Seeking a Spiritual Home in the Wasteland of Modernity | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 14)

Seeking a Spiritual Home in the Wasteland of Modernity | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 14)

At 9 a.m. Beijing time on Sunday, June 21, 2026, the World Literature Union and the Xuemo Foundation held the fourteenth session of “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” on Zoom.

Titled “Seeking a Spiritual Home in the Wasteland of Modernity: An International Literary Dialogue with Ban Wang, Xuemo, and Riccardo Moratto,” the forum brought together Professor Ban Wang, William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies in Stanford University’s departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature; Professor Dian Li of the University of Arizona’s Department of East Asian Studies; and Chinese writer Xuemo.

Riccardo Moratto, Distinguished Professor in Tongji University’s School of Foreign Languages and general editor of three Routledge book series, led the conversation through four themes: homelessness, meaning, storytelling, and transcendence.

Yanjin Chen, Xuemo’s longtime editor and author of The Xuemo Code, served as academic moderator. Nearly 20 sinologists, scholars, and young writers from China, the United States, Italy, Norway, Canada, the United Kingdom, Iran, Nepal, and other countries joined the forum, along with more than 200 readers.

Yanjin Chen: A Writer Who Has Set Aside the Consciousness of Being a Writer

Chen opened by introducing Wang, Li, Moratto, and Xuemo, as well as Thomas Zimmer of East China Normal University, Professor Renzhong Wang of McGill University, Professor David S. Hogsette of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Professor Rui Su of Northwest University, and other participating scholars.

In her introduction to Xuemo’s writing, Chen described him as an author who had learned to set aside his awareness of himself as a writer.

“He does not stand outside western China and treat it as literary material,” she said. “He becomes part of it, allowing its historical memories, rituals of belief, and human warmth to grow out of his own life. As Xuemo puts it, he gives birth to a work as a mother gives birth to a child; he does not manufacture it according to literary technique.”

This, Chen suggested, helps explain why Xuemo’s books can differ so greatly from one period to another. Beneath their differences, however, lies the same question: Once people find themselves cast into a world without apparent meaning, how can they live with dignity and find a way beyond their present condition?

Ban Wang and Xuemo: Lukács’s “Transcendental Homelessness” and the Dreamers of Western China

Moratto introduced Wang’s critical framework with a brief observation.

“We live in an age that has lost its sense of home,” he said. “Modernization has passed over tradition, reason, and the market like a great wheel, separating people from nature and from any secure sense of belonging. Xuemo’s novels form an epic search for a spiritual home within that wasteland.”

He then invited Wang to draw on his research on Xuemo and suggest a way into the writer’s literary world.

Homelessness: Lingguan’s Question and the Silencing of the Xixia Civilization

Wang described himself as a latecomer to Xuemo’s fiction. What first struck him was the reality of a western Chinese world in which good and evil coexist and supernatural beings mingle with ordinary life.

He read Desert Rites through the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács’s concept of “transcendental homelessness.” The phrase describes the modern condition in which people have been uprooted from the land, family structures, and systems of belief that once gave life coherence.

Lingguan, the novel’s central character, is born in Shawan and raised in the desert, yet he remains troubled by a sense that he does not belong. He watches the older generation repeat the same lives, like a millstone turned endlessly by a donkey, and asks: “Is this all that life is?”

For Wang, Lingguan’s question belongs not only to one character or one region. It is one of the defining questions of modern literature.

Wang then turned to Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia, where homelessness becomes more than an individual crisis. It becomes a historical wound carried by an entire civilization.

The Xixia kingdom was destroyed by the Mongol armies, and the surviving people later lost their voices again amid the upheavals of modern history.

“Homelessness at the level of civilization is a deeper tragedy,” Wang said. “Xuemo’s recovery of forgotten voices through folk singing, oral narrative, and stories of ghosts amounts to a search among the ruins for an inheritance that can still be passed on.”

Xuemo said that few scholars, in China or abroad, had identified the spiritual search beneath his fiction with such force.

“This is more than a literary reading,” he said. “It is a philosophical account of a condition shared by humanity. Since childhood, I have felt intensely that everything is changing and falling away, like bubbles on water or buildings becoming ruins. Earlier traditions called this decay and dissolution. Professor Wang’s idea of homelessness has given clear language to something I had experienced only vaguely.”

Xuemo said that he does not begin by designing a fictional plot. He thinks of writing as presentation and response. While working on his Xixia novels, he sometimes felt that he could hear the cries of women from the lost kingdom or that figures from history had come to tell him their stories.

A book, he said, should emerge from the writer’s life with warmth and breath, like a child born from its mother.

“That is why readers do not doubt its reality,” Xuemo said. “It is fundamentally different from language assembled by AI. AI does not possess this sense of an entire life.”

Meaning: Three Forms of Seeking and Meng Baye’s Act of Dreaming

Wang found three levels in Xuemo’s treatment of the search for meaning.

The first is the personal dream, represented by Lingguan’s refusal to submit to a predetermined life. The second is the search for cultural roots, embodied in Liangzhou xianxiao, a local tradition of sung storytelling. Its blind performers preserve stories and create a common world of meaning for village audiences.

The third is cosmological. In Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia, spiritual practice, rebirth, and the dissolution of boundaries between human beings and animals point toward a larger order joining humanity, nature, and the cosmos.

“This is not the rebellion of the isolated individual found in Western existentialism,” Wang said. “It is a collective act of dreaming rooted in a cultural community.”

He gave particular attention to Master Meng, a man without formal education who acquires ecological wisdom through hunting and close contact with nature. He takes only what he needs, accepts life and death without resentment, and arrives at an ease that Wang associated with an everyday, vernacular form of Buddha-nature.

Xuemo described Master Meng as someone who first creates a dream and then turns it into a way of life.

When the outside world cannot be changed, Xuemo said, Chinese tradition offers what he called “the wisdom of watching the play.” Heroes pass away, historical struggles become old stories, and the spectacle of human ambition eventually gives way to laughter and conversation.

This is not passive withdrawal, he argued. It is a deliberate response to change.

“When you have sufficient strength, you intervene,” Xuemo said. “When you do not, you watch the play without allowing your mind to be carried away. This has helped ordinary people survive for five thousand years. It is also a spiritual response to the failures of institutions.”

The discussion of meaning led to death. Wang referred to Walter Benjamin’s observation that death is one of the sources of storytelling and also invoked the idea of living toward death.

Xuemo recalled a line spoken by Ying’er in White Tiger Pass: “Death is the best teacher. Only when you understand death can you understand life.”

He related the line to Martin Heidegger’s thought.

“Death is not the end of meaning,” Xuemo said. “It is an opportunity for meaning to appear with particular force. The ability to catch a trace of aura within meaninglessness is evidence that one is alive.”

Storytelling: Xianxiao and the Struggle Against Forgetting

Drawing on Benjamin’s essay ““The Storyteller,”” Wang spoke about the disappearance of communicable experience in an age of mechanical reproduction. Short videos and fragmented media, he argued, further weaken the experiences through which people once understood one another.

Liangzhou xianxiao occupies an important place in Xuemo’s fiction. Xuemo has said that without xianxiao, there would have been no Desert Rites.

Traditionally, people gathered around the fire to hear stories of the past and present, laugh at public figures, and discuss the injustices of the day. The performance was both an art and a public forum.

“Xuemo writes about individual lives and collective destinies,” Wang said. “He asks how people can retain their dignity in a broken age. There will always be listeners for stories of this kind.”

Xuemo recalled that his earliest books had very few readers. Today, he said, his work has found readers in many countries.

“In the age of AI, fragmented attention, and disappearing meaning, people need stories through which they can draw close and keep one another warm,” he said. “My task is to finish the stories I must tell. I do not ask how large the audience will be.”

Transcendence: Literature as a Vehicle, Not the Destination

Moratto then asked Wang and Xuemo about transcendence.

In Desert Rites, Lingguan looks into the night sky and experiences a moment in which his quilt seems to become a flying carpet carrying him into the Milky Way. In Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia, spiritual disciplines and the idea of the rainbow body appear beside scenes of poverty and violence.

The narratives move repeatedly between a harsh material world and brief moments of release. Moratto asked whether these passages represented a genuine transcendence of reality rather than an escape from it.

Wang said that the movement between the two creates the work’s artistic tension. The moments of transcendence do not abolish suffering. They briefly close the wound between the self and the world and give the character enough dignity to continue living.

Asked whether literary transcendence and the transcendence sought through spiritual practice were the same, Xuemo drew a sharp distinction.

“Literary training alone cannot bring transcendence,” he said. “Tolstoy did not transcend simply through literature, even in his eighties. Dostoevsky remained torn throughout his life between the human and the divine. Literature can question the soul, but spiritual practice provides a path beyond the self.”

For Xuemo, the proper course is to attain a measure of transcendent wisdom through practice and then return to literature, using it as a vehicle for that wisdom.

He contrasted this with the existentialist image of the solitary hero resisting the world. His own approach, he said, belongs to the Chinese tradition of xin-xing (心性), the cultivation of the heart-mind and human nature, and gives literary form to the understanding gained through that discipline.

A Cross-Cultural Response to the Spiritual Crisis of Modernity

Chen summarized the dialogue through its four central terms: homelessness, meaning, storytelling, and transcendence.

Wang had brought Lukács, Benjamin, Max Weber, Bruno Latour, and other Western thinkers into conversation with Desert Rites, Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia, and Xuemo’s other novels of western China.

By using Lukács’s “transcendental homelessness” to read Xuemo, Chen said, Wang placed the fiction within a crisis of modernity shared by many societies. Xuemo is firmly rooted in China and has developed a literary world of his own, yet the questions in his books belong to world literature.

Chen described the novels as spiritual chronicles of modern life. They ask how a person should live, where meaning might be found, and whether genuine transcendence remains possible.

“In a world where meaning has broken into fragments,” she said, “Xuemo’s stories retain a sense of inner life. Their capacity for transcendence may help readers resist forgetting and nihilism, recover dignity, and find companionship.”

Dian Li and Xuemo: Speculative Fiction, Ecological Writing, and Buddha-Nature

Professor Dian Li approached Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia through speculative fiction. He asked about the sources of its journeys across time and its supernatural narratives.

Xuemo distinguished his method from that of writers who knowingly construct an imagined world.

“A writer of speculative fiction knows that the world is an invention,” he said. “I first believe that the spiritual world is real and then try to present it truthfully. The characters come alive and even argue with me. It does not begin as a conceptual exercise.”

Li also asked about Xuemo’s ecological writing. He referred to Ying’er’s struggle for survival in Into the Desert and to the moment when she deliberately puts on her “desert clothes” before swallowing gold.

“Many Chinese writers approach ecology by working with material they have collected,” Xuemo replied. “The desert in my writing flows through my veins. It has grown out of my life; it has not been assembled from research.”

On the influence of Buddhism, Xuemo compared the mind to a sea into which many cultures flow: Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Greek philosophy, Maya civilization, and any other tradition capable of nourishing human life.

When a classic falls into this living sea like a stone, he said, it creates new waves in the present. Books such as Laozi’s True Thoughts and The Wisdom of the Buddha arose from this meeting between inherited texts and a living mind, not from the mechanical repetition of ancient sources.

Yanjin Chen: Building a Literary Home in a Wasteland of Meaning

Chen ended the forum by returning to authorship in the age of artificial intelligence.

AI can now produce language in large quantities, she said, making it increasingly difficult to know who stands behind a text or whether its apparent authority can be trusted. In such a climate, readers may respond more strongly to work that bears the marks of an individual life.

She described Xuemo as a Chinese writer whose literary outlook and understanding of the world were formed within an Eastern cultural community, but who had also pursued inward transcendence in both thought and practice. The vitality of his work, she argued, comes from that lived foundation.

“We need texts with a soul,” Chen said. “We also need spoken conversations such as this one. When people speak in their own voices, we know who is speaking. In some ways, we have returned to the oral age of Homer and the Liangzhou xianxiao performers.”

Those spoken words will, in turn, be recorded, retrieved, and quoted by AI, entering new contexts and influencing how people think. Each conversation therefore adds something to humanity’s intellectual and spiritual inheritance.

“As Xuemo has said, we can choose and create deliberately,” Chen concluded. “By drawing on the wisdom already present within us, we may build a home for the heart through literature and culture, even in a wasteland where meaning has become difficult to find.”