MOCA TALKS with Ken Liu – Laozi’s Dao De Jing
November 12, 2024, 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm
The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) invites you to a thought-provoking conversation with award-winning novelist Ken Liu as he illustrates his new translation of Laozi’s Dao De Jing. Written around 400 BC, this foundational Chinese philosophical text resonates with themes of humility, resilience, and the search for harmony. Liu’s fresh interpretation offers more than just a translation; it provides a deeply personal journey through Laozi’s wisdom, addressing contemporary challenges with profound insight.
Liu, renowned for his speculative fiction and translations of contemporary Chinese science fiction (including the bestselling The Three-Body Problem), shares his struggles to find meaning in Laozi’s words. Through a series of interstitial entries, he takes readers beyond traditional, authoritative annotations, offering instead an unapologetically subjective approach. His reflections emphasize the process of grappling with ancient ideas that gesture toward the eternal, highlighting how such engagement can bring about moments of transcendent joy.
As the book coincides with an election season, Laozi’s Dao De Jing presents a much-needed perspective on finding comfort and balance amid heightened emotions and division. Liu’s work encourages readers to embrace the constant change and flow of life, ultimately finding solace in the Dao. Moderated by Yifan Wu, MOCA’s Director of Programs, this event promises a captivating exploration of the timeless relevance of Laozi’s teachings and the art of translation.
About Ken Liu
Ken Liu is an award-winning American author of speculative fiction. His collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. Liu’s other works include The Grace of Kings, The Wall of Storms, The Veiled Throne, and a second collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. He has been involved in multiple media adaptations of his work, including the short story “Good Hunting,” adapted as an episode in Netflix’s animated series Love, Death + Robots; and AMC’s Pantheon, adapted from an interconnected series of short stories. “The Hidden Girl,” “The Message,” and “The Oracle” have also been optioned for development. Liu previously worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on topics including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, the history of technology, and the value of storytelling. Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
About Laozi’s Dao De Jing; A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time
Laozi’s Dao De Jing was written around 400 BC by a compassionate soul in a world torn by hatred and ambition, dominated by those that yearned for apocalyptic confrontations and prized ideology over experience. By speaking out against the cleverness of elites and the arrogance of the learned, Laozi upheld the wisdom of the concrete, the humble, the quotidian, the everyday individual dismissed by the great powers of the world. Earthy, playful, and defiant, Laozi’s words gave solace to souls back then, and offer comfort today. Now, this beautifully designed new edition serves as both an accessible new translation of an ancient Chinese classic and a fascinating account of renowned novelist Ken Liu’s transformative experience while wrestling with the classic text.
Throughout this translation, Liu takes us through his own struggles to capture the meaning in Laozi’s text in a series of thoughtful and provocative interstitial entries. Unlike traditional notes that purport to be objective, these entries are explicitly personal and unapologetically subjective. Gradually, as Liu learns that true wisdom cannot be pinned down in words, the notes grow sparser until they fade away entirely. His journey suggests the only way out of struggle is to engage with texts that have survived the millennia, wrestling with ideas that gesture at something eternal, in hopes that we might eventually reach that moment of transcendent joy.
Liu’s translation, by eschewing cleverness, paradoxically reveals the slipperiness of Laozi’s original. The Dao De Jing has been translated countless times and will be translated countless times in the future. In that constant change and flow, we finally find our home in Dao, the eternal principle that allows us, finite beings in time and space, to reckon and reconcile with the infinite.