Wolf Totem

Jiang Rong

Penguin

Otago Daily Times, July 12th 2008

In 1969, Jiang Rong joined thousands of other young Chinese men and women who left their urban homes and travelled to the farthest reaches of the country to be rusticated. Most were determined to eradicate the “four olds” (old thought, old culture, old custom and old practice), which in practice meant the elimination of traditional rural life, but Rong developed strong attachments to the nomadic herders that he lived with on the Inner Mongolian grasslands.

Despite suffocating summers followed by six-month winters, and threats ranging from mosquitoes so numerous they can kill a fully-grown ox to wolves that descend upon the nomads’ flocks with regular and devastating effect, these people have survived and flourished for thousands of years. Rong left determined to document a philosophy and way of life that has since disappeared. The result is Wolf Totem, winner of the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize.

Unlike the Chinese (who hate and demonise wolves) the Mongols regard these fearsome creatures as partners, not enemies, in the battle to defend the ecology of the plains. When the protagonist, Chen, finds a mauled and dying gazelle, he exclaims in disgust “Wolves are evil, killing the innocent, oblivious to the value of life. They deserve to be caught and skinned”.

This is when he learns his first lesson from Papa Bilgee, the headman for the tribe and his adoptive father: “Out here, the grass and the grassland are the life, the big life. All else is little life that depends on the big life for survival. Even wolves and humans are little life...Creatures that eat grass are worse than creatures that eat meat. [W]hen you kill off the big life of the grassland, all the little lives are doomed”.

This is not to say that the nomads don’t themselves kill wolves. In fact, one of the most memorable scenes in the novel is a description of Bilgee’s daughter, Gasmia, holding a wolf by the tail to keep it from the sheep while Chen stands by helplessly, only to witness Gasmia’s 9-year-old son dash past him to grab one of the wolf’s legs and help her drag him to the waiting dogs. But they would never contemplate the eradication of the wolves that the Red Guard soon institute.

Determined to learn as much as he can about them, Chen captures and raises a wolf cub, a relationship that leads him to conclude these animals explain the success of the Mongols. Wolves teach them battle strategies, fearlessness and ferocity. They even train their battle horses, as only the fleetest, smartest and strongest survive.

In Chen’s opinion, the nomads retain their wolf spirit while the agrarian Chinese are sheep who have lost all connection to their true nature, an ironically appropriate metaphor as the grasses are overrun by Han farmers seeking to feed an ever-expanding Chinese population.

Upon his return some 20 years later, Chen finds the wolves gone, the rich and fertile countryside desertified by overgrazing and a once proudly independent people losing their younger generation to the lure of the city and its material comforts.

What is perhaps most extraordinary about this semi-autobiographical novel is the extensive criticism of the Confucian values the Communist Party espouses, and the coded call for the Chinese to discard their submissive acceptance of dictatorship and to embrace the freedom of self-determination.

But it is also a work of anthropology, the record of an ancient and vanishing culture, and an ecological handbook. Disquieting echoes of an ever-expanding dairy conversion and the mantra of profit and productivity growth that underpin our own economy were hard to quell.

Although the polemic aspects are more for the domestic than the international audience, I was haunted by the tragic inevitability that the world Rong creates cannot withstand the forces of progress. Whatever its shortcomings, Wolf Totem is a measure of the increasing openness of the Chinese Government to criticism, and offers a very different picture of China to that of other novels of the Cultural Revolution.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/disquieting-record-vanishing-culture