Wolf Totem

Author: Juang Rong
Translator: Howard Goldblatt
Publisher: Penguin 2008

During the cultural revolution in China, a young intellectual Chen Zhen volunteered to go to Olonbulag grasslands in Inner Mongolia to live with Mongolian herders and help raise sheep, cattle, and horses.  He carried banned Western classics with him to read and was joined by few like minded Chinese students.  They were under the supervision of a director, Bao Shungui, a farmer who has been shrewd enough to climb all the way up from the bottom of the bureaucracy.  Chinese farmers followed Confucius rules, while Mongols believed in Tengger (sky) and the grassland.  The Tengger is the father and the grassland is the mother.  The wolves of the Mongolian grasslands killed only animals that harm the grassland.

There were no wolves or rabbits in Australia.  But then someone introduced rabbits into the country, and since there were no wolves, the rabbits reproduced like mad, littering the countryside with their burrows, holes all over the place; eating up most of the vegetation; creating enormous losses for the livestock farmers.  

Khrushchev tried to supplant the Kazakhstan nomadic culture with Russian agriculture and industry.  And what happened?  One of the world’s great grasslands is now a desert.

Olonbulag had lush grasslands with few rabbits and rodents, thanks to Wolves.

But Chen, his friends, and Olonbulag Mongols effort to save wolves turned out to be a losing cause.  Bao had other ideas.  After trying and failing to eliminate wolves several times, he brought in sharp shooters from the army.

Chen tried to reason with Bao and his sharp shooter Xu.  “See how well-protected the pasture is?  When the brigade came here for the spring birthing lambs, tens of thousands of gazelles had stormed over from Outer Mongolia.  We couldn’t chase them away, even with rifles.  If they ran off during the day, they returned at night to fight over grass with birthing ewes.  Luckily wolves came and, in a matter of days, the gazelles were gone.  If not for the wolves, there’d have been no grass for the eves and no milk for the newborn lambs; we’d have lost tens of thousands of lambs.  Husbandry is different from agriculture.  When there’s a disaster, the most a farmer will suffer is a year’s crops, but a disaster out here can mean the loss of eight or ten years.”

After a while Xu said, “How could you have relied on wolves to kill gazelles?  That’s so backward.  The herdsmen have inferior rifles and marksmanship and no trucks.  Watch us next spring.  We’ll use motor vehicles, assault rifles, and machine guns.  No gazelles will be our match, no matter how many there are.”

The Mongolian wolves were doomed.  Without wolves the grasslands were doomed.  Without grasslands the thousands of years old Mongolian nomadic culture was doomed.

This is a heart wrenching story of the disruption of the Mongol herder culture and the elimination of their revered wolves by an unchecked expansion of Chinese modernization. 

This excellent novel won the very first Man Asia prize in 2007.

Ps.
(1) One of the books Chen carried to Inner Mongolia was "White Wolf" by Jack London.

(2) There was a movie made in 2015 based on this book with the same name directed by a French director.

(3) From Wiki:  The Man Asian Literary Prize was an annual literary award between 2007 and 2012, given to the best novel by an Asian writer, either written in English or translated into English, and published in the previous calendar year.

From 2010 to 2012, the Man Asian Literary Prize awarded USD 30,000 to the author and an additional USD 5,000 to the translator (if any).  For the prize of the first three years of its running, from 2007 to 2009, the Man Asian Literary Prize awarded USD 10,000 (author)/ 3,000 USD (translator) to a novel written by an Asian writer of the elective countries, either in English or translated into English, and yet unpublished. Submissions were made by the authors. The reason given by the Prize for the changes introduced in 2010 include the difficulty in finding talented unpublished authors.  With the new format, which has shortlisted and winning novels already available to the literary community, media and general public, the Man Asian Literary Prize recognizes “the best English works each year by Asian authors and aims to significantly raise international awareness and appreciation of Asian literature.”

The Man Asian Literary Prize was sponsored by Man Group plc., title sponsor of the Man Booker Prize. It was announced in October 2012 that Man Group would no longer sponsor the prize after the 2012 winner was announced in 2013.