Boston, MA
Joined December 2017
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I translated and published Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, Life of the Mind, Men in Dark Times and poetry (4books) and am back in China to go on book tours to talk about Hannah Arendt to a Chinese audience. Follow me for more details.
I am on the cover of Esquire China August issue with four other top podcasters.
I flew to Beijing mainly for this cover shoot and watched a movie premier on the side.
i am at home and found my notes from studying Homeric Greek when I was in high school. I had an excellent teacher Dr. Reyes and I studied with him very hard for four years. My English wasn’t very good so I took solace in foreign language classes because only there did I have an equal footing with my classmates. :)
Yiyang Zhuge retweeted
أنا أتحدث العربية. هل تتحدثها أنت؟. I spent 4 years in college learning Arabic and studying the rich history of Islamic art.
I went to visit Israel and Palestine in 2012 to study the conflict. I personally interviewed hijab-wearing university students in Gaza and reported how they only had 4 hours of electricity on a daily basis. I started writing about the insolubility of the conflict and the plight of Palestinian people in Chinese about 10 years before you historically illiterate Americans suddenly discovered Palestine and turned it into your chicest moral accessory.
You don’t know me. You trawled through my following list, you found the names of American Jews I know personally, and demanded that I explain myself. I recognize self-appointed Red Guards like you from my recent history, who combed through someone’s associations to identify members of the “Five Black Categories” and demand a public confession. Your politics is not solidarity. It is surveillance, guilt by association, and moral vanity.
3.Should Odysseus repent for his hubris or human pride, maybe pride appropriate for a great man?
4.Our age demands apologies of greatness. Do you?
5.What are…the gods? Figments of imagination or necessary noble lies?
I was invited to the China premier of the Odyssey and an interview with Nolan. I asked him:
1. Do you consider yourself a bard for a civilization at dusk?
2. Have you christianized the odyssey?
Is atonement the appropriate response to war, the doings and undoings of man?
cont.
Flying to Beijing to shoot the September issue of Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar. This airport replaced cashier humans with robots. I bought a $2 water from it. Kinda creepy.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine halted relationships between Russian and Western museums. This allowed Russian works to come to China, such as the Dostoevsky exhibition “Man is A Mystery” curated by Chen DanQing. I gave a lecture on Dostoevsky and political theory at his invitation
Talking to Professor Liu Qing about my new translations of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and Life of the Mind in Shanghai Library.
Dinner with Chen DanQing, legendary artist. In the 80s, his oil paintings of Tibetans changed the direction of Chinese contemporary art from Soviet propaganda style into western realism. He is in his 70s. Told me stories of meeting Andy Warhol in Ai Wei Wei’s apartment.
Chen Bi, law professor at the Chinese University of Political Science, interviewed me for my new translations of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and Life of the Mind.
Ice cream with Chinese political theorist Liu Qing, who turned out hosted professor @Christo66947097 years ago in Shanghai and btw thank you both for writing blurbs for my upcoming translation of rousseau’s letters.
I’ve been writing a cultural column on American higher ed for @caixin for the past 6 months and am the youngest columnist in its history. Nice to visit its headquarter in Beijing for an interview.
