When Stories Cross Borders: Fiction as Cultural Messenger

Stories have always crossed borders, carrying far more with them than plot and character. They carry assumptions about heroism, transformation, duty, freedom, and what it means to live well. In this Between the Lines program, we follow Journey to the West from its Chinese cultural and philosophical context into the wider world, asking what happens to a story when new audiences encounter it through different cultural lenses. Along the way, we place its great pilgrimage alongside The Odyssey and the Arthurian quest tradition, revealing how familiar narrative forms can express very different ideas. Across five short videos and a live session replay, When Stories Cross Borders explores fiction as a cultural messenger: how stories carry worldviews without announcing them, how their meanings shift as they travel, and what our interpretations can reveal about both the cultures that created them and the cultures receiving them. Because reading across cultures means more than following someone else’s story. It means learning to see the world, briefly, through another set of eyes.