Kathlene Baldanza

Reading Li Yu’s shockingly irreverent, and hilarious, short stories from 17th century China made me experience the late Ming/early Qing period in a new way. Li Yu’s stories can’t be taken as realistic accounts of people’s lives—they’re much too exaggerated—but they demonstrate that people in foreign places and of past times had struggles, joys, and senses of humor legible to us today. Scholars of late imperial China often focus on government records or religious texts that convey an idealized, and dull, vision of society. Li Yu’s subversive stories remind us that those official texts are more prescriptive than descriptive. Li Yu wrote many works; I chose this edition because Patrick Hanan’s lively and accessible translation models how to make the past present.