Book | Dong Liang

务虚笔记 - The Pursuit of Nothingness

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Pursuit of Nothingness is one of the most profound literary meditations on existence, resilience, and the search for meaning in modern literature. This is true not only within the context of Chinese literature but also in world literature at large. Written by a man who faced immense physical challenges himself, this work is largely autobiographical in its intimate reflections. Yet nowhere have these reflections felt more universal, offering insights that feel more urgent than ever in our age of uncertainty and rapid change.

Now available in English for the first time, The Pursuit of Nothingness invites a new audience into its quiet yet powerful explorations of fate, suffering, creativity, and the fragile beauty of being alive.

You can read the book if you scroll to the end of this post (fullscreen mode available). But as a translator, let me explain how I come to this particular title.

虚 vs 实

In Chinese, 务实 (wùshí) means “pragmatic” or “focused on concrete realities,” suggesting an emphasis on practical, tangible results. It relates to the idea of being grounded in reality, dealing with facts, and pursuing goals that yield substantial outcomes. In a sense, it is what we now often call “result-oriented” (as if this is the best thing in the world!)

务虚 (wùxū) is the opposite, and can be translated literally as “focused on intangibles”. The intangible in Chinese has a slightly negative connotation. If we say someone is 玩虚的, this translates to “he is playing tricks, or all words but no deeds”.

This is obviously not how our author use the word. To my understanding, when Shi uses the word 虚 against the background of 实, he is referring to a pursue of meaning independent of our concrete realities. It is Meaning with a capital M. And here lies the idea embodied by another distinguishing feature of the novel: all the characters are represented by a letter. It is a gesture of abstraction, of virtualizing identities.

Here is a list of major characters:

C: man with disability (the author) X: C’s lover	Z: painter WR: politician O: teacher	F: Doctor N: Filmmaker	HJ: runner, restaurant owner T: HJ’s love	L: poet	sans nom: Z’s uncle Z’s parents T’s parents ? woman in the sunflower meadow

What is left stripping away individual identities such as names? The essence.

This essence is not the same as in Sartre, where nothingness is set up against the essence, as an absence of essence. It is rather a cosmic intention. In Pursuit essence refers to the idea of beginning, of origin, the idea of finding one’s way back to the origin of human nature.

Void, Nothingness, Emptiness

28 我曾相信历史是不存在的，一切所谓历史都不过是现在对过去(后人对前人)的猜度，根据的是我们自己的处境。我不打算放弃这种理解，我是想把另一种理解调和进来 :历史又是存在的，如果我们生来就被规定了一种处境，如果你从虚无中醒来 (无以计量的虚无)看见自己已被安置在一团纵纵横横编就的网中，你被编织在一个既定的网结上(看不出条条脉络的由来和去处，这是上帝即兴的编织)，那就证明历史确凿存在、这两种针锋相对的理解互相不需要推翻。 29 那无以计量的虚无结束于什么?结束于“我” 我醒来，我睁开眼睛，虚无顷刻消散，我看见世界。虚无从世界为我准备的那个网结上开始消散，世界从虚无由之消散的那个网结上开始拓展，拓展出我的盼望，或者随着我的盼望拓展…… 43 我从虚无中出生，同时世界从虚无中显现。我分分秒秒地长大，世界分分秒秒地拓展。是我成长着的感觉和理性镶嵌进扩展着的世界之中呢？还是扩展着的世界搅拌在我成长着的感觉和理性之中？反正都一样，相依为命。

Because we obviously cannot translate it into The Pursuit of Essence, I look for other terms that are literally closer to 虚 but carries a philosophical connotation that the author wanted it: void, nothingness, emptiness.

Void: In Paradise Lost by John Milton, the void is depicted as the vast, empty chaos between Heaven and Hell, where Satan travels after his fall. The void is described as a place of disorder, lacking form but holding the potential for creation or destruction.

Example:

“A dark illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height,
And time and place are lost.”

I like that the “void” as depicted by Milton convey a sense of the origin, which is similar to how Shi describes as “waking up from the void”.

Nothingness

But the book itself is very meaning searching and philosophical. It does resonate with Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant : Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique).

The word néant really carries with it a lot of things. Although from different roots, it feels close to née, which is nascent, being born. The ending also suggests a sense of becoming, so néant reminds us of devenant, naissant.

In other words, nothingness is an established convention that I think works really well (if you understand this convention). This is why I chose to use the term.

“Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being — like a worm.” “The being by whom nothingness comes into the world must be his own nothingness.”

Emptiness: this is a more neutral term than “void” or “nothingness,” often used to describe a lack or absence without the weighty connotations of existential dread or the cosmic scale. It’s common in Buddhist philosophy, where emptiness refers to the idea that things have no inherent, fixed essence.

In The Heart Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism, emptiness is a core concept:

“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”
Here, emptiness doesn’t mean literal nothingness but rather the absence of fixed, inherent essence in all things.

Surprisingly, Shi doesn’t seem to be interested in Buddhism and so far as I can tell, there is no reference to Buddhism in the book. Therefore, I will not choose this term.

Here are some more passages from the book where the term is being used. See if you agree that nothingness is the best word to characterize the meaning.

Mindstorms - 思维风暴

Tue, 26 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever heard of Mindstorms? Not the awesome Lego robots (though they did get their name from it!), but the groundbreaking book by Seymour Papert? If not, I’ve written a little introduction that I think you’ll really enjoy – I highly recommend checking it out!

Read: Seymour Papert’s Legacy>

This book was actually the very first one I pitched to my publisher. After my previous work, “In Defense of Liberal Education,” they asked what I’d like to tackle next, and Mindstorms immediately sprang to mind, as I was busy with robotics coaching for First Lego League at the time I personally owned three sets of Lego Mindstorms. Unlike my project on Walden, where I boldly took on a text already familiar to Chinese readers through many translations, Mindstorms was virtually unknown in China. This surprised me, especially given the popularity of the Lego series with the same name!

The translation was finished in Dec 2017 and published sometime around 2018 – honestly, it’s a bit of a blur since I received my copy a while later. And when I finally held it in my hands… I was shocked! The title had been completely changed to something that translates roughly to “Power-Ups Through Computer.” I’m still scratching my head over that one. Maybe “storms” or “revolutions” are a bit overused in China, but the new title just felt… off. It made me genuinely sad.

Two books on my desk

The published Chinese version also included some prefaces from the second edition. I have the first edition, and I honestly believe the book stood perfectly well on its own. Seeing names like John Sculley – no offense to him – in a book about education just didn’t feel right. If it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have included those forewords. But, alas, I didn’t have a say in the matter.

In Defense of Liberal Education - 为人文教育辩护

Mon, 30 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Raphael’s “School of Athens” beautifully captures the very essence of what we’re exploring – the sheer joy of learning, the vibrant exchange of different ideas, and the way diverse fields of knowledge enrich one another. This incredible painting isn’t just a pretty picture; it’s a powerful statement about why a well-rounded education is so vital. It shows us a space where ideas clash, where disagreements spark new understanding, and where knowledge is sought not just for practical gain, but for the simple, profound satisfaction of understanding ourselves and the world around us.

My own journey reflects this very spirit. I’ve explored the worlds of computer science, literature, and cinema, and delved into critical media studies for my doctoral work. Like Scott Hartley describes in his book, “The Fuzzy and the Techie,” I’ve been happily bridging the gap between the humanities and the tech world, finding that each enriches the other.

Translating this book has been a undertaking both intellectually stimulating and deeply personal. The principles it articulates are ones I’ve seen in action, making their wisdom all the more resonant. My sincere hope is that this translation helps spark an appreciation for the value of a liberal education, which was, and still is, highly problematic in China.

Walden - 瓦尔登湖

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Walden is a name that needs no introduction.

It’s a curious thing, seeing a book like Walden, a work so often associated with a certain… intellectual elevation, pop up in unexpected places. Like in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, where Cary reads from a copy of Walden, belonging to the younger man she’s fallen for.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it’s because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

Honestly, seeing Thoreau referenced in a classic tearjerker felt almost… wrong. It clashed with my own, deeply personal relationship with the book. It felt a bit like a fishmonger using pages ripped from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation to wrap his daily catch.

But perhaps the misunderstanding is entirely my own. We all cling to certain beliefs in our youth, don’t we? Ideas about patriotism, social justice, revolutionary movements, spirituality, even the “ideal” partner.

Years ago, when I translated Walden, living in my own secluded cabin beside a metaphorical pond, I pictured Walden as a haven of solitude, a place of vast, untouched nature. Imagine my surprise, then, when I finally visited Concord in 2004. Not only did the tiny replica of Thoreau’s hut, complete with a statue out front, seem almost comical, but Concord itself was bustling with people and cars, and Walden Pond… well, it had become a popular public swimming spot. It wasn’t quite the serene escape I’d envisioned.

Thoreau in front of his hut

Bath house at Walden Pond

In a blog post published in 2/19/2008 I wrote:

A recent reading of Stanley Cavell’s The Senses of Walden brings back to me all those delightful yet painstaking days of translating Thoreau. But after the initial nostalgia phases out, what is left in front of me is nothing but an interpretation that I find unfortunately incompatible with mine. As a translator, I have to go through the words one by one and make perfect sense of them, and often in a deeper level than they literally say. And these small pieces of making senses ultimately add up to what Schleiermacher calls the “inner trajectory”. Or should I say, using Gadamer’s terminology, the process of translating a text fuses my own horizon with the horizon of Walden. It is on this base I claim, for I do, and sincerely, that I understand this book.

For someone like Cavell, this intentionality is still acknowledged. Yet obviously (for anyone familiar with Cavell), it is not this very intentionality he is transcribing or even addressing. It serves as a mere departure point, from which Cavell will produce his own writing. The task of those seminars from which the book originates is not to tell people what Thoreau means, for they can just read the book and find out by themselves, but to tell, what does he (Cavell) make of Walden. It is the “senses of Walden”, not “making senses of Walden”.

Translating is very different. In translating the performative options are limited. And when I perform, I feel guilty unless I am absolutely certain. This, of course, does not apply to all kinds of translations. The difficulty of any particular translation can be simply determined by this: try to feed the text to a machine (a translation software) and see how much you can gather from the result—how readable is the result? For a case like Thoreau, I think it would be less than five percent.

Translating a text such as Walden is totally a sacrifice. Come to think of it, I have problem understanding why I did it. It would be infinitely better if I had done something similar to what Cavell did, even if as a result, I can claim I understand the book better. Interestingly, when Thoreau claims that we should read those “heroic” or ancient books, he does not mean that we should try to understand them—we may not understand the nature of a certain light beam that is shed upon us, but it is still a glory to comprehend the consequences of being illuminated by this beam of light.

Putting in countless hours on this work over twenty years ago (maybe around 2001?), I wasn’t writing for a commission or even dreaming of publication. The joy, for me, was truly in the work itself. Finishing the book felt like closing one chapter and eagerly turning the page to a new one, as we often do in life.

And, in a wonderful turn of events, my translation was eventually published in 2009 by Yilin Press!

cover of published book

Enjoy reading the book and feel free to download a copy below.

Caligula

Tue, 14 May 2002 00:00:00 +0000

I recently stumbled upon a delightful surprise – a book I’d translated! The manuscript was tucked away, buried beneath a folder from my Montreal days, nestled amongst unfinished drafts and translation projects that I’d started but, somewhere along the way, abandoned.

This particular project, however, was complete. Perhaps that’s because the book itself is so incredibly entertaining and was perfectly within my abilities. I was completely immersed in French at the time, and I remember feeling thrilled to find such a gem – a little book that was both satisfying on a literary level and also manageable for my French skills.

Back when I was translating this, I don’t think it had been published in Chinese. Things have changed, of course, and it’s now 2025! But even after a quick peek at the published version, I have a hunch my translation might still hold its own.

One thing that really sets this play apart is the beautifully simple language. Forget the flowery prose of Proust or other French masters. This is the same direct style that made The Stranger so iconic: “Maman died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”

This play is a perfect showcase of Camus’s crisp, almost telegraphic style. Some translations I’ve seen floating around tend to add unnecessary flourishes. Let’s just look at the first three lines to see what I mean…

Original Text	A popular Chinese translation	My Translation
“PREMIER PATRICIEN Toujours rien.	贵族甲一直毫无音信。	贵族甲还是没消息。
LE VIEUX PATRICIEN Rien le matin, rien le soir.	老贵族早晨音信皆无，傍晚也音信皆无。	老贵族早上没有，晚上也没有。
DEUXIÈME PATRICIEN Rien depuis trois jours.”	贵族乙三天不见踪影了。	贵族乙都三天了。

I have nothing against a bit of flourish in a translation, provided it’s actually present in the original! As a translator, I’m quite passionate about accuracy – not just capturing the meaning, but also mirroring the original style. Honestly, a little part of me withers whenever I stumble upon a wonky translation. And in this day and age, with new terms and evolving meanings popping up constantly, it’s a bigger challenge than ever to get it just right.