Dissolving Boundaries: Ethics of Life and the Wisdom of Transcendence in Western Chinese Literature | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 15)

Dissolving Boundaries: Ethics of Life and the Wisdom of Transcendence in Western Chinese Literature | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 15)

On the evening of June 28, 2026, the World Literature Union and the Xuemo Foundation held the fifteenth session of “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars.”

The forum, titled “Dissolving Boundaries: Self and Other in Xuemo’s Short Fiction,” featured Wenjing Wu, a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of Connecticut; Lingxiao Wu, a doctoral candidate at Peking University’s Institute of World Literature; and Chinese writer Xuemo.

Yanjin Chen, Xuemo’s longtime editor and author of The Xuemo Code, moderated the event. More than ten scholars and writers from China, Norway, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, Nepal, and elsewhere joined nearly 200 readers online.

Yanjin Chen: Preserving Each Encounter Against Forgetting

At the beginning of the forum, Xuemo responded to suggestions that the introductions of participating guests should be shortened. Drawing on a Tibetan textual tradition in which even a copying error may be preserved in its original form, he argued that the memory of each gathering should remain part of the record.

“To preserve the memory of every meeting,” he said, “is to respect the line through which culture is passed down.”

Chen then introduced the participating guests, including Shouhui Zhao of the University of Bergen, Helen Wu of the University of Toronto, David S. Hogsette of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, and Elham Mirzania of Toronto Metropolitan University.

The participants posed for an online group photograph before beginning the discussion, creating a record of those present at the fifteenth meeting.

Wenjing Wu: Three Boundaries That Disappear

Wenjing Wu examined three of Xuemo’s short stories: “Old Man Xinjiang,” “Beauty,” and “The Rat God.” Rather than approaching them chiefly as sociological accounts of rural China, she brought them into conversation with Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Zhuangzi.

She argued that the stories express an Eastern ethics of life in which the self is no longer treated as the fixed center of experience.

1. The Boundary Between Friend and Enemy: “Old Man Xinjiang”

In “Old Man Xinjiang,” the protagonist learns that his elder brother has sold his wife. He does not respond with anger or revenge. Instead, he relinquishes his claim over her and asks whether she is happy.

Wu related his response to two traditional ideas: the Buddhist injunction to let the mind arise without attaching itself anywhere, and the Daoist principle of giving life without claiming possession. In this form of selfless love, she argued, the boundary between self and other begins to disappear.

2. The Boundary Between the Body and Human Worth: “Beauty”

Yue’er, the central figure in “Beauty,” has syphilis and is shunned by her village. Yet the deterioration of her body does not deprive her of dignity. Shortly before her death, she releases a toad rather than allowing it to be killed, showing compassion for another vulnerable life.

For Wu, the story challenges the assumption that the body determines a person’s value. Beauty lies not in physical perfection but in the dignity a person preserves within.

3. The Boundary Between Humans and Animals: “The Rat God”

“The Rat God” moves from the frenzied killing of rats to the worship of a rat deity. In the process, the certainty of human superiority begins to weaken.

Wu noted that Xuemo does not present the villagers’ awakening as complete or ideal. Their response to the spiritual remains hesitant, ambiguous, and unfinished. That lack of resolution, she said, gives the story much of its vitality.

Xuemo: Injustice, Acceptance, and the Breaking of Attachment

Wu asked whether patience in the face of injustice could become a form of submission.

Xuemo answered with an episode from his own life. Early in his career, a requested job transfer was denied, and he was later overlooked when housing was allocated. Those setbacks eventually pushed him to leave a small county and enter a wider world.

“If Heaven can dish it out, I can take it,” he said. “But that does not mean becoming numb. If you have a great aspiration, you do not need to waste yourself on every small injustice. What appears to be an obstacle may be the force that drives you toward the sea.”

Speaking about Yue’er’s desire for love in “Beauty,” Xuemo connected the story with his more recent Redemption Trilogy: Eternal Love, Mama’s Star, and Koala Wants to Be Happy. These books, he said, try to offer people in desperate circumstances the warmth of being understood.

He also discussed the mother in “The Rat God.” Like Lingguan’s mother in Desert Rites, the character was based on Xuemo’s own mother. He described her as a distinctly Chinese literary figure, marked by suffering yet possessing an almost sacred strength.

When Lingxiao Wu asked about the autobiography One Man’s West, Xuemo gave a three-part account of what he calls “breaking attachment.”

The first stage is attachment, represented by a cup. A person has a goal but does not allow the goal to define the whole of life.

The second is intellectual release, or breaking the cup. One recognizes that the perceived world is partly a reflection of the mind and that all knowledge has limits.

The third is release embodied in life, or entering the sea. Through sustained practice, a person recognizes the nature of mind, passes beyond binary opposition, and enters what Chinese tradition calls the unity of humanity and the cosmos.

“Those who reach the highest state often transmit rather than create,” Xuemo said, referring to Confucius and Laozi. “A writer must find a balance between breaking attachment and constructing a literary world. Transcendent wisdom must be joined with compassion for life within society.”

Lingxiao Wu: The Soul of Western China Through Bakhtin’s Chronotope

Lingxiao Wu read One Man’s West through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, the literary joining of time and space. Liangzhou, she argued, is not merely a geographical setting in the book. It is a space in which a particular form of life and experience takes shape.

Geography and Character

Xuemo’s writing shows how enclosed rural communities can develop markedly different temperaments.

Two villages separated by only a ravine may be shaped by opposing social habits. The village on the sunny slope is associated with force and open violence; the one on the shaded slope with restraint and calculation. Within such isolated communities, time can seem to have remained unchanged since the Han or Tang dynasty.

Wondrous Reality

Wu also asked about episodes in which chopsticks are made to stand upright in a bowl of water during a ritual to recall a wandering soul, or mice appear to bow like human beings.

“Belief and disbelief are both relationships,” Xuemo replied.

He described this as a form of relational ontology. Whether gods exist in a person’s world depends, he suggested, on whether a relationship of belief has been established with them. The Greek gods “died” with the rise of Christianity, he said, but were later brought back into cultural life by those who turned toward them again.

Yixin Chen: What the Land Gives a Writer

Yixin Chen, a writer born in the 1980s and a native of Liangzhou, spoke about writing from the same region as Xuemo.

He admitted that Xuemo’s Desert Trilogy had once left him with a sense of defeat. The books seemed impossible to surpass. He has since made peace with that feeling.

“As a child, I was steeped in the land,” Chen said. “When I grew older, I tried to question it with what I had learned from books. Now I no longer want to argue with it. I want to return and experience its smell.”

“My father has his West, and I have mine. What I want to capture is the hidden web through which living things have existed together for thousands of years.”

A Literary Community Without Calculation

In his closing remarks, Xuemo returned to the reason for establishing the forum. He hoped it could remain a place where Eastern and Western scholars, senior academics, and younger writers spoke as equals. Each account of literature and life, he said, should become part of the lasting record of human thought.

“To write something down is to make it endure,” Chen said. “The spoken word can also endure.”

She described the series as a literary community not governed by profit or personal advantage. Scholars from different countries meet there to express what they think about literature, the world, and human life. Through those conversations, they form relationships that may outlast the individual event.

During the forum, the boundaries between self and other, East and West, and local life and world literature did not disappear completely. They became more permeable. What passed between them was a concern shared by everyone present: how human beings might continue to seek truth, goodness, and beauty while living within difference.