June 20th, 2008

“Wolf Totem”

Remember those tales about wolf when you were a kid ? So you will love this one about wolves and Han Chinese.

I have Just finished reading “Wolf Totem” by Jiang Rong, largely based on the author’s experience and written under a pen name, who only recently revealed himself to be former political prisoner.

Just loved it…

Written in 2004 but translated in English and French only in March 2008, the book, set on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, has been a publishing phenomenon in China, where it has sold twenty million copies in its legitimate imprint and several million pirated copies since its release in 2004, despite Rong’s desire to keep a low profile, as reported by the Herald Tribune.

The NYT reports:

“Wolf Totem” engages the foreign reader only in its attempts to diagnose the spiritual malaise of contemporary China.

The main line of inquiry is announced on the very first page when a suitably old and wise Mongol tells Chen: “You’re like a sheep. A fear of wolves is in your Chinese bones.” As if on cue, Chen is soon “saddened to have been born into a line of farmers” who have “become as timid as sheep after dozens, even hundreds, of generations of being raised on grains and greens, the products of farming communities; they had lost the virility of their nomadic ancestors.”

Jiang Rong tries to defuse Chinese pride in their splendid agrarian civilization, even disparaging Confucius, now belatedly embraced by the Communist Party. There are laments about how timid Chinese peasants fell prey to canny Westerners who, as “descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons,” have the blood of wolves in their veins. Chen concludes that the Chinese “are in desperate need of a transfusion” of such “vigorous, unrestrained blood.”

The LA Times gives a different outlook:

It could have been a spectacular novel. Instead it fails to rise above ordinary and at times ventures into the realm of batty.

There is an odd calculus at work throughout this much-heralded book. It basically goes like this: Han Chinese ethnicity, bad. Mongolians, good. Being the sedentary, agrarian people that they are, the Chinese naturally hate wolves. The nomadic, spiritual Mongolians revere them. Why do the Chinese hate wolves? The Chinese are like sheep — weak, complacent, docile and easily led — and sheep hate wolves, that’s why. Mongolians are not like sheep. They are brave, fearless, wise warriors; you can’t fence them in. Why are the Mongolians like this? They have a wolf as their totem, of course. How else could Genghis Khan have conquered most of the then-known world? The Chinese, the poor saps, have a dragon as their symbol.

The most remarkable point, as reported by the NYT is that:

It seems strange that the Chinese censors missed this indictment of Han imperialism. It’s even more remarkable that a novel so relentlessly gloomy and ponderously didactic has become a huge best seller, second in circulation only to Mao’s little red book. This success may be due, at least in part, to its exhortations to the Chinese to imitate the go-getting spirit of the West. However, “Wolf Totem” also captures a widespread Chinese anxiety about their country’s growing physical and moral squalor as millions abandon the countryside in search of a middle-class lifestyle that cannot be environmentally sustained.

Let’s have a look at the conclusion by the Times Online:

The underlying allegory – that people should cease being led about like sheep and should instead emulate the wolf’s fierce independence – seems hardly in keeping with China’s usual heavy-handed emphasis on conformity.

More articles available in French here, there, also here, and there.

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