Litch Notes · Walking with Jin Ping Mei
Litch Notes: Wandering Jin Ping Mei is a slow, close-reading project on one of the strangest, sharpest novels in the Chinese canon. Instead of treating Jin Ping Mei as “just” an erotic or moralizing text, I read it as a living archive of late-Ming city life: desire, money, violence, small humiliations, raw tenderness, and everything in between.
Each piece takes one tiny shard – a throwaway line, a gesture, a scene of dice, a killing – and follows its structure all the way down: how violence is templated, how “virtue” and hypocrisy tangle, how a so-called hero like Wu Song is written with the same hand that writes a woman like Pan Jinlian. The goal isn’t to defend or condemn anyone, but to see them as fully as the text allows.
If you’re curious about how a 16th-century “dirty novel” can feel more modern than most contemporary fiction; if you enjoy structural reading, moral ambiguity, and a little bit of gleeful overthinking, this newsletter is for you.
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