Wolf Totem: A Novel by Jiang Rong
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Book Summary Author: Jiang Rong Translator: Howard Goldblatt Edition: Hardcover Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published) Published: 2008-03-27 ISBN: 1594201560 Number of pages: 544 Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The |
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Book Reviews of the Wolf Totem: A Novel
Customer Review: Powerful Naturalism and an Extraordinary View into China's National Psyche
Summary: 5 Stars
During Mao's Cultural Revolution of the late 1960's, a young college student from Beijing named Lu Jiamin was "sent down" like so many of his fellow classmates to live among and learn from the peasants. In Lu's case, his "down" was actually "up" as he was sent to the far northern planes of Inner Mongolia. Some thirty years later, that young man had become a senior academician back again in Beijing and as well the pseudonymous author as Jiang Rong of a startling (for mainland China) book first published in 2004 under the name "Lang Tuteng." The book became an instant best-seller in China, spawning enormous Internet debate along with pirated copies, unauthorized spin-offs and sequels, and reported a movie version in the works. Recently translated by the venerable Howard Goldblatt and published in English under the name WOLF TOTEM (a direct translation of Lang Tuteng), the book has already been honored as the first-ever recipient of the Man Asian Literary Prize (the Asian equivalent of the Man Booker Prize for English Literature).
Although drawn almost autobiographically from Jiang Rong's personal experiences, WOLF TOTEM is essentially an allegorical novel. Its hero is the author's alter-ego, the young and impressionable "sent down" college student Chen Zhen. Chen and other students are assigned to live with sheepherders and learn their ways. Along the way, he learns about animal husbandry and the customs of a Chinese minority group, hunts wolves, steals a wolf cub from its mother's den in order to raise it, and watches the sudden, unstoppable intrusion of Beijing's destructive bureaucracy into Mongolia's life and lands (as embodied to the point of caricature by the stunningly indifferent Bao Shungui).
Of course, the allegorical aspect of the novel is the proximate cause of its notoriety in China. Jiang Rong makes clear that the aggressive wolves represent historically the warlike nomadic tribes such as the Mongols. They are the meat-eaters, the makers of history, and their spirit has been transferred over time to the West. By contrast, the passive and meek sheep represent the Han Chinese by his estimation - settlers, farmers, vegetable eaters, ruiners of the great grasslands, and the people mortally fearful of wolves. Through Chen Zhen's gradual awakening to Mongolian life and that of wolves, the author questions the spirit and soul of the Han Chinese, the massive majority of mainland Chinese people. In a very real sense, WOLF TOTEM calls into question the Chinese national character. It is this national psyche that has been habitually belabored within China by feelings of powerlessness in the face of the West, from the march of the Eight Powers into Beijing in 1900 to sayings like, "In the West, even the moon is bigger." It is also this national inferiority complex that motivates China's responses to currency devaluation, the Olympics, Tibet, and nearly every other aspect of its present-day relationship to the West.
Jiang Rong clearly poses other awkward questions as well about Chinese government policy. The Chinese steamroll blindly or blithely over Mongolian culture and tradition; even the well-intentioned Chen Zhen violates centuries-old custom of not raising a wolf out of self-centered curiosity. Equally discomfiting, the Han Chinese are portrayed as horrific despoilers of grasslands that have supported nomadic tribal existence for thousands of years. Later scenes in the book portray a virtual Mongolian Eden of rich grassland, pure water, and abundant wildlife callously plundered to destruction by ignorant and avaricious Chinese officials and "settlers." Heart-rending descriptions of Chinese wolf hunting by rifle, mass killing of marmots, and slaughter of swans generate strong emotional feelings of anger and irretrievable loss in the reader. The sense of loss is palpable, particularly as expressed through Chen's "adoptive father" Old Man Bilgee. At times, old Bilgee's powerless horror at unfolding events and inescapable loss was reminiscent of Iron Eyes Cody, the "crying Indian" from the 1970's anti-littering television commercial campaign.
On the plus side, Jiang Rong's book is a wonder of wolf naturalism, a literary work that draws pictures of life on the Mongolian steppe as effectively as a National Geographic photo spread. While not nearly competitive with the literary strengths of Cormac McCarthy, some of the "wolf as hunter" and "wolf as hunted" scenes are reminiscent of McCarthy's extraordinary opening scene of man versus wolf in THE CROSSING. In fact, the writing at times waxes so lyrical over wolves and their seemingly extraordinary hunting skills as to border on unbelievable, totemic in the most pantheistically religious sense of that word. The author's intimate descriptions of nomadic herding life in the harsh Mongolian lands are equally powerful. For a mainland Chinese audience perhaps not yet accustomed to the message of ecological systems and symbiosis, Jiang Rong's exposition of the living relationships among herdmen, sheep, horses, wolves, gazelle, marmots, and even field mice must also seem positively revelatory.
On the minus side, WOLF TOTEM's literary merits are somewhat less stratospheric. As the main character, Chen Zhen lacks the necessary internal depth that would enable the reader truly to empathize with him. We never learn anything about his pre-Mongolian life or background, his family, or his feelings about having his education disrupted by Mao's notions of re-education. The wolf cub Chen adopts and hopes to raise to adulthood is in many ways a more empathetic figure, as are the old wolf-hunting dogs Erland and Yellow. Jiang Rong's writing is unnecessarily polemical and too often strident if not didactic. A twenty-page Epilogue taking place as a return visit some thirty years later does not fit the main text stylistically and only detracts by overexposition from the story Jiang Rong has already told.
WOLF TOTEM adds yet another to the list of recent artistic works, mostly cinematic, that idealize Mongolia as a sort of lost Eden or lost innocence (see for example, the movies THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL, MONGOLIAN PING PONG, THE CAVE OF THE YELLOW DOG, and even the current release of TUYA'S MARRIAGE) This is a wondrously entertaining story and remarkable if only for having originated out of mainland China. Read this book for its fascinating descriptions of wolf behavior and nomadic life and also for the light of self-examination and self-doubt it shines on a growing national power.