Lanjing Zhou

Language and Writing Interests

Lanjing Zhou writes poetry and teaches Chinese at Syracuse University, where she is the Chinese Language Coordinator of its Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics Department.  She has also founded/co-founded, and led, several organizations for the teaching and promotion of the Chinese language and arts -- most notably, the Chinese Language Institute in Boston.  In both China and the US, Lanjing has served as an expert translator for government (she is a certified interpreter and translator, US Federal District Court, Syracuse), also professional and private clients, on various subjects (e.g., legal, medical, computer and telecommunications, as well as literature and poetry).  Lanjing began her career as a Lecturer of the English Language and Literature, first at the Heibei Teachers University, Shijaizhuang, China, and then at the China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing.  She was also the English Editor of China’s Life Magazine, and one of thirteen contributors and translators to the Longman Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs (Chinese Edition), published by Heibei Education Press (1992).Her recent books are at www.amazon.com/Lanjing-Zhou/e/B00HFDSOKS.  Her poetry is also published in China, by Chizi, a magazine of China’s Economic & Cultural Exchange Council. 

Selected Masterpieces by Bai Juyi, Tang poems with English Translation, Ming Lei Press (2016).http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Masterpieces-Bai-Juyi-translation/dp/153939560X
Bai Juyi (772-846), a great poet of the Tang Dynasty of China, is a famous and very influential writer in Chinese literary history.  Called the King of Poetry, his writing is realistic, on a wide variety of topics, and simple and “down-to-earth”.  Here are five of what many consider to be his masterpieces, in a fresh English translation, and accompanied by the original Chinese.  Their titles are: The Rhyme of the Lute, The Charcoal Seller, Farewell at the Grasslands, On Seeing Wheat Harvesters, and The Song of Eternal Regret. 

The Teacher: Contemporary Chinese Poems with English Translation, Ming Lei Press (2016).http://www.amazon.com/Teacher-Contemporay-Chinese-English-Translation/dp/1537611429Poetry has always been vital to language acquisition, beginning with nursery rhymes and songs.  This book, however, is intended for all readers.  It contains a hundred original poems in Chinese, with English translation, on a wide variety of contemporary topics.  They are all short, in classical Chinese styles.  Instructors can use them as classroom readings, and translation exercises, for beginning Chinese students, also intermediate and advanced.  Chinese parents may read them to their children, and the children recite them with their grandparents. 

Nonfiction Books in English

This is the true story of Wu Qianxi, “Crazy Wu” as the boys called her.  Born in Beijing, she spent her first five years with a loving Aunt in a peasant village, before her father suddenly took her back to an elite Academy of the People’s Liberation Army of China.  She then lived there, as a “stranger in a strange land,” playing mostly alone, and also going to elementary school, until the Cultural Revolution came and replaced education with “re-education.”  In that insanity, Wu Qianxi found freedom and became a self-made Red Guard.  But when her father was criticized, her world collapsed – he was the editor of the Workers’ Press of China and had tried to publish the book titled Liu Zhidan, which Mao Zedong thought offensive.  To survive, our hero fell back upon the values of the village where she had been nurtured.  This is her story, told from that girl’s point of view, as she was growing up, first with a peasant family, then with her elite parents in Beijing, and finally at a remote hospital, where she gave intravenous treatments and stitches to patients as a sixteen-year-old nurse. 

(with Zhou Xinjing and Cao Jinqiu) Huzi: The True Story of a Boy Artist Growing Up in the Communist Army(abridged English translation, but with previously censored parts restored), Ming Lei Press (2014).http://www.amazon.com/dp/1495204332
This is the true story of Cao Zhenfeng, nicknamed "Huzi" (1926-2006).  It provides a Chinese point-of-view on certain events of the Twentieth Century that changed the world.  Born into poverty, when warlords were fighting civil wars, Japanese bombing civilians, and militias conducting summary executions of suspected Communists, Huzi joined the Eighth Route Army, "to fight the Japanese and save China."  Although only twelve years old, he not only could draw, he could read and write, which was rare in those days.  So for fifteen years Huzi served as a pictorial-journalist at the front lines of three wars: the Anti-Japanese War (WW2), China's Civil War, and the Korean War.  His illustrated reports were widely distributed, to educate and to encourage the troops, local folks, and peasants, most of whom were illiterate.  And he had many adventures -- also narrow escapes.  Finally, when he was twenty-seven, 1953, Huzi "retired" from the combat army. ( This book ends there; Huzi went on to become an authority on Chinese folk art, and a Deputy Director of China's National Art Museum.)