Did Barack Obama learn a word or two from his grandmother? Well, maybe not — he didn’t grow up with the gran pictured here (it’s his Kenyan stepmother). But many people did learn their very first foreign words from their grandmothers. The Big Show’s Marco Werman learned a Dutch curse. Nina Porzucki learned a Yiddish word that speaks to a existential Jewish mindset: dafka. Nina’s grandmother didn’t think she was conveying such a Big Idea. She was just describing the stubborn behavior of her granddaughter.

Marilyn Chin learned insults, puns and tongue twisters, many of which later found their way into her poetry. Chin has published three volumes of poems. Many of her poems are linguistic investigations of her own Chinese-Americanism. Now she’s published her first novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. It’s the story of two Chinese-American twins, Moonie and Mei Ling Wong, and their search for double happiness. Or maybe single happiness. Double Happiness is just the name of their family restaurant (wordplay and irony abounds). Between episodes of Chinese food delivery gone hilariously wrong — thanks to Mei Ling’s souped-up American need for sex and drugs — the twins enter a mythological world of Chinese fable. From profane to sacred, and back to profane again. In the pod, I interview Marilyn Chin, who like the twins in her novel, had an overly protective Old World grandmother raising her. Chin can still recite her grandmother’s curses and sayings, delivered in the Toisan sub-dialect of Cantonese. She also recites a super-punning poem from her 2002 collection, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow.

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• The BBC World Service Trust Iran Project
• Cyrus Farivar on detained Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan

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MARCO WERMAN: Persian language bloggers, both inside and outside Iran, have been weighing in on the days events in Tehran. Those bloggers are the focus of new research by the BBC World Service Trust and a Persian-language website called Balatarin. Our technology correspondent Clark Boyd has been speaking with the people behind the research. And Clark you’ve reported quite a bit on the so-called Iranian blogosphere over the past five years. Anything new and interesting here?

CLARK BOYD: Well I think one of the interesting things for me that it does is reinforce a breakdown of stereotypes. I think in the west especially we tend to get caught up in oh it’s a Persian-language blogger. It’s a blog about Iran. It must be about politics. It must be about nuclear weapons. It must be about US-Iranian relations or something like that. And what this research has really shown in collating a wide number of Persian-language blogs is that by and large Persian-language bloggers are blogging about a lot of the same things that we blog about. Sure some of it may be political but some of it may have to do with what they fed their cat yesterday. One of the interesting things though is that they noted that there were a lot of blogs about poetry and about literature. Now that’s not so strange.

WERMAN: Strong tradition there.

BOYD: Very strong tradition there. But what’s interesting is how the language in those blogs is being used. We can hear now from Mehdi Yayanajad who is the director of this website called Balatarin.

MEHDI YAYANAJAD: They are using poetry language to kind of show what is going on and what’s wrong with politics, what’s wrong with economy. But they are using poetry language because it’s safer to use that. It’s not direct and poetry language helps them to say things that they can’t say normally.

WERMAN: So Clark these bloggers are hiding from the sensors by creating blogs that are ostensibly about poetry but seemingly about politics underneath?

BOYD: Yes and no. Again I think there are political messages that seem to be embedded in the language of these blogs but at the same time they’re also celebrating the Persian language itself. And like we said before there’s actually a very long tradition in Iran not only of using poetic language but using that poetic language in service of politics. So in that sense they’re just using one of the tools that readily available to them to make their statements.

WERMAN: So what other things did the BBC World Service Trust research unearth?

BOYD: Well another interesting thing they noted is this rise of the conservative Persian blogosphere. And I think that what we’re seeing here is concerted effort on the part of the authorities in Iran to get more people who agree with them blogging about it. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself has a blog. He hasn’t updated it for a long time but he does have a blog. So you’re seeing this rise of conservative blogging. And of course Iran is famous for being a regime that really knows how to play defense right. I mean they really know how to keep information out. They’re very good at filtering the net. But what we’re seeing now that they seem to be actually be going on the offensive here and recruiting people to go out and blog their side of things.

WERMAN: And the World Service is also behind this Persian-language website aggregating all this Persian-language content. What’s the end result do they hope?

BOYD: What they really want it to be is a service. There’s no overt political goal here according the people that I spoke to about it. They really just want it to be a service. A resource for Persian speakers. And eventually what they would like is to get a team of volunteers together who would help translate all of this Persian-language material into English. I’m sure it would make absolutely fascinating reading for us.

WERMAN: Well we’ll stay on top of this. I’m sure you will. The World’s Clark Boyd. Always a pleasure. Thanks.

BOYD: You’re welcome.

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• Obama’s Nobel win: Full citation
• World leaders react to Obama’s win
• Global editorial cartoonists react to Obama’s prize
• Jeb Sharp’s weekly history podcast

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KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark.  This is The World.  Surprised and deeply humbled.  That’s how President Obama described how he felt when he heard he’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  Here’s more of what the president had to say this morning at the White House.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Throughout history the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement.  It’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes, and that is why I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st Century.

CLARK: Only two other U.S. presidents were awarded the Peace Prize while in office.  They were Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919.  Jimmy Carter won it when he was already a former president.  The World’s Jeb Sharp begins our coverage.

JEB SHARP: Even those who support President Obama’s policies were skeptical. Charles Grant directs the Center for European Reform in London. He was chairing a conference this morning with experts and dignitaries from all over Europe. He said when the news broke people were stunned.

CHARLES GRANT: This is in a room of people who are generally sympathetic to Obama. They like his multilateralism.  They like the fact that he doesn’t talk in a unilateralist way as George Bush did, and yet the feeling was, and it’s my feeling too, how strange to award a prize to someone before they have achieved anything.  It has to be said, in terms of peace Obama has great ambitions, but has not achieved anything yet as far as we can see.

SHARP: President Obama seemed to acknowledge as much himself.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize. Men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.  But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women and all Americans want to build.

THOMAS KNOCK: This does seem to be a prize that is more prospective than retrospective.

SHARP: That’s historian Thomas Knock, an authority on Woodrow Wilson, the last sitting U.S. president to win the prize.

KNOCK: I think to encourage a certain kind of initiative and a certain kind of thinking about international relations and I think that’s a good idea.  I think a lot of people will debate whether or not this was a deserved prize, and I think Obama deserves tremendous credit, should get credit, for saying that he himself wonders whether or not he deserved this.

SHARP: The prize usually, but not always, goes to someone with a considerable peace-related achievement under their belt.  Someone like Woodrow Wilson.

KNOCK: Well, Woodrow Wilson is regarded as the father of internationalism in a sense, the founder and creator of the League of Nations, which was established at the end of the First World War to lessen the possibility of another catastrophe like the First World War.

SHARP: The League was a failure in the end, not least because Congress balked and the United States never joined.  But in the sense that it was a precursor to the United Nations, the idea eventually prevailed. Theodore Roosevelt was the other president who won a Nobel Peace Prize while in office; in his case for mediating an end to the Russian-Japanese war of 1905.  Roosevelt, of course, is famous for his line “speak softly and carry a big stick.”  For all the talk of peace, President Obama finds himself using a big stick, not least in Afghanistan. The irony of giving a Peace Prize to a man prosecuting two wars was not lost today.   For The World, I’m Jeb Sharp

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

This week, a look back at the career of the late Sergei Mikhalkov, who has died aged 96. During World War Two, Mikhalkov wrote the lyrics to the Soviet national anthem. After Stalin died, he rewrote the lyrics, expunging all mention of Stalin. Decades later, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian government adopted a new national anthem, but no-one particularly liked it: it just didn’t sound grand and powerful enough. So in 2000, Vladimir Putin re-installed the old tune by Alexander Alexandrov and had Mikhalkov re-write the lyrics yet again. This time round, instead of praising Stalin or Lenin, the anthem gave a nod to God. As someone who so readily held his finger to the political winds, it’s no surprise that Mikhalkov took part in smear campaigns against the likes Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Of course that was during Stalin’s rule, which means that not participating in such campaigns could have dire consequences.

Next, a conversation with Keith Spicer on Canada’s 40-year-old language laws. Spicer was the country’s first enforcer of bilingualism. Being Canadian, there wasn’t much enforcing– more like pusuading, cajoling and endless, endless debating. The way Spicer tells it, Canadians eventually embraced the law, with millions of English Canadians clamoring to learn French. He says that Quebec’s provincial language rules that outlawed signs in English and discouraged English-language expressions in French were silly but understandable, given the historical hostility to French in Anglophone Canada.

Finally, this month the British government finally apologized for its treatment of Alan Turing, who helped break the Nazis’ war codes. When Turing’s homosexuality was exposed, the British government stripped him of his security clearance and prosecuted him for gross indecency. Faced with a prison term, Turing agreed as an alternative to hormone treatment. The treatment drove him to suicide in 1954.

>>>Click here for more of Aaron’s stories from Afghanistan.

This week, the nuanced — and sometimes not so nuanced — world of diplomatic insults: we hurl a few your way, coutesy of Hugo Chavez, Hillary Clinton and Winston Churchill. There’s also an overheated exhange in the British parliament between then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and leader of the opposition Neil Kinnock, which goes something like this: insult (Thatcher), outraged indignation (Kinnock), quasi-retraction (Thatcher).

We follow this with news of so-called click languages. My colleague David Cohn has been finding out about these and he’s posted some thoughts and links in the science section of The World’s website. Here’s the headline: linguists have figured out how to decipher and classify clicks– and some languages have a huge number of of them. Just as well that the linguists are discovering this now. Some of these languages are about to kick the bucket. You can listen to the sounds of one of them here.

Next up, that underestimated vegetable the cucumber. Norwegian is one of several languages (Dutch, Polish and German are others) that appropriate the word cucumber to describe what we English speakers call silly season. That’s the time of the year — now, as it happens — when we in the news media resort to covering shark attacks, dogs reunited with their owners, and astronauts’ underwear. (Actually, we do these stories year-round, but during the silly season, they wind up on the front page). Norwegians and others supposedly put cucumber harvest season on their front pages. No wonder newspapers are in trouble.

Finally, many French fans of Harry Potter novels read the books in English. Or at least they did before the books were translated into French.

So the primal minimalism, the matter-of-fact savagery evoked in Cao Naiqian’s remarkable collection of interlaced stories “There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of Your Late At Night” (Columbia University Press, 232 pages) provides a powerful alternative to the impression of maximalism. The volume’s translator John Balcom writes in his informative introduction that “the economy of expression and understatement of his [Cao’s] writing are unique in contemporary China.” He also points out that Cao’s allegiance to realism and his gritty study of the poverty-stricken lives of peasants marginalizes him during a time of enthusiasm for post-modern truisms.

Cao’s terse style may owe something to the writer’s ‘legit’ job – since 1972 he has been a police detective in the Public Security Bureau of Datong City. Set in rural China (Shanxi Province) during the Cultural Revolution, his stories are not rote police tales of criminal scheming and enforcement neurosis. This volume offers indelible images of people on the edge, raw yet poetic depictions of violence and despair rooted in the denial of needs for food, sex, and respect. Many of the stories revolve around incest, bestiality, suicide, murder, and mental illness.

Stuck by the art, courage, and visceral punch of “There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late At Night,”  I asked Balcom about Cao Naiqian’s use of language, his political leanings, and his literary influences.

The World: Why do you think it is important that Western readers become acquainted with Cao Naiqian?  What is your favorite story in the collection?

John Balcom: There are a number of reasons I think it is important that Western readers become acquainted with Cao Naiqian.  Most of all, he is a fine writer, a marvelous talent.  I have been reading and translating Chinese literature for over a quarter of a century and this work was one that cried out immediately to be translated. Good books deserve to be translated and known, that’s the bottom line here.  The stories he tells are worth reading — stepping into the world depicted by Cao is troubling, but also moving; it is a side of China that most are not familiar with.

As for a favorite story, that is hard to say – there are too many of them.  I read the work more as a novel and think it is best appreciated as a whole.  The cumulative effect of the stories is staggering.

The World: For Western readers unfamiliar with the fiction of Cao Naiqian, discuss his place in modern Chinese fiction.

John Balcom: I see him as a bit of an outsider.  You must remember that many of China’s writers are supported (still) by the state through writers associations – they are paid to write.  Cao has a day job as a police detective.  (As a literary translator in the US, I can relate to this.)  His writing has largely been done on his own time, though he did at one point receive a stipend that allowed him to take time off from work to write.

The World: Why do you think his writing departs, so radically, from much of contemporary fiction in China?

John Balcom: This is an interesting question, because on some levels he is a throwback to an earlier age – these days as fiction has moved online, he writes about rural China and in a local dialect, all things that were encouraged by the state literary bureaucracy for decades.  This is why I touched upon Zhao Shuli in my introduction.  Zhao Shuli wrote about rural life in Shanxi before and after the revolution.  He was a great storyteller, but was definitely working largely within the confines of the parameters established for literature at the Yenan Forum.

Cao Naiqian has no such limitations and explores realms that have been off limits to fiction in China for a long time – the polyandrous relationships in the poor countryside, for example, not to mention taboo subjects such as incest.  Cao provides an honest portrait of the other China, the one that is not seen on international tours, the poor one that has lacked access to much of what most of us take for granted, adequate food and education, for example.  In this regard he is a courageous writer.  In political terms, what he writes about is something that would have been impossible to do just a few decades ago.

Another way in which Cao departs from contemporary writing is simply in the quality of his writing.  Many contemporary writers are quite prolix and have little sense of style – they have stories to tell, but lack a sense of craftsmanship when it comes to writing.  Cao, on the other hand, writes economically, more like a poet – remove one word and the whole thing falls apart.  This is one thing that won’t necessarily be apparent to the reader of Chinese fiction in translation, mainly because most works of Chinese fiction in translation are heavily cut and edited in this country.  My translation of Cao was not.

The World: How does Cao Naiqian’s work – a police detective in the Public Security Bureau of Datong City, Shanxi – shape the subject matter and style of his writing?

John Balcom: In some ways I think he is a natural born writer in his ability to observe people. Clearly, though, there is a relationship — his work has brought him into contact with a wide variety of people, and, as a detective, he is a keen observer of human nature who attempts to understand human motivations.  Some of his characters are based on actual individuals he has known.  Leng Er, for instance, was a real human being that Cao knew.  I think he has a great understanding and empathy for human beings.

The World: In this collection he focuses on the shocking barbarity of life in a rural community in China during the Cultural Revolution. Why does he concentrate on the tawdry, especially sexual perversion?

Translator John Balcom

John Balcom: Cao once commented that he wanted to write about the way people lived at a certain period.  The characters in the book are scarcely able to rise above the realm of necessity.  Food and sex are primary desires that are not fulfilled by the system. I quote from the “Book of Rites,” a Confucian classic, in my introduction to make the point that there are basic human motives that transcend time or place.   I think it is the investigation of human motives on this level that drives Cao’s writing.  He is dealing honestly with a realm of existence, which none of us has experienced, a world that is light years away from us.

The World: In moving stories such as “Wen Shan’s Woman” animals display more humanity than human beings.  How much is Cao Naiqian’s dark vision of society influenced by his view of the Chinese government?

John Balcom: I don’t really see any overt political criticism as such, and I don’t think that was his intention.  I think it is more subtle than that.  Again, I think he is examining things at a much more basic level.  Naturally, politics is evident throughout the work. Why do people exist on the level they do?  What about the system has led to this situation?  In the stories, Party members are usually depicted as self serving and incapable of dealing with anything serious – in the last story, for example, the authorities are more than happy to arrest a peeping tom, but as soon as soon as any danger is involved, they don’t want to get involved.

As I said, I think it is more basic and subtle than that.  It strikes me that Cao is dealing with characters operating outside of any ideological system – they would do the same in a traditional Confucian system or a contemporary Communist one. Think of the character Dog, for instance.  For him work is the most important thing in life – it doesn’t matter who he works for – the Japanese or the Communists.  Also, think of the way justice is meted out in the village – there is no organized legal system.  Rather a village elder makes the decisions.  One gets the impression that that is the way things have been done since the beginning of time.  In this way the village almost exists outside of time, approaching a place of myth.

The World: What writers have influenced Cao Naiqian’s writing?  In terms of technique, some of the stories are powerful but clumsy and repetitive.  On the other hand, a tale about a blind man’s attempt to kill himself expertly evokes the absurd humor of Samuel Beckett.

John Balcom: This is not all that easy to pinpoint.  Cao is a voracious reader of Western fiction in translation and of classical Chinese fiction.  I know he is a fan of Faulkner, who, of course, depicted illiterate backcountry characters in almost mythical terms. On the Chinese side, I see certain affinities with the writing of the great Shen Congwen.

I would disagree with the characterization of his stories being clumsy and repetitive.  His writing is more tightly structured and less repetitive than much of what we encounter in contemporary Chinese fiction today.  He is a master of short fiction.  I was drawn to the work for its concision and its subtlety — the irony of some of the pieces is as good as anything produced by Lu Xun.  In fact, I think he has a better sense of craft than many so-called professional writers in China today.  Perhaps the subtlety is tied to an understanding of the culture, though.  The longest piece, “Corncob” is seen sometimes as being too long, but I think that contributes to the horror and ultimately the sadness of the piece.

The World: In your introduction to the volume you talk about the dialect Cao Naiqian uses in his writing.  Talk about the difficulties of translating Cao Naiqian.  What is lost in translation?

John Balcom: This is a good question.  The difficulties that I encountered as translator do not exist for the reader of the translation.  The first thing that is lost is the linguistic sense of place.  In reading the Chinese text, one is immediately in the presence of a deep sense of place.  There is just no way to capture this in English.  The dialect is apparent to any reader of the Chinese text, but even the native speaker of Chinese will have difficulty with some of it.  On another level, many aspects of the material culture depicted in the tales needed to be explained.  Cao Naiqian was extremely helpful in explaining these details as well as explaining the use of dialect.  (Thank goodness for email!)  I ended up with about fifty pages of notes on dialect and material culture.  I think that the losses are offset with what is gained – a sense of clarity and ease of understanding for the reader.  In this case, my homework as translator should help the reader.

The Mao Case, by Qiu Xiaolong,  304 pages, Minotaur Books

Reviewed by Harvey Blume

Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai police force, the main character of “The Mao Case” (and of five previous mystery novels by Qiu Xiaolong), is not your average cop. He moonlights as a translator of American mystery novels, writes poetry, and, if given a choice, would rather puzzle over the collected works of T.S. Eliot than chase criminals.

T.S. Eliot might at first seem like an unlikely Western favorite for a Shanghai policeman, but there is a kind of sense to it. Eliot is commonly referred to as the most Mandarin, as in high-toned, of twentieth-century English language poets. On a deeper level, Eliot imposed upon himself what can be conceived of as an essentially Confucian duty, namely to put his tradition’s texts in order, to define and maintain its canon. (Eliot’s buddy Ezra Pound went so far as to make Kung — aka Confucius — a major voice in his “Cantos”). That Chen can be moved to quote Prufrock one moment and Tang poetry the next makes him an intriguing character to stick with during China’s recent economic boom, which provides the setting for these novels.

The Communist Party has denied Chen a literary career, but won’t let him settle into the normal life of a police officer, either. Beijing bosses routinely disrupt Chen’s work by reassigning him to charged, politically sensitive cases. In the new book, the case in question has the power to embarrass the Party down to its Maoist roots.

Chen learns the rudiments of what will become the Mao case in a phone call from Beijing that comes just as he is about to enjoy a chef’s special — “pork intestine, lung, heart, and whatnot,” according to the waitress, steamed with homemade rice wine, “a specialty,” she points out, “of old Shanghai cuisine” that is not to be found outside her humble eatery. Here, as throughout, Qiu Xiaolong is very particular about what his characters eat, and he makes sure to feed them often. Cuisine helps Xiaolong’s plots along — if this were a film, food would be its movie music — but there is usually just a bit more food than his plots manage, well, to fully digest. There are recipes to think on though not necessarily to try at home.

Huang Keming, China’s new Minister of Public Security, called Chen to tell him that the Party has made it a priority to locate and recover a certain “something” Chairman Mao might have given to Shang Yunguan, a Shanghai actress with whom he danced and dallied in the 1950s and early 1960s. Chen protests that was a long time ago, and that if there ever was such a “something,” wouldn’t the Red Guards, who later ransacked Shang’s premises, have found it?

Huang impatiently overrules Chen. It is true that after Mao’s death, Madam Mao, The Great Helmsman’s insanely jealous widow, ordered Red Guards to torture Shang and that shortly afterwards Shang killed herself. But the story of the something didn’t necessarily end there. Shang had a daughter, Qian, to whom she might have passed something on. Qian, we learn, after likewise suffering severe political harassment, died in a car accident. And she, too, had a daughter. It is the recent behavior of Jiao, Shang’s granddaughter, that alarms the Party.

Jiao has recently quit a poorly paying job and is suddenly partying with “people from Hong Kong, Taiwan or Western Countries.” Is she trading on the worth of the Mao “something”? Is she cashing in on an item that could, in the wrong hands, undermine Communist rule?  Chen must drop everything to find out.

The tale of Shang reminds Chen of other multi-generational Cultural Revolution tragedies he has known. “What had happened during those years,” he reflects, was “absurd, cruel . . . almost unbelievable.” He’s not eager to confront full catastrophe Maoism. After all, “he wasn’t a historian, he was a cop.” But he acknowledges that in recent years, “he’d found it more and more difficult, even as cop, to steer clear of the nation’s history under Mao.” And he’s not without the means to take Mao’s measure. Chen recalls that as a boy during the Cultural Revolution when he was studying English, the first sentence he learned was: “‘A long eternal life to Chairman Mao!’ Exactly the same phrase as was used with regard to the emperors for thousands of years.”

Chen’s investigation brings him into Mao’s secret history – the hidden Mao, well researched by Qiu Xiaolong — and eventually into Mao’s old bedroom near the Forbidden City. Mao’s custom-built, larger than king-size bed is still covered with his bedtime reading, which consists of well-thumbed chronicles of dynastic rule and dynastic succession.

Chen finds that Mao’s imperial manner extended beyond matters of state into his love life. “Paranoid that everybody was plotting against him,” Chen notes, Mao “killed . . . thousands of high-ranking Party officials who had been loyal to him.” A related pattern obtains to the succession of lovers and wives Mao left to be destroyed.

Novelist Qiu Xiaolong explores a revival of Mao worship.

Mao’s love life surprises Chen somewhat less than the fact that even in the throes of its great capitalist boom, when fanatic moneymen have replaced fanatic Red Guards, China is suffering a Mao revival. This is brought home to Chen on a visit to a bookstore whose owner tells him that the volume most in demand at the moment happens to be none other than Mao’s “Little Red Book.”

Chen is astonished. “What?” he exclaims. “Billions of copies were printed back then.  How can it be a rare or antique book?”

The bookseller explains that people ditched their “Little Red Books” as soon as the end of the Cultural Revolution permitted. But the volume is “coming back with a vengeance” because for “those left out of the materialist reforms, Mao is . . . a mythic figure again.”

The renewed cult of Mao is far from universal. It doesn’t extend to those of Chen’s friends and co-workers who barely survived forced labor camps, or to people who can’t forgive or forget what it meant to be accused of imperfect Mao worship. But a yearning to borrow what he imagines to be Mao’s imperial — son-of-heaven — virility drives one of Shanghai’s new money men to crime and madness. The madman leads Chen to the something he has been tracking. When he has it, he must decide whether to keep it hidden or to surrender it to the Communist Party, which has made such a fetish of it.

“The Mao Case” is an historical novel cast in the form of a mystery. Rich in intellectual detail, character — and cuisine — it joins the effort many Chinese writers are making, in a wide variety of genres, to exhume and examine their country’s Maoist past.

Qiu Xiaolong, after the massacre at Tiananmen Square, brought his family out of China to St Louis, where he was studying literature. He writes in English. “The Mao Case” begins with the dedication:

For the people that suffered under Mao.

The book ends with Chen, Qiu Xiaolong’s highly literate alter ego, reflecting on T. S. Eliot in a way that suggests why Eliot might be a balm for a Chinese writer. “With T. S. Eliot,” Chen thinks, “the personal went into a poem, into the manuscript of “The Waste Land”, but with Mao, the personal became a disaster for the whole nation.”

Now Tabanka is an annual festival on Cape Verde. It features a parade where locals mock traditional figures. Tabanka is just one of the songs on a new album by the artist: Lura.

Lura was born and raised in Portugal, but she’s the daughter of Cape Verdean immigrants. And it’s that blend of cultures that’s evident on this CD. It’s called Eclipse.

Lura kicks off a month long tour in the US next week.

The new leaders of Honduras are under intense pressure from the United States and other nations a day after a military coup. But the country’s new president says the move was legal. Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Frances Robles of the Miami Herald who is in the capital Tegucigalpa.Listen

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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins, and this is the World. There’s a nationwide curfew in Honduras today, but it couldn’t stop hundreds of demonstrators from taunting Honduran soldiers outside the Presidential palace. The demonstrators denounced the man who    is now the acting President of Honduras. He replaced President Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted yesterday. Zelaya had insisted on going ahead with a referendum that might have allowed him to stay in power beyond the one-term limit. But the Honduran military kicked him out of the country. One protester today said Hondurans want United Nations peacekeepers to intervene.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] We want the blue helmets. We want an army to liberate us. We don’t want this man who usurped power. We want our President.

LISA MULLINS: Frances Robles of the Miami Herald is there in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. She spoke with us earlier this afternoon.

FRANCES ROBLES: What’s really interesting, I’m standing outside the Presidential palace, and what I can see, I would say about two blocks, as far as I can see are young men. Some of them with handkerchiefs around their faces, other ones carrying clubs. And a number of just families and older people demanding the return of the President. But what’s more interesting is that there’s quite a contradiction in reaction here. If you watch the television news media, they’re carrying on as if nothing has happened, frankly. They’re playing soap operas and cartoons.

LISA MULLINS: When you say that some of the protestors have handkerchiefs around their faces, what’s the purpose of that? Are they feeling they’re at risk by being out?

FRANCES ROBLES: I think they’re trying to look menacing [INDISTINCTIVE] [LAUGHS], because I don’t see any authorities here making any effort to stop them from protesting. So I don’t know if they’re trying to hide their identity. I think some people are just trying to cover their mouths from smoke. You see a lot of people wearing the medicine masks that you see for the people protecting themselves from swine flu, because there are burning piles of trash and tires and things of that nature.

LISA MULLINS: And those things that are burning are part of the protest?

FRANCES ROBLES: Part of the protest, yes, absolutely.

LISA MULLINS: [TALKS OVER] What do we hear in the background there right now, Frances?

FRANCES ROBLES: What you’re hearing is a number of people on loud speakers demanding the return of the President, and saying that they will not recognize Roberto Micheletti as the President of Honduras. They say that they’re not leaving here until Manuel Zelaya comes back.

LISA MULLINS: Until he comes back. And is there any indication that the former President will indeed be back?

FRANCES ROBLES: I don’t have that sense because they have an uphill battle. Because what I’m sensing here is a vast majority of the population [INDISTINCTIVE] establishment. You have the Attorney General’s office, you have the military, you have the supreme court, and you have congress decidedly on the side of this new President saying, you know, “Zelaya had to go, and this is the way we had to do it, and we did it [INDISTINCTIVE]. And then you have a small percentage of the population that I’m watching now in front of the Presidential palace saying, “No, no, no. That’s not the way things should be done.”

LISA MULLINS: And meanwhile, there is pressure coming in from the United States, maybe you can tell us how significant that may or may not be with Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, saying that they support the President who was ousted yesterday. That they believe that democracy should reign in Honduras. Here is what the acting President though has to say. This is Roberto Micheletti, who is speaking to Spanish TV.

ROBERTO MICHELETTI: [SPEAKS IN SPANISH]

LISA MULLINS:  Frances, I don’t know if you caught enough of that for me to ask you to translate for us. Did you hear that?

FRANCES ROBLES: I did heard. And actually, what he says is, nobody has the right, not Barack Obama or Hugo Chavez, has the right to come and threaten Honduras. Because there had been some comments from Hugo Chavez, sort of suggesting that this warrant of military action.

LISA MULLINS: To what extent does he fear what either Hugo Chavez, or certainly Barack Obama has to say about the coo that happened that brought him to power yesterday. I mean, the United States has been close to the Honduran military, but then we have the military, the supreme court of Honduras, the congress of Honduras, the Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church, all coming out in favor of this coo. I mean, what does that say in terms of how the US and its influence is viewed there.

FRANCES ROBLES: The US is in a bit of a tight spot because what you have here is enough institution that we’re in fear of the President, what looked like the President was about to conduct some kind of power grasp, where he was going to conduct this referendum despite the fact the Supreme Court has a little bit of ego, that the Attorney General has a little bit of ego, and that the Armed Forces refuse to participate in it. And then you have people who, “Oh okay. If that’s the case, then we’re gonna get this guy out of the country, we’re gonna [INDISTINCTIVE] him away. So what’s the United States supposed to do? On the one hand, I think they recognize that perhaps President Zelaya was perhaps up to no good. On the other hand, there’s ways to get rid of a President, than perhaps breaking into his bedroom in the middle of the night, is not the way you’re supposed to do it.

LISA MULLINS: Alright. Thank you very much. Speaking to us from the Presidential Palace in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Frances Robels from of the Miami Herald. Thank you.

FRANCES ROBLES: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

More of Lorne Matalon’s Mexico coverage on The World

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LISA MULLINS: Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon is not up for re-election on Sunday, but he’s gonna be watching the mid term vote closely. Calderon’s conservative pan party is trying to win congressional seats, and the polls have not been favorable. The key issue in Mexico is ramping drug related violence. Calderon has launched a war on drug gangs, and he’s put some traffickers behind bars, but cartel turf wars still kill hundreds of people each month. The world’s Lorne Matalon has been following the campaign in Metepec, he prepared this report.

[SOUND CLIP IN SPANISH]

LORNE MATALON: She’s 30, well spoken, a graduate of the London School of Economics and media-savvy. Rookie political candidate, Brenda Estefan, a Congressional candidate with Felipe Calderon’s PAN Party, campaigns in Metepec, 2 hours northwest of Mexico City, in the State of Mexico.

[SOUND CLIP IN SPANISH]

LORNE MATALON: Estefan tells citizens Calderon is a good president. Her outings mirror American-style campaigning. One difference, running for the US Congress can cost up to two million dollars.  Mexican candidates are limited to 60-thousand dollars. Another difference; media time here is bought by the party, not the candidate, which means candidates are constantly pleading with their party bosses in Mexico City to buy airtime in their districts. Estefan was selected by the PAN to run for Congress after four years at the Interior Ministry, which plans Calderon’s assault on the drug cartels. It’s one of several problems Estefan says Mexico inherited from seven decades of PRI rule.

BRENDA ESTEFAN: One of those is the drug dealing and organized crime, which for many governments, for many years was not attended. It was just left behind.

LORNE MATALON: By many governments, Estefan means the PRI, which did not tackle drug dealing in its decades long hold on power.  In his first three years as President, Calderon has had mixed success dealing with the PRI, which acts as a legislative kingmaker, holding the second largest block of seats in Congress after the PAN.  PAN wants to turn its plurality into a majority. And that’s why the party’s chosen candidates, such as Estefan, meant to symbolize a new generation, in such an important race.

BRENDA ESTEFAN: In this drug war, all the initiatives against the drug dealers have to pass through the Congress. And if he doesn’t have a majority, then it would be hard for the people and for the country itself to continue with this drug war.

LORNE MATALON: That’s the PAN’s mantra. Ask voters to support PAN candidates, to help Calderon fight the drug war, and push police and judicial reforms through Congress.

[SOUND CLIP IN SPANISH]

LORNE MATALON: The radio spot says “to help the President, I’m going to vote for PAN.” The help is a specific reference to the support for the narco-war that Calderon is asking for. The PRI says Calderon is stumbling in that war, but it hasn’t presented its own plan to deal with the cartels.  Latest opinion polling shows the PAN catching up to the PRI. It’s now just four-percentage points behind. The PAN is riding on Calderon’s coat tails. His personal approval rate stands at 65% for his handling of the Swine Flu epidemic, and the roundup of allegedly corrupt politicians. A wildcard in this election is a growing “Annul Your Vote” campaign. That is, destroy or otherwise make your ballot uncountable. Denise Maerker, a columnist at the newspaper El Universal, kick-started the movement by writing, “Why Should We Vote?” a scathing condemnation of Mexican politicians.

DENISE MAERKER: We have been betrayed by the political class, and it’s because they have common interests much more bigger than the interest they have in representing us.

LORNE MATALON: An Ipsos Mexico poll suggests 11% of Mexicans support the ‘Annul Your Vote’ movement. And with the PRI and PAN so close, that could influence the outcome. For The World, I’m Lorne Matalon in Metepec, Mexico.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.