The Desert Is Silent, but the Dialogue Is Not: Riccardo Moratto in Conversation with Xuemo, an MCLC Interview | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 9)

The Desert Is Silent, but the Dialogue Is Not: Riccardo Moratto in Conversation with Xuemo, an MCLC Interview | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 9)

On the evening of May 17, 2026, the World Literature Union and the Xuemo Foundation held the ninth session of “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” via Zoom.

More than 20 sinologists, translators, and literary scholars from China, Italy, Norway, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Peru, Mexico, Denmark, and other countries joined the event. Their discussion covered the development of Xuemo’s writing, the ideas behind his work, and its reception across cultures. Yanjin Chen, author of The Xuemo Code, moderated the event.

Xuemo’s principal interlocutor was Riccardo Moratto, an internationally known sinologist and Distinguished Professor at Tongji University. Moratto has edited several academic book series for Routledge and was named a “Friend of Chinese Literature” in 2025. A two-volume Routledge collection on Xuemo, under Moratto’s general editorship, is scheduled for publication at the end of 2026.

From Western China to Questions of Civilization

Speaking in both Chinese and English, Moratto traced a series of questions through Xuemo’s writing life. He asked how Xuemo had moved beyond the label of a “western Chinese writer,” how the pen name “Xuemo” had acquired its meaning, and how the oral culture of his childhood had shaped his prose.

The conversation also covered the 12 years Xuemo spent writing Desert Rites, the difference between his “spiritual realism” and Latin American magical realism, the relationship between spiritual practice and writing, and his approach to female characters. Behind these questions lay a larger concern: What can literature still do in an age of fragmented attention?

Xuemo divided his career into three stages: writing about western China, interpreting culture, and examining civilization. His present work, he said, is no longer confined to one region but addresses problems faced by people across societies.

“Civilizations of the past often disappeared because they lacked the ‘genes of longevity,’” he said. “If literature does nothing but tell stories, and if cultures remain separated by barriers, neither can answer the needs of the age. I want to bring literature and culture together with the idea of Xin-xing Civilization (心性文明), a form of civilization grounded in the cultivation of the heart-mind and human nature. I hope this can bring a little more light and a little less violence into the world.”

Three Realms of Reality

The conversation soon moved beyond literary history. Asked about supernatural elements in his work, Xuemo described a threefold understanding of reality.

A writer, he said, works not only with physical and social reality but also with a hidden realm connected to the mind. The movement among these three realms reflects the traditional Chinese idea of unity between humanity and the cosmos.

On the subject of women, Xuemo said that great mothers do not need to prove their worth through worldly achievement.

“The devotion found in their daily lives,” he said, “often reaches a level that many recognized sages never attain.”

Toward the end of the interview, Xuemo turned to the relationship between technology and civilization.

“Artificial intelligence is, in essence, humanity’s discovery of intelligence in nature,” he said. “Eastern and Western civilizations may eventually meet in the recognition that the world itself is an immense intelligent being.”

Silence, Translation, and Spiritual Realism

The scholars’ discussion opened with a question from Dr. John Edward Stowe of Toronto Metropolitan University about the aesthetic relationship between silence and what remains unwritten.

“The greatest forms of language teach us how to speak within silence,” Moratto replied.

Lingxiao Wu, a doctoral candidate at Peking University, asked how translators should respond to the Orientalist assumptions that Western readers may bring to Chinese literature.

Moratto said that translation should “turn a landscape into a home rather than an exotic decoration.” A translator’s task, in his view, is not to heighten a work’s foreignness but to help readers enter the human world within it.

Wenjing Wu, a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut, asked about the relationship between women’s suffering and transcendence in Xuemo’s fiction.

Xuemo answered with stories about the mothers of Mencius and Confucius. Their lives, he said, show that selfless devotion is not merely a moral virtue but a form of wisdom.

Professor David S. Hogsette of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China asked about the historical foundations of “spiritual realism.” His exchange with Xuemo examined the different layers of history, belief, and cultural memory that lie behind the term.

A Weekly Conversation Across Cultures

“Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” is held each Sunday at 8 p.m. Beijing time. The series uses literature as a point of departure for public discussions among writers and scholars working across languages and intellectual traditions.

At the end of the event, Chen quoted Fernando Pessoa: “To write is to make something eternal.”

“To speak is also to make something eternal,” she added. “Every conversation adds something to humanity’s intellectual and spiritual inheritance. We hope more scholars will join us as we look together for gentler answers to the problems of our world.”