Celebrate Asia Pasifika: Speaker Event (Prof. Hsiang-Lin Shih)

Hsiang-Lin Shih, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, will present Fathers and Children: The Cao Family and the Early Medieval Chinese Court Poetry.

“The parent–child relationship prescribed in the Analects of Confucius is so unique, and the grief for parents is so distinct from any other kind, that one who upholds the tradition may say, as the scholar Amy Olberding concludes: “In my parents, the world is made, and in their deaths, it comes undone.” Through this lens, I trace the divergent paths that the early medieval Chinese poets Cao Pi, Cao Zhi, and Cao Rui take into a world that has come undone in their father/grandfather Cao Cao’s death. I observe how the bereaved children sustained themselves and their community—a family as well as a court—through poetry of emulation.”

Sponsored by Asian Studies Department, Academic Civic Engagement, Taylor Center for Equity and Inclusion, and Northfield Public Library.