Wolf Totem
by Jiang Rong
Hamish Hamilton HK$216
As Chen Zhen is riding home one day his horse suddenly baulks, tosses its head and snorts in fear. Too inexperienced to read the black steed's signals, Chen forces it to press on. His ignorance nearly costs his - and the horse's - life.
Chen, a young man and the protagonist of the novel Wolf Totem, who has come to Chinese-ruled Inner Mongolia from the 'inner lands', or the Han-populated territories south of the Great Wall, soon realises his mistake: they have entered a dark ravine full of wolves the size of leopards, whose gleaming yellow eyes swivel to stare at the intruders. The 'last thing he recalled was a muted but terrifying sound rising up to the top of his head ... it must have been the ping his soul made as it tore through his crown on its way out'.
Chen survives the encounter, despite his shattering ignorance of the ways of the Mongolian grasslands, which Han Chinese like him are busy settling and militarising and, in the process, wresting away from ancient ways of life. The wolves were holding a council, probably planning an attack. But as the wise Mongolian Old Man Bilgee explains to Chen later, back at the yurt: 'You'd have realised your luck had you known that when their coats shine, they aren't hungry.'
Wolf Totem, the runaway hit by Jiang Rong now translated into English, is the first novel to look unflinchingly at the devastation wrought by the Han Chinese when they settled Inner Mongolia in large numbers from the late 1960s, turning wild grassland into enclosures and destroying the ecological balance of the region. It was also the winner of the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, awarded in November.
