Where Is the West? Chinese and Polish Scholars Discuss the Vital Force in Xuemo’s One Man’s West | World Literature Union Youth Forum (Episode 4)

Where Is the West? Chinese and Polish Scholars Discuss the Vital Force in Xuemo’s One Man’s West | World Literature Union Youth Forum (Episode 4)

The fourth World Literature Union Youth Forum, jointly organized by the World Literature Union and the Xuemo Foundation, was held online at 8 p.m. Beijing time on August 22, 2026. The forum took as its theme “Where Is the West? From Xuemo’s One Man’s West to Our Lives in Poland: Home, Distant Places, and the Vital Force at the Cultural Margins.” The featured speakers were Liu Chao, a lecturer at the Institute of the Middle and Far East at Jagiellonian University in Poland, and Tong Yuying, who holds a master’s degree in Polish language and literature from the University of Warsaw. Young scholars from Peking University, Beijing Normal University, Shanghai International Studies University, Malaysia University, Singapore International Chinese University, and other institutions joined long-time readers of Xuemo’s works for a dialogue on literature, cross-cultural experience, identity, and related questions.

From Xinjiang to Poland: Resonance Between Two “Wests”

A cross-cultural researcher who has taught in Poland for nearly twelve years, Liu Chao shared his reading under the title “One Man’s Journey Through the West.” He grew up in Xinjiang, China, and later moved to Poland to teach, reconstructing his sense of identity between two “Wests,” geographical as well as psychological. “Xinjiang is the west of China in a geographical sense, while Poland occupies a western position in Europe in political and cultural terms. Both exist within a center-periphery structure, yet both have nurtured cultural traditions of remarkable resilience,” Liu said.

Liu identified at least four layers of meaning in the “west” of One Man’s West: Liangzhou as a geographical homeland; the cultural inheritance of western China; a spiritual ground for self-cultivation; and, at the innermost level, a spiritual point of orientation. Phrases in the book such as “overcome yourself” and “whatever Heaven can throw at me, I can take” resonated strongly with his own experience of living across cultures in Poland. “What the margins teach us is not how to conquer the external world, but how to come to terms with fate and then keep moving forward. The true west is not a place. It is the continuing process of living out who you are.”

Tong Yuying read One Man’s West alongside A Treatise on Shelling Beans by the contemporary Polish writer Wiesław Myśliwski. She observed that both works move beyond grand historical narratives and begin instead with the lived experience of ordinary people, transforming home into a spiritual space. “The west in Xuemo’s writing is not a direction on a map, but the sum of childhood, loved ones, land, and memory. The Polish countryside in Myśliwski’s writing is likewise not a geographical coordinate, but a past to which one can no longer return. Both works show that literature need not occupy the center of a dominant narrative. By beginning at the margins, with the small and particular experiences of individual lives, it may reveal people and their times more truthfully.”

The Margins as a Position from Which to See the World

During the question-and-answer session, the two speakers and scholars attending online discussed the work’s meanings and its cross-cultural circulation. Asked why the book is called One Man’s West, Tong identified “one man” as the key to understanding it. “The west is not an object observed from outside. It is perceived through Xuemo’s own lived experience. This deeply personal mode of writing makes an abstract west concrete and warm, while giving greater emotional force to the theme of ‘perfecting oneself.’”

Liu added from a cross-cultural perspective: “Xuemo’s ‘one man’ represents a state of being: complete in oneself, inwardly fulfilled, and at ease in solitude. This is especially illuminating for people who live between cultures. When you belong to no single center, you may instead grow a spiritual anchor of your own at the margins.”

Discussing the narrative of hardship in One Man’s West, Tong emphasized that the book is not fundamentally about “escaping poverty,” but about “choosing what kind of person to become amid scarcity.” “Material resources may be scarce, but the spirit need not be impoverished. Xuemo writes about how people shape themselves within their circumstances. The environment determines the starting point, but we define the destination.” Liu strongly identified with this reading. He recalled details from the book such as “dreaming in a garlic field after failing the university entrance examination” and putting the words “overcome yourself” behind a dormitory door. “These passages remind me of the countless moments when I faced cultural differences alone in Poland. The greatest opponent is never the environment, but the part of ourselves that wants to give up.”

The two scholars reached a shared understanding of the value of the margins. Liu called the periphery a “privilege”: “It allows you to see two worlds at once, both the center and the forgotten corners. Poland was partitioned several times in its history, yet it produced Nobel Prize-winning writers such as Wisława Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz, and Olga Tokarczuk. This shows precisely how the margins can give rise to a culture of extraordinary resilience.” Tong described the periphery as “a position from which to view the world”: “Standing at the center, we often see only the mainstream narrative. Standing at the margins, however, we may discover forms of vitality that have been overlooked.”

Literature as a Bridge to Cross-Cultural Understanding

As a Chinese-language educator, Liu was particularly interested in the potential for One Man’s West to reach readers in Poland. He noted Poland’s deep tradition of borderland literature. Miłosz’s The Issa Valley and Tokarczuk’s Primeval and Other Times both explore memory and identity in peripheral regions, offering meaningful points of comparison with Xuemo’s narratives of western China. A selection of Xuemo’s short stories was donated to Jagiellonian University in 2024. The 2025 competition for research on and translation of Xuemo’s works also included Polish as a competition language, and a student at the university, Katarzyna Guo Kaini, won third prize in the Polish translation category. “Polish readers naturally respond to themes such as ‘leaving and looking back’ and ‘writing the life of a disappearing world,’ because their own history is also filled with memories of migration and loss,” Liu said.

Liu nevertheless acknowledged that Polish translations of Xuemo’s works remain at an early stage, with students of Chinese still forming the main readership. “Yet the power of literature lies precisely in its ability to cross national borders. We do not need to deliberately tell Polish readers ‘what China is like.’ If we present a truthful and complex story of a human life, they will be able to see themselves in it,” Liu said. “As Tokarczuk has said, literature is ‘the ongoing narration of the world,’ and One Man’s West has already provided a textual foundation on which such an exchange can unfold.”

Tong added that young people in Poland are increasingly encountering China not as a “distant symbol,” but through the “particulars of everyday life.” Popular cultural works such as The Three-Body Problem, Black Myth: Wukong, and The Untamed have become important windows through which they come to know China. “If One Man’s West can be translated into Polish, its stories of growing up, making choices, and coming to terms with fate will surely move many more Polish readers.”

The West as a Perspective on Life

Toward the end of the forum, Liu quoted from the preface to a new edition of One Man’s West: “If you understand this book, perhaps you can understand Xuemo. But this book does not exist in order to make you understand Xuemo. It exists to reveal the relationships between people and culture, people and the land, and culture and destiny, and to help those who wish to fulfill themselves do so.” Drawing on his twelve years of life in Poland, he also returned to the forum’s central theme. “The west is not a destination to be reached, but a road on which we continually leave the familiar and encounter the unknown. I am neither purely Chinese nor purely Polish. I am a ‘third form of being’ that has grown where two cultures meet. Perhaps this is what Xuemo means by ‘playing my own game together with everyone else.’”

In her concluding remarks, Lin Mianzhi said that the forum had not only deepened participants’ understanding of One Man’s West, but had also explored the possibilities of cross-cultural literary dialogue. “As both speakers have said, the west is home, a distant place, and the margins. More importantly, it is a perspective from which to contemplate life. When we look back from the margins, we may see the world more completely and hear the voice within us more clearly.”