Podcast appearances and mentions of bruce rusk

More Swindles from the Late Ming is the companion piece to the Book of Swindles, a translation of a Late Ming text by Zhang Yingyu (fl. 1612–1617) which details various types of scams and swindles and how to guard against them. More Swindles from the Late Ming "presents sensational stories of scams that range from the ingenious to the absurd to the lurid, many featuring sorcery, sex, and extreme violence. Together, the two volumes represent the first complete translation into any language of a landmark Chinese anthology, making an essential contribution to the global literature of trickery and fraud." Bruce Rusk and Christopher Rea, the translators, joins us to talk about these two books and their experience with the translatino. More information on More Swindles from the Late Ming available on the publisher's website here. Contributors: Bruce Rusk Bruce Rusk is an Associate Professor of Pre-modern and Early Modern China in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. His main areas of research and teaching are the cultural history of China, especially the Ming (1368–1644) through mid-Qing (1644–1911) periods. Additionally, he also works on the history of textual studies, literary culture, writing systems, and connoisseurship. He has published widely and was the past present of the Society for Ming Studies. Christopher Rea Christopher Rea is a Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the modern Chinese-speaking world and his recent publications concern research methodology, cinema, comedy, celebrities, swindlers, cultural entrepreneurs, and the scholar-writers Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang. He has published several books and numerous articles, and also hosts a free online course on Chinese novels. Yiming Ha Yiming Ha is the Rand Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Pomona College. His current research is on military mobilization and state-building in China between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on how military institutions changed over time, how the state responded to these changes, the disconnect between the center and localities, and the broader implications that the military had on the state. His project highlights in particular the role of the Mongol Yuan in introducing an alternative form of military mobilization that radically transformed the Chinese state. He is also interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian state-building, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. He received his BA from UCLA, his MPhil from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and his PhD from UCLA. He is also the book review editor for Ming Studies. Credits: Episode no. 21 Release date: March 1, 2025 Recording date: January 9, 2025 Recording location: Vancouver, Canada/Los Angeles, CA  

Lock up your daughters and watch your wallet. In this episode, we are going to take a look at stories from the late Ming's most famous grift manual, a book by Zhang Yingyu. For this episode, the translators, Bruce Rusk and Christopher Rea have kindly agreed to come on talk about this text without stealing anything.  I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to make counterfeit silver, run a gang of that blinds and amputates children or just to anyone looking for some damn good stories. Purchase the book here, at Columbia University Press.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk, both professors at the University of British Columbia, about their translation of Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection (骗经 piànjīng), by Zhang Yingyu 张应俞. Anyone who has lived in China in recent decades will understand intuitively why a podcast ostensibly about current affairs in China would want to talk about a 16th-century book. However, for anyone who doubts the relevance for today's China, we believe it all will become painfully clear as you listen. Recommendations: Bruce Rusk: The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man. Written by David Maurer, a professor of linguistics who spent the 1930s hanging out with a legion of con artists to learn their languages and tricks, the book is one of the most colorful, well researched, and entertaining works of criminology that has ever existed. Christopher Rea: Slapping the Table in Amazement: A Ming Dynasty Story Collection. Originally written by Ling Mengchu 凌濛初 (1580–1644) and translated by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang, the book is full of fantastic tales that collectively present a broad picture of traditional Chinese society during that period of time. Kaiser: The Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset that blew Kaiser away.

In Zhang Yingyu’s work from the late Ming Dynasty, you’ll encounter swindling concubines, clever commoners, and even eunuch cannibals trying to regrow their members. “We live in an age of deception. Words and appearances mislead. Con artists prey on the unwary. In this world of swindlers, one must rely on one’s wits to survive. How, then, to guard against the duplicity that lurks behind every smiling face? Look to your kin, keep your possessions close, and trust no one. But first, read The Book of Swindles.” Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk, both associate professors of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia, have recently published The Book of Swindles’ first English translation. In this interview, they discuss the work's historical and cultural context as well as walk through some of the most shocking, revealing, and prurient stories The Book of Swindles has to offer.

In Zhang Yingyu's work from the late Ming Dynasty, you'll encounter swindling concubines, clever commoners, and even eunuch cannibals trying to regrow their members. “We live in an age of deception. Words and appearances mislead. Con artists prey on the unwary. In this world of swindlers, one must rely on one's wits to survive. How, then, to guard against the duplicity that lurks behind every smiling face? Look to your kin, keep your possessions close, and trust no one. But first, read The Book of Swindles.” Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk, both associate professors of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia, have recently published The Book of Swindles' first English translation. In this interview, they discuss the work's historical and cultural context as well as walk through some of the most shocking, revealing, and prurient stories The Book of Swindles has to offer. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In April 1992, China implemented a law that, for the first time, allowed families from other countries to adopt Chinese children. Since then, around 120,000 Chinese have been adopted abroad, with 80,000 finding a home in the United States. But when adoptions started in that first year, only 206 came to America. Rae Winborn is one of that first wave of adoptees, brought over at just nine months old to the U.S. to grow up with a white, middle-class American family in Durango, Colorado. Charlotte Cotter was adopted a few years later at the age of five months in 1995, and grew up with two moms in Newton, Massachusetts. She is now the president of China’s Children International, a support and networking organization run by and for Chinese adoptees around the world, which she co-founded in 2011. Kaiser and Jeremy had a conversation with Rae and Charlotte about their experiences growing up in America, why they both chose to learn Chinese and spend time working in China — which Rae described as the “Chinese-American experience on steroids” — and what it was like when Charlotte made contact with her birth family. Recommendations: Jeremy: Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve, an excellent book on education by Lenora Chu. Also, The China Questions: Critical Insights Into a Rising Power, by Jennifer Rudolph and Michael Szonyi. Rae: italki, a private tutoring service for language learning where you can get Skype lessons to improve your Chinese. Charlotte: Somewhere Between, a documentary of Chinese adoptees in America by Linda Goldstein Knowlton, and Twinsters, a movie about two Korean twins separated at birth and raised separately in America and France. Kaiser: The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection, a book written by Yingyu Zhang and translated by Christopher G. Rea and Bruce Rusk, which describes the incredibly clever ways in which people cheated one another in 17th-century China.

What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems' as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics of a Han dynasty “critic in the borderlands” to the theories of May Fourth intellectuals, Bruce Rusk’s elegantly written and carefully argued new book traces the changing relationships between secular and canonical poetry over 25 centuries of verse in China. Rusk introduces readers to a cast of fascinating characters in the course of this journey, from a versifying “drive-by” poet to a gifted craftsman of textual forgeries. In the course of an analysis of the changing modes of inscribing relationships between classical studies and other fields in China, we learn about poems on stone and metal, literary time-travel, ploughing emperors, and how to excavate the first drafts of Zhu Xi. This is an exceptionally rich account that ranges from the history of literary anthologies to the circulation of interpretive tropes in poetic commentaries, and in doing so it transcends the disciplinary boundaries of historical and literary studies of China. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics of a Han dynasty “critic in the borderlands” to the theories of May Fourth intellectuals, Bruce Rusk’s elegantly written and carefully argued new book traces the changing relationships between secular and canonical poetry over 25 centuries of verse in China. Rusk introduces readers to a cast of fascinating characters in the course of this journey, from a versifying “drive-by” poet to a gifted craftsman of textual forgeries. In the course of an analysis of the changing modes of inscribing relationships between classical studies and other fields in China, we learn about poems on stone and metal, literary time-travel, ploughing emperors, and how to excavate the first drafts of Zhu Xi. This is an exceptionally rich account that ranges from the history of literary anthologies to the circulation of interpretive tropes in poetic commentaries, and in doing so it transcends the disciplinary boundaries of historical and literary studies of China. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics of a Han dynasty “critic in the borderlands” to the theories of May Fourth intellectuals, Bruce Rusk’s elegantly written and carefully argued new book traces the changing relationships between secular and canonical poetry over 25 centuries of verse in China. Rusk introduces readers to a cast of fascinating characters in the course of this journey, from a versifying “drive-by” poet to a gifted craftsman of textual forgeries. In the course of an analysis of the changing modes of inscribing relationships between classical studies and other fields in China, we learn about poems on stone and metal, literary time-travel, ploughing emperors, and how to excavate the first drafts of Zhu Xi. This is an exceptionally rich account that ranges from the history of literary anthologies to the circulation of interpretive tropes in poetic commentaries, and in doing so it transcends the disciplinary boundaries of historical and literary studies of China. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices