Awakening through Tenderness and Resilience: Nepali Doctoral Students Discuss Women’s Lives in Xuemo’s Writing | World Literature Union Youth Forum (Episode 2)

Awakening through Tenderness and Resilience: Nepali Doctoral Students Discuss Women’s Lives in Xuemo’s Writing | World Literature Union Youth Forum (Episode 2)

The second World Literature Union Youth Forum, jointly organized by the World Literature Union and the Xuemo Foundation, was held online via Zoom at 8 p.m. Beijing time on August 1, 2026. Under the theme “Letters from a Goddess, Flowers of the Desert: Nepali Doctoral Students Discuss Tenderness and Resilience in the Women of Xuemo’s Works,” the forum featured Zhang Yang, a Nepali scholar and recent doctoral graduate of the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University, and Pude, a Nepali doctoral student in comparative literature and world literature at the university’s School of Chinese Language and Literature. More than 200 young scholars, university faculty and students, and literature enthusiasts from China, Nepal, and other countries participated online and in person. The forum was coordinated by Xu Yujiao (Joy), secretary of the World Literature Union and an editor responsible for the international presentation of Xuemo’s works, and moderated by Lin Mianzhi, who hosts cultural and tourism events for Lingnan Xuemo Academy and Wuwei Xuemo Academy.

From Victims to Those Who Choose

Dr. Zhang Yang delivered a keynote address titled “Becoming Oneself Again in the Desert: Reading Daughters of the Desert through the Destinies of Lanlan and Ying’er.” Having grown up in rural Nepal, he was deeply moved by the resilience displayed by the novel’s two women from western China in desperate circumstances. He argued that Lanlan and Ying’er are not conventional female figures “waiting to be rescued.” Rather, under the intersecting pressures of marital violence, poverty, and traditional constraints, they actively choose to enter the desert in search of a chance to survive, becoming the novel’s two central protagonists.

“The desert is not only a geographical space, but also a metaphor for the conditions of life: poverty is a desert, an abusive marriage is a desert, losing loved ones is a desert, and prejudice and indifference are deserts as well.” Zhang argued that Xuemo does not reduce women’s strength to the slogan of “never breaking down.” Instead, he portrays with sensitivity their genuine strength in being willing to rise and continue forward even after breaking down. Lanlan’s rational resilience and Ying’er’s emotional tenacity complement each other. The “new form of relationship between women” that they build amid the sound of camel bells, without dependence or self-sacrifice and with mutual protection, transcends traditional power structures and offers young people today a spiritual model for “affirming oneself in adversity.”

From Being Looked At to Writing Oneself

Pude, in turn, examined the distinctive value of Love Letters from the Goddess from the perspective of cross-cultural communication. Originally titled Jianxing Ru Mian: Sha’erwadi de Qingshu, or “Seeing One’s True Nature as If Face to Face: Saraswati’s Love Letters,” the work grew out of The Undying Diamond Heart. It tells the story of a Nepali living goddess who is chosen by society and enshrined for worship, and who, after leaving that role, gradually develops a sense of herself as a subject through writing love letters.

“Literature has rarely attended to the private lives of Nepal’s living goddesses after they leave their role. Xuemo has turned his attention to this seldom-written stage of their lives.” Pude emphasized that the work’s subtlest achievement lies in its shift of narrative focus, from “how the outside world defines the goddess” to “how the goddess examines herself.” Here, letters are not merely a literary form, but a means by which Saraswati reclaims her voice. Although her awakening remains entangled with waiting for love and she has not entirely escaped the fate of “being shaped by others,” her determination to “continue perceiving, judging, and acting amid uncertainty” embodies the dialectical unity of tenderness and resilience. Tenderness is the capacity for understanding and empathy; resilience is the courage to take responsibility for the consequences of one’s choices. Pude also highlighted the book’s journey from its original Chinese composition into Nepali translation and then back into a Chinese-language context, describing it as a successful example of the “reverse circulation” of Chinese literature.

Women’s Resonance across Borders

In the discussion that followed, the two scholars exchanged views on the texts. Asked whether Lanlan and Ying’er could be understood as two sides of the same female soul, both Zhang and Pude agreed. Pude interpreted the question through the “Way of the Mean”: “Modern women are often expected to possess both tenderness and resilience. This is not a division, but the wholeness of life. Just as Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai in Dream of the Red Chamber can be seen as two sides of one whole, Lanlan and Ying’er together form an authentic and richly realized world of women.”

Qian Xin, a doctoral student at Fujian Normal University, drew attention to the scholarly significance of “cultural return.” Pude responded that works of this kind help fill a gap in Nepali literature’s reflection on its own culture and promote deeper mutual understanding between China and Nepal at the level of emotional structures and spiritual foundations. Pude’s younger brother Pujing, a master’s student at Beijing Language and Culture University, posed a question grounded in the difficulties facing young people today. Pude responded pragmatically that “one needs both ideals and love”: “A genuine choice does not mean sacrificing one for the other in an either-or decision. It means seeking balance through communication and taking responsibility.”

Possibilities for Life in Literature

The conversation lasted more than two hours, moving from the Gobi and yellow sands of the Hexi Corridor to the light and shadow of Himalayan shrines, and from the vicissitudes of individual lives to exchange and mutual learning between civilizations. It brought together textual analysis and personal experience. In her concluding remarks, moderator Lin Mianzhi observed that although the transformation of social structures will still take time, individual awakening is always the starting point of freedom. With their lived quality of “resilience within tenderness,” the women in Xuemo’s writing not only add a distinctive radiance to the literature of western China, but also offer an Eastern literary perspective on women’s issues in a global context.