Xue Mo Biography（雪漠传记）

雪漠传记

雪漠，原名陈开红，出生在甘肃省凉州的一个偏僻的小村庄，那儿黄沙扑面，干旱缺水，十分贫穷。雪漠的父母是农民，不识字，但十分善良。但从小他就梦想着成为一名作家。除了学生课本之外，村子里找不到一本书。但那时，家里常来人，客人总爱讲故事，他就会记下复述。父亲经常对他能成功的叙述故事给予赞许的微笑。

他因此发现村子里充满着丰富的故事，这激起了他的好奇心和想象力。如果一个蹲在墙头的村民，告诉他要上天摘星星时，他就信了，便幻想着有一天，自己也能上天摘星星。一放学，他就会跑到邻居瞎贤贾福山那里听他弹奏凉州贤孝。凉州贤孝是通过盲艺人用三弦琴弹唱的方式弹奏出的一曲曲沧桑、朴素、厚重、向善、催人上进的故事，它因此成为雪漠生命中永远抹不去的音符，也成为雪漠所有作品的基调。

小时候，雪漠还崇拜《西游记》中的孙悟空，孙悟空跟着他的师父去西天取经，他神童广大，会七十二变。他也希望自己能像孙悟空一样，变出很多宝贝，而他最大的愿望就是有书读，村子里很少有书，他只能在学校读到教科书。父母给他的第一本书是连环画《战马驰骋》并支持他成为作家。

孩提时，雪漠还深受舅舅的鼓励。舅舅精通命理学和八卦。一天，舅舅告诉他的父亲，只要在自家院里栽一个高高的杆子，杆子上装一盏灯。一入夜，就亮起那盏灯，亮灯几十年后，按照当地的说法，家里就会出一个伟大人物。父亲不知道啥是伟大人物，但父亲还是信舅舅的话，从河里砍来了一棵小树，栽在自家院里。虽然那时的电费很贵，是家里最大的开支，但一入夜，那院子上空的灯，总是会亮起来。那灯的光虽然微弱，但总能穿透浓浓的夜。它一直亮过了雪漠的童年时代、少年时代、青年时代。

在当时，舅舅还让他心中默念“自强不息，厚德载物”。鼓励他完善自我，有担当，雪漠就按照舅舅的话每天坚持做。

在十五岁那年，因为一篇作文《给科学家伯伯的一封信》，他被选拔到了武威一中。后来，很多学校将它当成了范文。自从到了县城上学之后，就有机会接触大量的书籍，接触到一些国外名著。他每天养成了读书、写日记的习惯。那时候，他在文学创造领域没有任何老师指导，俄罗斯作家托尔斯泰成为他文学创作领域的榜样。每每在读其作品时，他想象与托尔斯泰自由的对话，以此丰富他内心世界的声音。

雪漠高中毕业之后，继续读了武威师范中专，毕业后被分配到当地一所中学任教。第一次有了薪水，他都用来买书籍和文学杂志了。他从未放弃自己的梦想，在业余时间写作，并在接下来的六年里完成了创作积累。

在二十五岁那年，他的第一部处女作——《长烟落日处》在“飞天”杂志上发表，一夜之间，他就从一个名不见经传的文学青年，变成了甘肃省青年作家。但随后便陷入了写作危机，为了走出焦虑，恢复文学自信，雪漠转向了大手印文化并进行相关训练，后来，他结合自身的体悟修证，出版了《无死的金刚心》和《空空之外》这两本书。

此后，雪漠写了各种题材的作品，包括小说、诗歌和哲学散文，作品触及爱、自由、生与死、人与自然等多种命题。雪漠作品曾被中国数百家媒体誉为“真正意义上的西部小说”和“不可多得的艺术珍品”。雪漠作品为当今的人们提供了一种精神性的生活方式。

雪漠最著名的作品是他的《大漠三部曲》，他花了12年的时间，完成了第一部长篇小说《大漠祭》，此作品描绘了中国二十世纪下半叶，西部一个典型的农村家庭的生活面貌。2000年出版后，雪漠一夜成名。在《大漠祭》获得业界人士广泛好评后，雪漠的《猎原》出版，小说故事围绕“猪肚井”而展开，极具寓言和人物群像的复杂性，探讨了在生存斗争中，人类和自然的冲突。随后，《大漠三部曲》最后一部长篇小说《白虎关》面世，叙述了生活在中国西部的人们的精神追求，小说重点围绕兰兰、莹儿和月儿三个女人的生命故事而展开（《雪漠小说精选》的一部分人物故事则选自其中）。

雪漠曾三度入围“茅盾文学奖”，连续六次获“敦煌文艺奖”，以及荣获“冯牧文学奖”和“中国作家大红鹰文学奖”。在 2015 年，他入选为“中国品牌文化十大人物”。他的作品已经由世界各地的知名出版商出版，并被翻译成20多种语言。英文版有《大漠祭》、《猎原》、《西夏咒》、《无死的金刚心》、《世界是心的倒影》、《空空之外》、《女神的情书》《娑萨朗》史诗。

《雪漠小说精选》已被翻译成15多种语言，其中《新疆爷》一文已在英国卫报上获得发表并被卫报认为是当代中国最优秀的五部短篇小说之一。

Xue Mo Biography

Xue Mo, formerly known as Chen Kaihong, was born in a remote village in the Liangzhou district of Gansu province. He grew up surrounded by sand, drought and poverty, and by the love and kindness of his family. His parents lead a peasant farmer’s life and were unable to read, yet from a young age, Xue Mo dreamed of being a writer. There were few books in his village, but relatives and guests often visited and told stories. As a boy he would memorise these tales and retell them, much to his father’s delight.

Xue Mo found his village to be rich with stories too and this stoked his curiosity and imagination. If a villager, squatting on a wall, told him he would pluck the stars from the sky, Xue Mo first believed and then fantasied that he, himself, would do the same thing one day. After school he often visited a blind neighbor, Mr Jia Fushan, and listen to him play local Xianxiao songs on a sanxian, a traditional three-stringed lute. The songs told of the vagaries of life, of its simplicity and its depths, and of kindness and the capacity for personal transformation. The songs became deeply embedded in the young boy’s mind, and they continue to form keynotes that reverberate across all of Xue Mo’s writing.

As a boy, Xue Mo also idolized the Monkey King from the classic tale TheJourney to the West and the Monkey’s quest to follow his master to bring Buddhist scriptures from India to China. He wished he could conjure treasures as his hero did – the treasure he most desired was a book to read. There were few books in his village, and he only had access to textbooks at school. His parents encouraged his dream of being a writer by giving him his first book, a comic bookBattle Steed Gallop.

There was one further inspiration in Xue Mo’s early life: his uncle. He practiced numerology and divination, and following local beliefs, advised Xue Mo’s father to place a lamp at the top of a tall pole in the centre of the family courtyard one day. He said that each day, as night visited the family, they should light the lamp. If they did so, someone in the family would make a great contribution to the world. Accepting his brother’s advice, Xue Mo’s father went to the river, cut down a small tree, erected it in the yard and placed a lamp on top. From the first night that the light was turned on, Xue Mo saw hope. Although their electricity bill was very high, indeed the greatest expense the family faced, the light in the courtyard was always turned on at night. Its faint glow penetrated the darkness as Xue Mo grew from childhood into youth, and youth into adulthood.

Xue Mo’s uncle also taught the young boy a saying – “Just as nature is, at its heart, dynamic, a gentleman must constantly strive”. He encouraged his nephew to remember the saying and to work towards self-improvement and being socially responsible. Xue Mo decided to take his uncle’s advice.

At the age of 15, after writing an essay titled “A Letter to Uncle Scientist”, Xue Mo was selected to study at a county school, Wuwei No.1 Middle School. The essay later became an example studied at many schools. The school opened up the opportunity for Xue Mo to read a large number of books, including translated classics from overseas. He developed a daily practice of reading and keeping a diary, and took up Kung Fu to keep fit. With no teacher available to guide the young scholar in his literary ambitions, he adopted the Russian author Leo Tolstoy as a role model. When he read, Xue Mo imagined himself speaking freely with Tolstoy and in so doing developed his own inner voice.

After graduated from Wuwei No.1 Middle School ,Xue Mo continued his education at Wuwei Normal Secondary School and on graduating was assigned to teach at a local middle school. For the first time in his life he was earning a salary and could extend his reading by buying books and literary magazines. Never losing sight of his ambitions, the young man wrote in his spare time, and built a body of work over the next six years.

When Xue Mo was 25, his story “Clouds And Mist Rose Where The Sun Set” was published in Feitian magazine and his reputation as a young writer from Gansu province began to form. This new recognition took some processing and for a while he struggled to write. As a means of coping, Xue Mo turned to the philosophies of Mahamudra. He adopted related practices and they helped him overcome his anxiety and restore his confidence in his writing. The stories he discovered during this journey inspired him to write his next two published works, the magical realist novel “The Holy Monk and Spirit Woman” and Mahamudra practice manual “Beyond Sunyata —The Essence of Mahamudra”.

From this point forward, Xue Mo wrote extensively, in a variety of literary forms including novels, poems, and philosophical essays. His work investigated the themes of love, freedom, life and death, and humans’ relationship with nature. It has enjoyed extensive Chinese media coverage, received critical acclaim and is regularly identified as seminal literature from China’s western provinces. Xue Mo’s writing is credited as presenting an alternative, spiritual lifestyle for people today.

Xue Mo’s best known work is his Desert Trilogy. He dedicated 12 years to writing “Desert Rites”, the first novel in the series. It depicts the life of a typical rural family in China’s western provinces during the second half of the twentieth century. After it was published in 2000, Xue Mo became famous overnight. Following the critical and commercial success of “Desert Rites”, Xue Mo wrote “Desert Hunters”, a multi-character fable set around a watering hole known as the ‘Pig’s Belly Well’. The novel examines the conflict between humans and nature in their struggle for survival. The final novel in the trilogy, “White Tiger Pass”, explores the cultural psychology of people living in western China, and focuses around the lives of three women, Lan Lan, Ying and Yue – characters also encountered in his short story collection, “Selected Stories by Xue Mo”.

Xue Mo has been nominated three times for the Mao Dun Literature Prize. He won the Dunhuang Literature and Art Award six times in succession, and gained further recognition winning the Feng Mu Literature Prize and the Red Eagle Literature Prize for Chinese Writers. In 2015 the author’s name was recognized as one of the ten leading brands in China thanks to his influence in the field of cultural studies. His books have been published around the world and translated into over 20 languages. Titles available in English are: Desert Rites, Desert Hunters, Curses of Xixia Dynasty, The Holy Monk and the Spirit Woman, The World is A Reflection of the Mind, The Essence of Mahamudra,Epic SuoSalangand Love letters From the Goddess.

“Selected Stories by Xue Mo” has been translated into more than fifteen languages, and the Guardian newspaper selected and published one story in the anthology - "Old Man Xinjiang" – in their collection of five top short stories from contemporary China.

（Nicola Clayton，刘晓领译）