about their own way of suppressing their emotions just to appear to be twice about their behavior. And maybe they can realize that they don't always have to suppress their feelings, that they can actually be more spontaneous and more truthful to their feelings. And Falmung says that society is sick because people always suppress their own feelings.
So it's almost like a collective mental illness. Everybody's tried to be sick. And so this seems to be the underlying moral lessons that Falmung tried to teach by telling jokes. Now in his preface he also invokes a figure of a medieval trickster priest, right?
This is the cloth sack monk. He says cloth sack monk, you're my master, you're my master. Now you talk about this figure of the cloth sack monk in the introduction as well and it seems like that might be a good place to go to now since you just talked about these virtues and the values he's placing on these sorts of things in the preface. And he also invokes the cloth sack monk as his master in the preface.
So can you talk about this cloth sack monk? What is he doing here and what's his importance? Okay, the cloth sack monk claimed that he was a reincarnation of the Buddha, my trea, Milavo. And usually when we think about Milavo or the and when I did research on the cloth sack monk, I realized that before this person was born in China, when the Chinese penters pented the portrait of Buddha, or Milavo, the picture of this Buddha is just very similar to other Buddhas, you know, compassionate, mildly smiling, but in general pretty serious and in good shape.
But after the cloth sack monk claimed that he was the reincarnation of Buddha, my trea, the Chinese Buddhist penter started to alter the image of Milavo, and Milavo becomes a laughing Buddha, very round the belly, you know, fat and had a cloth sack on his shoulders. And so I started to do a little bit of research on cloth sack monk and I found that when we think about the laughing Buddha, at least the laughing Buddha seems to be pretty good looking, but the historical cloth sack monk is portrayed to be somebody who is ugly, who looks like a bad guy, so people were put off by him and he was also filthy, he did not take a bath, he was smelly and he was talking nonsense, he seems to be a crazy guy, and in his cloth sack he saw a lot of food reviews, garbage. Sometimes he would distribute the food reviews or the garbage to the kids who seem to be attracted to him. And so the adults thought of him as somebody who was crazy and filthy, but young children seems to be attracted to him, but this guy was always talking nonsense that nobody seems to take him seriously.
But then before he was dying he revealed himself to the reincarnation of Buddha, my trea, and then after he's passing there was a lot of miracles around the place where he was buried, and then he sometimes they would be sighting of him with his cloth sack. And then he was starting to think back of all the nonsense that he talks during his lifetime and realize that even though they started crazy, they all came true later. And so this is somebody who is always joking and who looks very unserious, who is even filthy, who is of disgusting, but the nonsense that he turned out not to be nonsense. And so I think when Foreman evoked the image of cloth sack monk, he was asking his audience not to take the jokes as simply jokes and that they should take the jokes seriously, and even though he sometimes has jokes that seem to be filthy and dirty, they are not so filthy and dirty.
The way you think about it, the action are plain, but I think it's a very interesting plan that there should be an non-tuality between what looks filthy and what inside is actually quite sacred. So I think that the, you know, the treasury of love, not only is entertaining, it also has some sort of philosophical undertone to it, and that is you shouldn't take things at face value. Great. Thank you so much.
After the preface, the book is actually divided into thirteen sections. These are sections that cohere around particular themes and they range from age old envy, rotten scholars, the untouchables, occultism and medicine, various locations, extraordinary faculties, petty sports, mocking vulgarity is the eighth section, and then we move in the ninth section to air of sexually sophisticated women, body parts, funny mistakes, daily necessities, and finally intercalorie words. So let's maybe, you've already generously read to us a couple of jokes. Now that listeners have a sense of, hey, there's this preface, the kind of virtues celebrated in the work, the sections into which the jokes are divided.
Would you mind reading a couple more for us of jokes that you find particularly interesting or particularly, then jokes that you'd just like to read for us. I come from any of those sections. Okay, sure. Thank you for giving me the opportunity.
Let me see. Okay, there is a joke. King Yama searching for an eminent doctor, King Yama of course is King in Hell. So Yama the King of Hell dispatches his runners to search for an eminent doctor in the world of the living with instructions.
If you find a physician whose clinic is not haunted by unrequited ghosts, he is the one I'm looking for. Now every clinic the runners visit is crowded with unrequited ghosts of patients who died, but finally they come to a clinic with only one single ghost lingering about. They decide that this decision must be an eminent one and tear it is. They learned that the doctor just hung out his shingle yesterday.
So this is joke about physicians who kill patients. We know that medicine was not a field that a lot of people seem to have a face in because people think that a doctor would probably not want to cure you, whatever all because then he would not have to put her business to do with you. And so probably he would try to give you a slow solution so that he would have to come back to him again so that he can earn more money from you. And sometimes physicians are believed to be people who don't really have a skill, but pretend that they have a skill and so there's a lot of wrong for diagnosis and things like that.
And I think even in the modern days from time to time we see these kind of tragedies. So I think the joke about a bad doctor, maybe universal. And for listeners who are looking for this particular joke who get their hands on a copy of the book, this is in the fourth chapter of calledism and Medicine and it's on page 116. Great.
We have time for it. And last please it would be great. Give us another one of you, Lisa Generas. Okay, page 149.
The joke is shoe repairman. A shoe repairman has used only one pair of leather bottoms throughout his career. He always glues the leather bottoms to the shoe so superficially. After the customer leaves his shop, the bottoms will drop for sure.
For the customer, he would retrieve his leather as his principal. One day after following the customer for a distance, he fails to find his leather. Lamenting and crying over his permanent loss. He returns to the shop and is delighted to see that the leather had already been dropped even before the customer stepped outside.
When I first read the joke, I couldn't help but actually the shoe repairman because he loves his leather bottoms. So hard with it. Even now, these are, I think, they translate really well. They're really funny jokes.
And I think sitting down to translate this particular kind of work poses different kinds of challenges, right? In different kinds of difficulties than perhaps translating another kind of work. Can you talk a little bit for us about what for you were some of the challenges of translating this particular work? What was particularly challenging?
What was particularly difficult? Can you take us into your process a little bit? Okay, yes. For a long time ago, I went from Soudro.
And so sometimes he would include Soudro dialect and Soudro's lens in his jokes. And because I am from Taiwan, I cannot speak the Soudro dialect. And I don't really have the vocabulary in my point where encyclopedia about those lens. Sometimes it's difficult for me to understand the Soudro's lens and the Soudro's puns, et cetera.
But somehow anticipated that. So sometimes he would have editors know saying that this word in the Soudro dialect is pronounced like that in Mandarin Chinese. And so if you speak Mandarin Chinese, you may not get it. But you know, and so he would give us the notes to help us understand the Soudro's puns a little better.
But he doesn't always do that. And so sometimes when I encounter something that is Soudro dialect or Soudro's lens, I feel that maybe I won't be able to really get it. And I have to guess it a lot. And also there's a lot of puns in the jokes.
And so sometimes two Chinese words have very similar words, the same pronunciations, but I mean totally different things. And other times it's two Chinese characters that look very similar to each other, but they mean totally different things. And so when you read the jokes, you can appreciate it if you know the Chinese language. But for people who are not a native speaker of Chinese, those puns could be difficult to understand and a lot of explanations in my footnote.
And when the footnotes are long, the jokes become not so funny. And so my speaker is, how can I translate something that is difficult for non-native speakers? But still can be some sort of humor in it. And oftentimes I have to say, I give up.
I'll just read my notes and it's funny for the Chinese, but maybe not for you, but I'm sorry. And other times he will use some literary allusions that are not very popular. And so I have to admit that there are some phrases that I just couldn't find in any dictionary. And so again, I have to do a lot of guesswork.
And sometimes he would mention a certain toy or a certain musical instrument that I'm not familiar with. But under those circumstances, I have to find Google pretty useful. I would type in the Chinese characters what their particular toy or particular musical instrument and Google actually shows me how it looks like. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm a total believer in Google as a researcher. I'm dealing with you there. Yes.
But sometimes there are things that even Google cannot understand. And so I would really have to resort to just guessing games. And other times it's not that the phrases or the material things that pass on me. You understand every single word, but you still cannot understand the joke.
Probably because the comedian's brand works differently from my brand. And so I just cannot understand it. And I would really, really, really, and still I would say, oh, I'll give up. And then I'll go to the next one.
But I keep that joke in my mind. And sometimes when I was watching a PBS murder mystery or reading a Chinese or Japanese murder mystery, it hits me and I said, oh, I got it. It's not that the joke has a lot of murders and mysteries. And I just said, I think murder mysteries and solving the puzzles and understanding the jokes sometimes work in very similar ways.
So how, when sort of a mystery is solved on TV or in detective book, it inspires me to think, oh, maybe I should order my logical thinking. And then I can understand the joke better because a joke, I think that the comedian is always teasing us. And he says, okay, when you are hearing the joke, your mind works this way and you make your own logical associations, but the punchline tells you that your logic is way off. So if you are cheating, but then you have to smile, I said, okay, I have to admit that the comedian is smarter than I am.
Because he thinks this way and it seems to be illogical, but after all, he simply follows a different logic. So the joke is logical. It's not just, it's just that it's not the common sense kind of logic. I love that.
And I love how you're inviting us to think about murder mysteries and sort of solving problems and coming up with solutions in a way that puts it into conversation with jokes. I think that's really fabulous. So, is it too much for me to ask you to share another couple of jokes with us before we wrap up? Because we're moving toward, if you can believe it, we're already moving toward the time of what we have to wrap up.
But there's so many wonderful, delicious jokes in this book and it would be such a shame if we didn't at least share with listeners, maybe just a couple more of the ones that you think. Oh, thank you. Thank you for giving me that. Okay.
One, sixty two. There is a joke about what the headphone is. And I think any joke about what the headphone is funny because sometimes we forget things and we have to laugh at ourselves. Also, a man brings a hedge to the bamboo grove to cut them.
He has a sudden urge. He puts the hedge on the ground and enters the bamboo grove to go while he is relieving himself. He incidentally looks up and says, oh, we can use a bamboo at home. There is some nice bamboo here.
Unfortunately, I didn't bring a hedge. After he's done, he sees a hedge and is overjoyed. So, heaven has answered my request. There happens to be a hedge here.
As he is searching for the right bamboo to apply the hedge, he spots the shits, gets back and comes. Who empties his powers all over the place? It almost equates my feet. So, somebody who just cannot remember anything that happened to him or came across his mind just one second before.
And of course, this is hilarious because it did exaggerate things. However, I think everybody has some forgetful. Absolutely. You probably appreciate this kind of joke.
Definitely. Okay. There is another joke. A little off-color.
That's okay. Let's go there. That's page two, forty-eight. Upset by children.
Okay. Let's do it. Husband and wife are doing the bedroom thing. And the peak of her pleasure.
The white kids crying out, I'm dying. The two sons are both in bed with them. Hearing the mothers remark, the other son cannot help but burst out laughing. The mother is embarrassed and angrily hits the boy on his head.
The younger son voices his support of the mother say, Mommy's right to strike the brother. Hearing that you are dying is their pride and he laughs. So, this tells you, these are not your children on bed. I'm not bad.
What's this from? It's from Hong Kong. That's great. Thank you so much.
So, we're now at the point where it's time for us to wrap up. But are there any other jokes that you are burning to share with us? We maybe have time at most for one more. If there's one more that you're burning to get on the air, we can definitely make time for that.
Okay. One more text joke. One more. Let's do one more text joke for the listeners, for the people.
Page two, fifty-two. Okay. It's called aching belly. The wife about to give birth suffers a severe pain in her belly and keeps snapping at her husband saying, It's all your fault that I'm such distress.
The husband coaxes my dear to save you from further complaints. After the baby is born, I'll cast her as myself. The wife renews her scolding. You stink it hurt her.
Just when I'm feeling a bit better. Here you go again. Getting me mad. And the joker's not.
Her sewing words should be spoken in a sick like voice for it to be truly funny. Of course, it's this little wife doesn't want to have the pain of delivering the baby, but she's here while sex. Pigeon, I wish we could talk honestly for another hour with you just reading jokes. I'm scared, but we're at the time to wrap up.
There's a ton of material in the book that we didn't have time to talk about. There's all kinds of great stuff that listeners will find when they be the introduction to situate themselves within the world of the book and the world that emerges from the book. And there's also pages and pages and pages of fabulous jokes that you've very generously shared moments from that listeners will find an ample quantity when they find the book for themselves. Given that though, is there anything else that we didn't have a chance to talk about that you'd like to mention for listeners before we wrap up?
I think we've actually covered the ground pretty well. Thank you very much for asking me those very interesting questions that allow me to talk about my book. And I hope that the interview will inspire our listeners to actually go out and buy a copy of my book. Thank you very much.
And now that the book is out, what's next for you? What are you currently thinking about working on? Okay, because I have been writing a lot of essays and then a couple books about Fomena. I feel that even though I really love this guy, I have to say goodbye to him, at least for a moment.
And so my next research project may be about Kokxinga, Jengxiang, and the history of Taiwan because I am from Taiwan and I feel that I have been doing research on Chinese culture and society. I have been trying for me to think about where I am from. And I choose Kokxinga to be sort of my first project in the history of Taiwan because Kokxinga is both somebody who is important for the history of Taiwan. And also if he was an important person in main history.
And so I feel that I don't need to depart from in history and I can do something that is very different from what I have been doing so far. Well, best of luck with that work and thanks for taking time away from that. Thank you very much. And share some jokes with us today.
It's been a pleasure and thank you so much. The pleasure is all mine. Thank you. You've been listening to new books and new station studies.
Thanks very much for joining us today and we'll catch you next time.