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SCMP Reporter

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.
Jiang, 62, a retired political scientist, did not attend the prize dinner in Hong Kong or the Beijing unveiling of the book during the Bookworm International Literary Festival last month. Reportedly, Jiang was wary of saying too much in Beijing to the mostly foreign audience. 'There are things he has kept unsaid for so long that he was afraid might come out,' one insider commented.
Jiang's absence, and the reasons behind it, underscored the challenging nature of this book to the Chinese government, whose settlement policies for Inner Mongolia appear in a bad light. Jiang, whose real name is Lu Jiamin,  preserved his anonymity for three years after Wolf Totem's initial publication in 2004; only when it was up for the Man prize did he step forward.
The novel is a thinly disguised account of Jiang's life in his 20s, when he fled Cultural Revolution turmoil for the Mongolian grasslands with a handful of close friends.
At the end of the novel Chen stands at his window in Beijing watching the city sinking under clouds of yellow Mongolian sand, brought by winds from overgrazed, desertified grasslands. He is overcome by a sense of desolation. 'A nomadic herding society was now extinct; even the last trace left by the wolves on the Inner Mongolian grassland - the ancient cave of the wolf cub - would be buried in yellow sand.'
Hunted to extinction by soldiers, the wolves that once menaced Chen are gone; in their place are vast herds of sheep reared mostly by settlers, raised for their meat that supplies thousands of hotpot restaurants across the country. Nouveau herdsmen pocket the money and return to the cities to set up businesses, while the grasslands wither more each day. It is a bleak scenario. Chen, who has killed his share of wolves, is overcome by guilt; in this he represents the conscience of Han China.
Jiang's novel is an absorbing, thrilling read that, amazingly for a 524-page story about wolves, sheep, horses and herdsmen, captures readers' imaginations thoroughly.
In tandem with the tale, Jiang explores philosophical issues surrounding Chinese culture, asking why the Chinese have grown 'soft', or sheep-like, unlike the 'hard' Mongolians represented by their wily wolves.
It is this last musing that has attracted negative attention from critics such as Sinologist  Wolfgang Kubin, who accused Wolf Totem of being 'fascistic'. Perhaps not coincidentally, the wolf was the favourite animal of Nazi leader  Adolf Hitler, who named his subterranean command centre in eastern Poland the 'Wolfsschanze', or wolf's lair. Certainly, the novel  has spawned a host of crude copycats, most of which use the metaphor of the wolf to urge modern Chinese people to be more aggressive in the pursuit of wealth or national interests.
Howard Goldblatt, the novel's translator, is appalled by Kubin's comparison. 'All I can say is he didn't finish it, didn't understand it or doesn't understand what is fascism,' Goldblatt said before the translation made its appearance in Beijing. All three possibilities are unlikely, pointing to a deeper truth about this book: it is a gem, but a flawed one, containing simultaneously deep and naive observations about what it means to be Chinese.
Yet the naivety owes more to the partial, pre-modern and heavily censored nature of the 'national identity' debate on the mainland than analytical or personal flaws on the part of the author. The book is worth buying, reading and thinking about as we struggle with both increasingly denuded physical surroundings and a rising world power: China.



Wolf Totem