Literature as Intervention: Xuemo and the Redemptive Work of Fiction | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 17)

Literature as Intervention: Xuemo and the Redemptive Work of Fiction | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 17)

What can a novel do when medicine has reached its limit? That question ran through the seventeenth session of “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars,” held online on July 12, 2026, by the World Literature Union and the Xuemo Foundation.

The evening was devoted to Xuemo’s Redemption Trilogy: Eternal Love, Mama’s Star, and Koala Wants to Be Happy. Two younger writers from his family led the discussion: his son Yixin Chen and his nephew Jianxin Chen. More than 20 scholars and writers joined them, along with nearly 200 participants.

Yanjin Chen, who edited the trilogy and wrote The Xuemo Code, moderated the forum. Xuemo spoke from Singapore, where he had spent the preceding days meeting readers and taking part in literary events. For the first time, he systematically explained the creative vision behind the Redemption Trilogy and the principles that guided his writing.

A Speech from Singapore

Xuemo had attended more than ten events in Singapore, among them appearances at the National Library, universities, alumni associations, and cultural institutions. Bookstores had set up displays of his work, and his visit had attracted attention on social media.

What stayed with him most, he said, was the determination of Chinese communities in Singapore and Malaysia to preserve their cultural inheritance.

“There is a strong sense of Chinese community in Singapore and Malaysia,” he said. “People take pride in carrying Chinese culture forward.”

He spoke of Tan Kah Kee and others who supported the 1911 Revolution and invested heavily in Chinese-language education across Southeast Asia. Their example, he said, revealed how much effort had gone into keeping a culture alive far from its place of origin.

“For almost a century, Chinese communities in Southeast Asia have worked to preserve the flame of Chinese civilization,” he said. “That sense of responsibility moved me deeply.”

Xuemo described literary exchange as the passing of a flame from one heart to another.

“We give off a little warmth and a little light,” he said. “It may not be brilliant, but it can still illuminate the space around us.”

The journey had also given him new material. He said it might one day lead to a book about the inner history of Chinese life in Southeast Asia.

Why “Redemption,” Not “Healing”

Chen opened the discussion of the trilogy by asking how the books should be described. Were they works of healing, or of redemption?

Xuemo chose “redemption.”

The word “healing,” he said, carries medical implications and is restricted on some livestreaming platforms. But his objection went beyond terminology. Redemption, to him, names a stronger and more demanding process.

The trilogy was not planned in advance. Each book began when Xuemo encountered a form of suffering he felt unable to ignore.

“When those silent forms of pain appeared before me,” he said, “I had no choice but to write.”

Redemption works in two directions, he explained. The characters seek some way out of suffering, while the act of writing changes the author.

Earlier in his career, Xuemo had been preoccupied with literary form and artistic purity. These three books drew him back toward the immediate lives of ordinary people. Questions about literary status and authorial identity began to seem less important.

“Literature cannot take the place of medicine,” he said. “But it can enter places medicine cannot reach: dignity, love, and understanding.”

Xuemo connected this position with Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea of engaged literature. His own philosophical ground, however, is not existentialism. It is xin-xing (心性), the cultivation of the heart-mind and human nature.

Three Novels, Three Widening Circles

Yixin Chen found a clear progression across the trilogy.

Eternal Love begins with one person facing death. It asks how someone with a terminal illness can retain dignity when the future has almost disappeared.

Mama’s Star widens the circle to the family. A mother spends ten years writing letters as she tries to rebuild trust with her autistic son.

Koala Wants to Be Happy turns toward society. Its central figure is a young woman trying to begin again after making a serious mistake, only to be pushed back toward despair by prejudice and institutional failure.

“The trilogy moves from the individual to the family and then to society,” Yixin said. “Redemption is not only about whether a person can save himself or herself. It asks whether we can become a society that does not give up on people so easily.”

The books feel immediate, he argued, because Xuemo did not begin with a theory. Actual lives pressed themselves upon him and demanded a response.

Jianxin Chen compared the new trilogy with Xuemo’s earlier Desert Trilogy. The earlier novels follow farmers in western China struggling to remain alive amid poverty and an unforgiving natural world. The Redemption Trilogy asks a different question: How can people awaken when the danger lies within the mind and within the structures of modern society?

“To see someone is the beginning of redemption,” Jianxin said.

Koala Wants to Be Happy refuses a consoling ending. Jianxin compared its severity to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Both expose the cruelty of exclusion without pretending that suffering can be neatly repaired.

Yet the book does not abandon its character. For Jianxin, its very attention to a marginalized young woman leaves a light burning for others like her.

He also drew a distinction between pity and empathy. Pity looks down from a safe height. Empathy lowers itself until it can share another person’s field of vision.

“Xuemo does not write about these people,” Jianxin said. “He becomes them.”

Becoming the Character

Readers have often remarked on the changes in Xuemo’s style. One book may sound so unlike another that the two seem to have come from different writers.

Xuemo said the difference comes from his attempt to disappear into each character.

“When I wrote Mama’s Star, I was that anxious, tenacious mother,” he said. “When I wrote Eternal Love, I was Yatou facing death.”

He has no wish to reproduce a successful earlier version of himself. At times, he said, he has deliberately broken with accepted ideas of the novel in order to place the writing where contemporary pain is most acute.

He recalled hearing about a distressing social incident on June 18. Within a month, he had completed a novel and a novella prompted by it.

“I am not trying to make literature,” he said. “I am racing against death.”

A writer has limited time, Xuemo explained, especially when writing for people who cannot make themselves heard. That urgency has taught him to work in cars, airport lounges, and crowded social gatherings rather than wait for silence.

He described this state of mind as ruru budong: an inward stillness undisturbed by one’s surroundings.

What Xuemo Told the Two Younger Writers

Xuemo praised Yixin and Jianxin for the sensitivity they had developed through years of literary training. He also spoke frankly about what he thought was holding them back.

Both remained too caught up in daily life, he said. They had not yet learned to protect solitude or to refuse demands that pulled them away from writing.

His advice was to approach the work less solemnly.

“Writing should be like a child playing with mud,” he said. “Keep a child’s heart and enjoy the process. Do not calculate the result. Do not judge yourself, and do not allow other people’s judgments to govern you.”

Yixin said he had long believed that writing required the right environment. He now wanted to free himself from that dependence and learn from his father’s habit of writing at once.

Jianxin spoke of returning to zero. He wanted to look at the world again with an infant’s eyes and allow his growth as a writer to follow his growth as a person.

A Family Conversation Opens Outward

Chen described the event as an intimate family conversation held before an international audience. A father, son, and nephew were discussing not only how books are written but how a literary life passes from one generation to another.

The circle around Xuemo’s work is wider than his family, however. It includes readers, editors, translators, and scholars.

“Xuemo has created more than a personal body of work,” Chen said. “He has created a literary community. Within it, anyone can pick up a pen, and anyone can reflect a little light.”

For Xuemo, she added, literature is not simply a profession or a collection of books. It is a way of living.

The evening began in Singapore, with questions of memory and cultural inheritance. It then moved through illness, autism, social exclusion, literary form, and the discipline required to write amid distraction.

What emerged was not a literature of retreat. Xuemo’s idea of redemption asks the writer to enter the world more fully: to notice people whom society overlooks, to speak where suffering has remained silent, and to preserve dignity when no easy solution is available.

The seventeenth session therefore returned to the question with which it began. Literature cannot cure illness or repair every damaged life. It can, however, refuse to look away.

“Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” is held each Sunday at 8 p.m. Beijing time. The next session will continue the series’ discussion of literature and spiritual life.