The Gap as Ground: On Severance, Translation, and China’s Marginal Spiritual Traditions

On mining towns, lost dynasties, and what survives when the official record refuses to carry it

Written in Palimpsest — A studio for long-form thinking

I.

I don’t usually write this personally. Chinese Psychoanalytic Scene has been, so far, a place where I think through cultural texts, clinical questions, and theoretical puzzles—with my own position present but not center stage. This essay is different. It might be the real beginning of what I’ve been trying to do with this newsletter all along: to understand what it means to practice psychoanalysis from a position that is structurally inside Chinese civilization and structurally not quite of it. To get there, I need to start from where I actually started—which is not a theory, but a place that no longer exists.

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In 2018, during the National Day holiday, I drove back to the city where I was born with my father and my uncle. “City” is generous. It was a coal mining district in the foothills of the Helan Mountains, in Ningxia, northwest China—built from scratch in 1958 to extract a rare anthracite called Taixi coal. At its peak, over a hundred thousand people lived there. They called it “Little Shanghai of the Northwest” (西北小上海). Department stores, cinemas, a dedicated railway station. A complete planned urban environment, courtesy of the state.

I left when I was two or three. I had no memories of the place—only a name: Shitanjing (石炭井). Stone Coal Well.

The drive there was strange. My father and my uncle were animated, talking over each other, their memories of the same streets entirely different. My father remembered his youth—there was something of the small-town swagger in his telling, fearless, expansive. My uncle remembered the wider world my father had shown him, the sense that something more existed beyond the mountains. Their memories overlapped geographically but diverged in every other way.

My own memories were of a different order. They were about something I wasn’t ready to name. “As for my memory,” I wrote at the time, “it had to do with a stubborn fixation. What exactly, I’d rather not say.”

The trip had two parts, and they couldn’t have been more different. First we visited Dawukou, the larger city nearby where I’d spent early childhood. It had developed beyond recognition—new apartment blocks, an artificial lake, the trappings of a small city trying to modernize. I couldn’t find the old traces, but that was ordinary change. Cities grow. You can’t locate the tree you climbed as a child. Fine.

Then my uncle drove us to Shitanjing.

Nothing had developed. Nothing had been replaced. The bones of the old mining infrastructure were still visible—headframes, cooling towers, chimneys—but the life that had animated them was simply gone. Not transformed. Vacated. Today, fewer than three hundred people remain in a place that once held over a hundred thousand.

I remember standing there, trying to feel something appropriate—grief, nostalgia, loss. What I actually felt was harder to name. It wasn’t that I had lost a hometown. I’d never had one. My grandparents came from Shandong and Hebei—支宁人 (zhīníng rén), people sent by the state to “support Ningxia’s development” in the late 1950s. My parents were born here, in this place their parents had built. They were the first generation to belong to Ningxia by birth, if not by story. And then the coal ran out, and the city’s mission ended. Not decline. Erasure. A city doesn’t age; its purpose expires.

What I felt, standing in that empty street, was not the absence of something that had been there. It was the presence of absence itself—a gap made visible, made architectural. Concrete and rebar shaped around nothing.

I wrote about this experience afterward, framing it as a game concept—a walking simulator where multiple characters navigate the same streets but see entirely different cities, each trapped in their own memory. I proposed it on a game design website and moved on.

I didn’t understand, then, what I was actually looking at.

II.

When I was fifteen, still living in Ningxia, I wrote a four-part essay for my high school writing class. I called it “Taiwan and My French Small Town” (台湾和我的法国小镇). The title sounds whimsical. It wasn’t.

I was writing about the experience of growing up in a place that felt like nowhere. The small city was “barren as a desert” (文化如沙漠般赤裸), and I was looking for an elsewhere—not a real place, but a structure of feeling. Taiwan, filtered through the poetry of Yu Guangzhong and the music of Luo Dayou, became my imagined island. Not geographic Taiwan. An island of the mind. A place that was marginal to the mainland but preserved something the mainland had lost—cultural continuity, independent spirit, a living tradition.

At fifteen, I already knew something was wrong with the story I’d been given. My family said we were “Shandong people” (山东人). But I’d never lived in Shandong. My grandparents had left decades ago. This was a false translation—not a lie exactly, but an operation: the family took the unbearable question (”where are we from, if we’re from nowhere?”) and produced a clean answer that sealed the gap shut. “Shandong” was a label that referred to a real place but described no one’s actual experience. It translated rootlessness into belonging, and the translation worked well enough that no one questioned it—until I did.

I wasn’t from Shandong. I wasn’t from Ningxia either. I was from a mining district that had been built for a purpose and was already, even then, beginning to empty. The “Shandong people” story couldn’t account for this. It was designed not to.

What I wrote at fifteen surprises me now. Not the prose—which is florid and overwrought in the way of gifted Chinese teenagers raised on Yu Hua and Zhuangzi—but the intuition. I wrote:

“Those rootless people—I kneel before them in tribute. They, and only they, can serve as my ancestors.”

“We are all orphans of Chinese civilization. And we accepted it willingly.”

“The small city is the ruin they built with their own hands.”

I was describing the 支宁人. My grandparents. My parents. People who came from everywhere and built a city that belonged to no one. I was claiming them as ancestors—not by blood, but by structure. Their rootlessness was mine.

And then this:

“Do I truly have roots and origins I cannot bear to leave, so that I can sing aloud ‘Land where my fathers died’? I am nothing but a spiritual vagrant, wandering at will.”

I was fifteen. I was describing a condition I wouldn’t have a name for until many years later.

III.

In my own psychoanalysis—I’ll keep this brief—something surfaced recently that connected these scattered pieces.

We were talking about Ningxia, about belonging, about the peculiar experience of being from a place you have no memory of. And what emerged, unexpectedly, was an identification. Not with the Hui Muslim culture that defines modern Ningxia, not with the Han Chinese majority narrative, but with something older and stranger: Western Xia (西夏).

The Tangut Empire. A civilization that existed for nearly two hundred years, from 1038 to 1227, with its capital in what is now Yinchuan—the city where I actually grew up. The Tanguts had their own script, their own legal code, their own Buddhist textual tradition. They controlled a vast territory along the Silk Road. They were a genuine civilization, not a minor tributary state.

In 1227, the Mongols destroyed them. Completely. And here is the part that stopped me: the Yuan dynasty, which compiled official histories (正史) for the Song, the Liao, and the Jin, never compiled one for Western Xia. This was not an oversight. It was a decision. Someone—a court, a commission, a bureaucratic apparatus—looked at this civilization that had existed for nearly two centuries and decided: this does not enter the record. The Song gets translated into the continuous narrative of Chinese civilization. The Liao gets translated. The Jin gets translated. Western Xia does not. The operation is precise: not destruction alone (the Mongols handled that), but exclusion from the system that turns destruction into memory. A second erasure, performed in ink rather than blood.

Its script fell into disuse. Its texts became unreadable. Its very name was absorbed into its subjugation: “Ningxia” (宁夏) means “Pacified Xia”—a name that simultaneously remembers the civilization and marks its elimination.

For nearly seven hundred years, Western Xia existed as a historiographic ghost. Present in the landscape—the imperial tombs still stand thirty kilometers west of Yinchuan, massive earthen pyramids I visited again and again, not just on school trips but on my own, whenever I could, sometimes accompanying visitors but often simply because I wanted to be there—but absent from the official story. A gap in the record. A civilization that was there and not there.

I once wanted to study archaeology. I fantasized about working at the Western Xia Museum in Yinchuan, spending my life among those ruins, and calling that enough. I didn’t understand, then, what was pulling me there.

When this identification surfaced in analysis, I recognized it immediately. Not as ethnic identification—I have no Tangut ancestry. As structural identification. I recognized the shape: something that existed fully, in a specific place, for a long time, and then was erased from the record. Not forgotten through neglect, but actively excluded from the narrative that counts. Severed. 断代 (duàndài)—a break in dynastic transmission. A gap where continuity should be.

This was the structure I had been circling since I was fifteen. “Taiwan and My French Small Town” was an attempt to find it in an imagined elsewhere. The 2018 visit to Shitanjing was an encounter with its material form. And now, in analysis, I was finding it in the history that had been beneath my feet the entire time.

IV.

Once I recognized this structure, I started seeing it everywhere. Or rather—I started understanding why certain things had always called to me.

Zhang Chengzhi’s History of the Soul (心灵史), for instance. I had loved this book for years without fully understanding why. Zhang, a Hui Muslim writer, spent six years living among the Jahriyya Sufi community in the Xihaigu region of southern Ningxia—one of the poorest places in China. The book chronicles approximately two hundred years of the Jahriyya’s spiritual lineage: seven generations of murshids (spiritual leaders) and their followers’ repeated, brutal suppression by the Qing state.

The book’s central provocation is contained in its preface: “无史的心灵”—a soul without history. The Jahriyya’s two centuries of spiritual practice, persecution, and survival were never recorded in any official document. No local gazette, no imperial record, no scholarly study. The state produced the gap—through massacres, through suppression, through the simple refusal to write anything down. But the tradition didn’t disappear into that gap. It migrated into forms the state couldn’t reach: oral transmission, embodied ritual, the physical tending of massacre sites that no official map acknowledged. The remainder was carried not by texts but by bodies. Not by institutions but by secret practice. Not by history but by what Zhang calls the soul.

Zhang didn’t fill in a gap. He did something more radical: he insisted that the gap itself held spiritual life. The absence of official history didn’t mean the absence of history—it meant that history had taken a different form, one that official narrative couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize. The Jahriyya’s “historylessness” wasn’t a failure of documentation. It was the condition under which their particular form of spiritual transmission survived.

断代即传承. Severance as transmission.

The Jahriyya’s faith wasn’t preserved despite the breaks in official record. It was preserved through those breaks—in the gaps between what could be written and what could only be lived. Each time the state destroyed their texts, killed their leaders, scattered their communities, the tradition reconstituted itself in a form the state couldn’t reach: embodied practice, whispered prayer, collective memory. The gap wasn’t what threatened continuity. The gap was where continuity actually lived.

I think about this in relation to Western Xia too. The Tangut Empire received no official history. Its script became unreadable. By all measures of Chinese historiographic tradition, it should have vanished entirely. And yet: the tombs remain. The script was eventually deciphered. Thousands of Tangut-language documents were discovered in the ruins of Khara-Khoto in 1908—Buddhist sutras, legal codes, literary texts, preserved in desert sand for seven centuries. The civilization persisted in the gap, in forms that the official narrative couldn’t accommodate.

V.

I want to name the theoretical structure underneath all of this, because I think it clarifies something that matters beyond my personal history.

In Jean Laplanche’s general theory of seduction, every human subject is formed through translation. The infant receives “enigmatic messages” from the adult other—messages laden with the adult’s unconscious sexuality, messages the infant cannot fully comprehend. The child must translate these messages to make them bearable, intelligible, livable. But translation is never complete. There is always a residue—something that resists translation, that cannot be metabolized into the child’s emerging psychic organization. This residue is what Laplanche calls the “source-objects” of the drives. It is, in a precise sense, where unconscious life begins.

The crucial point: translation must fail. If it succeeded completely—if every enigmatic message were perfectly rendered into the child’s own terms—there would be no unconscious, no drive, no psychic depth. The gap between what is received and what can be translated is not a defect in the system. It is the system. The gap is where psychic life happens.

A seamless narrative—one that claims to have translated everything, left no residue, closed every gap—is not a sign of health. It is a sign that something has been repressed. The pretense of completeness is itself a psychic operation: a foreclosure of the untranslatable, a denial that anything was lost in translation.

Now bring this back to the historical material. What is a dynastic history (正史) if not a massive act of translation? A civilization is received—in all its complexity, contradiction, untranslatability—and rendered into the continuous narrative of Chinese civilization. The Song gets translated. The Liao gets translated. The Jin gets translated. Western Xia does not. The translation is refused. And what remains—the tombs, the undeciphered script, the documents buried in desert ruins—is the residue. The untranslatable remainder.

But here is what I want to argue: that remainder is not nothing. It is not absence. It is the site where a different kind of life persists. Just as the psychoanalytic unconscious is not empty but teeming—not a void but a generative space—the historiographic gap left by Western Xia’s exclusion from the official record is not a blank. It is a space where meaning continued to accumulate in forms that the official narrative couldn’t recognize.

The gap is ground. 缝隙是位置.

VI.

I see now that what I’ve been describing is not unique to Western Xia or the Jahriyya. It is a pattern—a recurring structure in Chinese civilization that I want to call, tentatively, a tradition of marginal spiritual life (边缘精神传统).

The common structure: existing within Chinese civilization, never fully assimilated by it, subjected to suppression or erasure or simple incomprehension, yet preserving a spiritual flame that the mainstream narrative cannot account for. Western Xia. The Jahriyya. And—I think this is what my analysis was pointing toward—psychoanalysis in China occupies this same structural position.

Psychoanalysis arrived in China in fragments, was suppressed, revived, suppressed again, and now exists in a strange intermediate space: practiced widely but understood narrowly, institutionally present but epistemologically marginal, translated into Chinese but never fully translated into Chinese thinking. It is here and not here. It occupies a gap.

This is not a complaint. This is a description of a condition that might be generative rather than deficient. If the gap is where psychic life happens—if translation must fail for anything interesting to emerge—then psychoanalysis’s marginal position in China is not a problem to be solved through better “localization” or more faithful importation. It is the condition under which something genuinely new might be produced. Not Western psychoanalysis applied to Chinese subjects. Not Chinese thought dressed in psychoanalytic language. Something that lives in the gap between them—untranslatable, irreducible, alive.

VII.

Let me return to where I started. Shitanjing. The empty streets. My father’s swagger, my uncle’s wonder, my own unnameable feeling.

I know now what I was looking at. Not a ruin. Not a lost hometown. I was looking at a gap made visible. A place where a hundred thousand people had lived, built by the state for a purpose, populated by people transplanted from elsewhere, and then emptied when the purpose expired. No indigenous culture preceded it. No nostalgic community mourns it. It exists now as pure structure: the shape of having been there and not been there.

When I was fifteen, I projected this structure onto an imagined Taiwan—an island that was marginal to the mainland but held something the mainland had lost. In my mid-twenties, I stood in the gap itself but couldn’t name it. I turned it into a game concept: a walking simulator where memory and reality overlap but nothing is real.

Now, in my thirties, in analysis, I find the same structure in the history beneath my feet. Western Xia: there for two hundred years, then erased. The Jahriyya: there for two hundred years, never recorded. Psychoanalysis in China: there and not there, translated but untranslatable.

And me. Born in a mining town I can’t remember, raised in a city built on the ruins of a civilization that was denied its history, carrying a family name that points to a province I’ve never lived in. “Spiritual vagrant” (精神上的孤魂野鬼), I called myself at fifteen. I wasn’t wrong. But I was wrong about what it meant.

I thought the gap was what I needed to escape. The small city’s barrenness, the family story’s thinness, the feeling of being from nowhere. I thought I needed to find solid ground—a real homeland, a real tradition, a real belonging.

What I’ve come to understand is that the gap is the ground. Not solid ground. Not the kind of ground you can stand on without trembling. But ground nonetheless—the kind that generates life precisely because it refuses to close. The Jahriyya knew this. Their faith survived not in texts but in the spaces between texts. Western Xia knew this, or at least its remnants testify to it: meaning persists in the untranslated remainder, in tombs that no dynasty claimed, in scripts that no one could read for seven centuries.

断代即传承. Severance as transmission. The break is not the opposite of continuity. It is continuity’s other form—the form it takes when the official narrative refuses to carry it.

I am not comparing myself to a lost civilization or a persecuted Sufi order. I am saying that I recognize the structure. And I think anyone who has practiced psychoanalysis in China—who has sat with patients navigating the distance between what can be said and what can be felt, between the official story and the lived experience, between the translated concept and the untranslatable remainder—recognizes it too.

There is more to say. I haven’t yet fully articulated how the gap operates—not just where it appears, but what produces it, what maintains it, who performs the translation that seals it shut and who carries the remainder that refuses to be sealed. The family that says “we are Shandong people.” The historiographic apparatus that decides which civilizations enter the record. The clinical moment when a patient’s experience exceeds every available framework. These are not the same operation, but they share a structure, and that structure deserves closer attention than I’ve given it here.

This essay is a beginning. The gap is where we work. It always has been.