You wander through the book fair. Hundreds of strangers cross paths with you. You do not know their names. Chances are you will never cross their paths again.

These people are your “nearby.” Yet they remain entirely invisible to you.

This is the core of anthropologist Xiang Biao’s theory of the “disappearing nearby”: we fixate on melting polar ice caps and faraway conflicts, yet barely register the lives unfolding within arm’s reach.

This panel brings together three speakers — Chinese novelist Zhang Yiwei, literary podcast host Azure Zhang, and writer KK Wang — to unpack one simple question: Can literature teach us to truly see the people right beside us?

Zhang Yiwei writes about ordinary, overlooked lives: neighbours who share a stairwell yet never exchange a word, strangers who unexpectedly end up sitting across the same dinner table. Her fiction captures quiet, unpolished moments that turn total outsiders into something akin to family.

Azure Zhang makes a living listening: to voices spanning continents, to readers pouring out their most private reflections through headphones. Her podcast creates a space where anonymous strangers step forward as storytellers.

Based in Frankfurt, KK Wang navigates the city’s streets, trains and supermarkets as an outsider. Her personal “nearby” consists of the small, familiar daily landmarks she has slowly come to recognise in an unfamiliar country.

Our conversation unfolds across four core segments: What does the “nearby” mean to each of us? How did we lose the ability to notice it? How does a random passer-by transform into a story? And ultimately — can literature give form to the unseen, and rewrite the way we view the world around us?

Ahead of the fair, we launched a cross-platform short-story open call across Chinese social media under the theme Finding the Nearby. Azure Zhang will announce the five selected writers live on stage and invite them to share their original stories.

Now it is your turn. In the event’s final five minutes, we invite every attendee to jot down one sentence about a stranger you have crossed paths with at the fair today. We will read several submissions aloud — and collectively, we will turn the invisible visible.

Key Discussion Topics:

1.What is the “nearby”?—Personal interpretations from our three speakers.

2.Why have we stopped noticing the “nearby”?—How modern urban life and our daily choices make the people around us fade into the background.

3.How does a stranger become a story? — Turning overlooked passers-by into narrative characters.

4.What can literature do? Can writing make the “nearby” visible again?—Exploring how literature reclaims the overlooked and reshapes our way of seeing.

 

ps: We still have an additional half-hour of activities at networking area; The event languages include English and Mandarin