An Insider’s Voice in World Desert Literature: Reading Xuemo Across Cultures | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 16)

An Insider’s Voice in World Desert Literature: Reading Xuemo Across Cultures | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 16)

On July 5, 2026, the 16th session of the online forum “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” brought together writers, translators and literary scholars for a discussion of Xuemo’s desert fiction.

Organized by the World Literature Union and the Xuemo Foundation, the forum was titled “Xuemo’s Desert Writing from a Global Perspective.” Its principal exchange took place between Xuemo and Thomas Zimmer, a German sinologist, scholar of Chinese literature and Zijiang Chair Professor at East China Normal University.

Riccardo Moratto, an Italian sinologist and Distinguished Professor at Tongji University, moderated the conversation, organizing it around ten themes. Yanjin Chen, Xuemo’s longtime editor and the author of The Xuemo Code, served as academic host.

Nearly 30 scholars and writers from China, Germany, Italy, Norway, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Iran and Nepal participated, along with more than 200 readers. Their discussion considered what distinguishes literature written from within a desert community from literature produced by travelers, explorers and outside observers.

Building an International Community of Readers and Scholars

Chen opened the forum by introducing Zimmer, Moratto, Xuemo and the participating scholars. Among them were Shouhui Zhao of the University of Bergen, Helen Wu of the University of Toronto, David S. Hogsette of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Yan Liu of Beijing International Studies University, Elham Mirzania of Toronto Metropolitan University and Bjoern Aage C. Blix, a postdoctoral researcher at Hunan University.

In his opening remarks, Xuemo said the weekly forum had begun to attract attention among international scholars because of its regularity and sustained focus. Representatives of the Singapore Writers Association, he recalled, had remarked that literary discussions held with such frequency and academic concentration were unusual.

Transcripts from earlier sessions have been edited into the first two volumes of a forthcoming collection. Future sessions will continue to be numbered and documented, creating an archive of the series.

For Xuemo, the discussions are also a response to cultural fragmentation. By bringing people in different countries and time zones into regular conversation, he said, the forum seeks to create a community grounded in literature, reflection and shared intellectual concerns.

Thomas Zimmer: A Literature Written From Within

Drawing on more than 40 years of research into Chinese literature, Zimmer organized his discussion with Xuemo around 10 subjects. These included Xuemo’s reasons for writing about the desert, the place of subjective experience in literary representation, the desert in contemporary Chinese travel writing, women in desert narratives, and the desert as natural environment, social world, site of memory, spiritual space and meeting point between cultures.

Zimmer observed that Western desert literature has often treated the desert as a “blank screen for philosophical projection.” In works by Paul Bowles, narratives associated with T. E. Lawrence and Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara, the desert is frequently encountered through the eyes of travelers.

Xuemo’s fiction begins elsewhere. His writing emerges from a life spent within the desert communities of western China.

As Xuemo put it:

“The desert is not an other. It is my skin and my breath.”

For Zimmer, this position as a writer from within the desert distinguishes Xuemo from authors who approach it chiefly as an exotic or symbolic landscape. It also complicates the kind of Orientalist gaze criticized by Edward Said, in which a distant region becomes an object of projection for the outsider.

Zimmer placed Xuemo’s work alongside several other forms of contemporary writing about deserts. Liu Zichao’s travel writing draws on reportage, while explorers often concentrate on scientific or archaeological discovery. Xuemo’s fiction, Zimmer argued, combines literary imagination with sustained philosophical inquiry.

He also compared Yue’er and other women in Xuemo’s fiction with female figures in the work of Sanmao and Ban Zhou, whose writing concerns Afghanistan. Xuemo’s characters, he suggested, are not simply symbols of gender. They embody the dignity and spiritual inheritance of rural communities undergoing disruptive change.

Zimmer identified three distinguishing features of Xuemo’s desert writing:

An insider’s voice

A literature of survival and endurance

A record of spiritual seeking

Together, he argued, these qualities address a longstanding absence in world desert literature: narratives grounded in the daily lives of people for whom the desert is home rather than destination.

Zimmer summarized the distinction in concrete terms:

“When Western readers encounter the named camels, the father who freezes to death and the elderly people singing ancient songs, they are not encountering an idea. They are encountering the weight of living beings.”

The Desert as a Lifeworld

Xuemo said he had never regarded the desert merely as an object to be represented. It was part of the world that formed him and therefore part of the substance of his writing.

“My writing is not something I simply create. It grows out of life, like a child born from a mother. Excessive rewriting would destroy its original vitality.”

When Zimmer raised the tension between subjective experience and objective description, Xuemo invoked the phenomenological idea of the “lifeworld.” Absolute objectivity, he argued, remains beyond human reach.

“Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’ remains unknowable,” he said. “The essence of literature is the exploration of the human heart.”

In Xuemo’s fiction, the desert is both a geographical environment and a field of meaning. It carries the memories of folk traditions in western China, including stories associated with Huanglong Temple and the Sand Dolls. Xuemo also related this conception of human life to the scientist Qian Xuesen’s view of human beings as open systems, continually interacting with their surroundings.

This understanding helps explain why landscape in Xuemo’s fiction is seldom passive. The desert shapes memory, relationships, language and moral choice. It acts upon the characters even as they try to interpret or resist it.

Women, Wisdom and Spiritual Imagination

Xuemo described two stages in the development of his female characters.

His earliest portrayals grew from observations of his mother and other women in rural western China. In later works, those realistic foundations became intertwined with images drawn from Tibetan Buddhist traditions, including the figure of the dakini.

“Female characters have become one of the inner forces driving my writing,” he said. “They represent wisdom and compassion, and they embody the human hope for deliverance from spiritual desolation.”

The discussion then turned to differences between Eastern and Western religious approaches to the desert.

In biblical traditions, Xuemo suggested, the wilderness is often a place in which human beings encounter God and establish a relationship with the divine. The movement is directed outward, toward a transcendent presence.

In Buddhist and Daoist traditions, by contrast, the desert may become a place where attachment to the self is relinquished.

Reflecting on Auschwitz, Xuemo observed that a Christian might ask, “Where is God?” He contrasted this appeal to the divine with the Buddhist pursuit of liberation through releasing attachment to the self and entering a larger whole. The two paths differ, he said, but both express a desire to move beyond the limits of ordinary existence.

Literature can cross cultural boundaries, Xuemo argued, when it addresses such ultimate concerns without erasing the differences between traditions.

Literature in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The conversation also addressed the place of literature in an era increasingly shaped by algorithms and short-form media.

“When algorithms occupy every aspect of human space, and short videos destroy our patience for reading and imagination, literature becomes one of the last shelters for the human spirit,” Xuemo said.

His remark framed literature not simply as a form of entertainment but as a discipline of attention. Sustained reading asks people to remain with unfamiliar experiences, complex emotions and unresolved questions in ways that algorithmically selected fragments often do not.

Xuemo described his own creative development in three stages: entering the desert, living in the desert and constructing Suosalang within the desert.

The formulation marks a movement from physical experience to literary habitation and finally to philosophical creation. The desert begins as an environment, becomes a way of life and ultimately serves as the imaginative ground of an epic.

Placing Xuemo in a Wider Literary Tradition

At the close of the principal dialogue, Moratto offered a concise summary:

“A place without memory is only a coordinate. A civilization without dialogue will eventually become a desert.”

Chen observed that Zimmer had used the desert as the organizing image for placing Xuemo’s fiction in conversation with writing from other cultures.

The discussion ranged across Paul Bowles’s desert fiction, narratives associated with T. E. Lawrence, Ludwig Leichhardt’s exploratory journeys, the travel writing of Sanmao and Liu Zichao, biblical wilderness traditions, Said’s critique of Orientalism, Husserl’s lifeworld, Paul Tillich’s concept of ultimate concern and Italo Calvino’s treatment of memory and place.

The purpose of these comparisons was not to assimilate Xuemo into a Western theoretical framework. It was to establish where the comparisons hold and where his local experience demands a different vocabulary.

As Zimmer said:

“Xuemo writes about people living in the desert, not simply ideas about the desert. His characters possess historical depth; they are not symbols.”

For Xuemo, the desert is at once a homeland, a repository of memory, a setting for the dissolution of the self and a space in which the human spirit may change.

His fiction examines hardship, survival, dignity and transcendence. By treating the desert as both a physical environment and an inward condition, it brings a distinctive local experience into a wider literary conversation.

Yingdi Zhao: Multicultural Influences on Xuemo’s Writing

During the question-and-answer session, Yingdi Zhao of Xi’an International Studies University asked about the multicultural elements in Xuemo’s work.

Xuemo recalled two encounters that redirected his intellectual and spiritual life. The first occurred in 1994, when he unexpectedly attended a Buddhist ceremony in Tibet. The second concerned a possible historical connection between the Vajravarahi Cave near his hometown and the culture of the Western Xia dynasty.

These encounters began a decades-long investigation of Tibetan culture and Western Xia history.

“The pain buried deep in history reached me through these fragments,” Xuemo said. “Millions of words of material surged within me, yet I have written only a small part of it.”

Zhao also asked about the extensive annotations in the traditional-character edition of Suosalang. Xuemo described the notes as part of the epic’s creative structure:

“They are stones I throw into the ocean of the mind.”

The annotations, he explained, are intended to direct readers toward cultural references and historical memories that might otherwise be overlooked.

Chen added that Writers Publishing House released the simplified-character edition of Suosalang in 2024. That edition underwent further literary adaptation, she said, making the relationship between the two versions a possible subject for comparative study.

She described the desert in Xuemo’s writing as both symbol and physical reality. Suosalang is not only the title of the epic but also the name of an imagined spiritual homeland created through literature.

Dialogue in an Age of Fragmentation

Over three hours, the discussion moved from the deserts of the Hexi Corridor to broader questions of memory, identity, religion and the human condition.

Chen concluded:

“Xuemo’s works show us that the desert is not only a geographical concept but also a metaphor for the human condition. Writing grounded in lived experience has the power to cross cultural barriers.”

The weekly forum is itself an attempt to counter the isolation and fragmentation discussed during the session. It brings different languages, disciplines and intellectual traditions into sustained conversation.