Wolf Totem

Picked up this book again after two years of not reading it. The first time that happened, I was in Hungary, a nation born on the steppes, so it was appropriate enough. Today the English translation has come out, and it should be quite interesting to read the same book twice in Chinese and English.

The English translation is a little unwieldy, even though it was translated by someone named Howard Goldblatt. Or maybe because it was translated by someone named Howard Goldblatt.

The author, Lu Jiamin (aka Jiang Rong) spends much of the novel obsessing about the wolf packs and their encounters with the Mongols in the Olonbulag, an area of fertile pastures in the east of Inner Mongolia. He feeds from the endless cycles of feuds between wolf and man that characterised the everyday pasture life, to form the main body of the novel: The charged and dramatic narration of such feuds is best epitomised in Chapter 5, where a herd of war horses was massacred by a pack of wolves whose cubs had been stolen by the Mongols. The wolves, with superior strategy and deathly will, decimated the herd in the blizzard and almost took the horse-herd with them. The description is even more chilling when the others came and dug out the horse corpses: all of them, even some of the wolves, had been squished to death like bugs.

Out of a very Chinese propensity to pontificate, Jiang Rong enjoys spending long paragraphs praising the wolves in their art of war, their environmentalism, their self-pride and love of freedom, etc. Interspersed within the feud narrative were also some anecdotes of wolf encounters by the Mongols in Ujimchin, and conversations between the protagonist Chen Zhen and his close friends, which serves such a purpose.

This pontificating is probably the reason why the human characters in Wolf Totem are unrealistic, and one relates better to the wolves and the herds than to the humans sometimes. Chen Zhen and the Mongols are ever in unison: the ideas they express often add on to one another, whereas the outsiders, who were hell-bent on exterminating the wolves, were perpetually and utterly obstinate. Talking to Bao Shungui, the production brigade leader, was like halting an avalanche. The Mongols try to persuade him, even gang up against him, but their protests were effortlessly dispersed on the mention of study sessions, and they can't do anything but tear when Bao Shungui commits such atrocities like killing swans for food.

There is another inexplicable twist in the story, when Chen Zhen brought up the wolf cub, knowing full well that it was a cultural taboo in the Olonbulag and that he will earn the ostracism of the Mongols, especially his mentor and foster father. Despite his admiration for the wolves and desire to be like them, he treats the wolf cub with mollycoddling care. The story ended in his failure: The wolf cub can never be reunited with the Olonbulag pack, whose tongue he had forgotten; Chen had blunted his teeth for safety, which robbed him of a chance in the wild. On the other hand the wolf's spirit was as indomitable as his kin, and Chen was forced to kill him "while there's still a little bit of wolf in him."

Why so frustrating? To push the story forward, perhaps. Like much of the pastures in Inner Mongolia, the Olonbulag was going to hell anyway, and at the time of writing, the Gobi was already knocking on Beijing's front door. So it is understandable that many of the turns in the narrative are half-formed in favour of the didactism, and if you read it in Chinese, you might not notice it at all.

After the epilogue was an essay, thinly disguised as a conversation between Chen Zhen and Yang Ke. It summarily talked about the spirit of the wolf in the ancestors of the Chinese and the barbarians that were their neighbours, how it was diminished and revived at various times of Chinese history, and that the best for us if the wolf bits and the sheep bits in the Chinese character "are in balance, with a little more of wolf than sheep." It was a good and informative read, though not entirely convincing, and now there's more than a few questions up my head that I have to answer.