Wolf Totem: A Novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  About the Author

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2008 by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Translation copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2008

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in Chinese as Lang Tuteng

  by Changjiang Literature and Arts Publishing House, 2004.

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the

  author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Jiang, Rong.

  [Lang tu teng. English]

  Wolf totem : a novel / Jiang Rong ; translated by Howard Goldblatt.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-594-20156-1

  I. Goldblatt, Howard. II. Title.

  PL2942.3.A 44L3613 2008

  895.1’352 2007037554

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  Translator’s Note

  In 1969, a young Chinese intellectual from Beijing answered Chairman Mao’s call for city dwellers to go “up to the mountains and down to the countryside,” joining as many as a hundred like-minded youngsters in traveling to one of China’s most remote, most “primitive” spots: north-central Inner Mongolia. While most of the fifteen to twenty million young urbanites who were sent out of the cities to be “rusticated” dreamed constantly of going home and, insofar as possible, shunned close attachments to their rural hosts, Jiang Rong did in fact learn from and befriend the herdsmen with whom he lived and worked. In all, he spent more than a decade as a shepherd on the sparsely populated Olonbulag, a fictional setting in the Ujimchin Banner, a hardscrabble existence in a place where life is unimaginably hard on all its inhabitants, man and beast.

  Despite its remote location and hostile environment, Inner Mongolia was not spared the excesses of the disastrous Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when the nation was on war footing, arrayed against domestic enemies of the state and international enemies of the nation, real and imagined. The “four olds” (old thought, old culture, old customs, and old practices) were under attack, targeting, in particular, ideologically “backward” members of superstitious and conservative rural societies. When they weren’t working to bring down important political, military, and cultural figures, Red Guard factions spent their time tormenting ordinary citizens. Military organizational schemes replaced traditional tribal order, military terminology was in vogue, and military commanders, competent or not, were placed in charge of production activities. In Mongolia, it was an onerous time for people whose lives were centered on respecting the ways and superstitions of their ancestors. They took great pride in the military conquests of those ancestors—the great Mongol hordes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—and were unmoved by the ideologies of Mao and his followers, whose Han ancestors had been no match for the mounted warriors of Genghis Khan. The key to the success of the khans, according to Mongol legend, as the author discovered during his years on the grassland, was the wolf, the only significant land-bound predator that was able to thrive for thousands of years.

  Wolves have captured the imagination of peoples everywhere, but seldom have they been venerated to the extent that they are by nomads of the Mongolian grassland. Their paradoxical role in the people’s lives—as predator and prey, as defilers of herds (the “little lives”) and protectors of the grassland’s ecology (the “big” life), and as animals to be feared and at the same time revered—forms both the actual and the metaphorical core of this magnificent novel. Wolves, courageous and ferocious, loyal to the pack, and respectful of their environment, are posited as an antidote for what ails Chinese society—a society the quasi-autobiographical protagonist compares to the sheep he tends and which he must protect against the clever, almost supernaturally shrewd wolves he so admires. The symbiotic relationship between the herdsmen and the wolves, participants in a delicate ecological balancing act of keeping at bay the Gobi to the west and the Han Chinese to the south, is threatened by encroachments by both. Wolf Totem, which sold in the millions in China—in both authorized and pirated editions— ushered in heated debates on the Chinese “character.” It is a work that compellingly blends the passion of a novelist who lived the story he tells and the intelligent ethnological observations of a sympathetic outsider.

  In 1979, when Chinese society was trying to rid itself of the effects of the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Rong was admitted into the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences as a graduate student. In 1988, Jiang Rong, who had become a political scientist attached to Beijing University, began writing this novel, obsessed with a story that had stayed with him for nearly twenty years; six years later it was finished and instantly became a runaway bestseller.

 
In the translation of Wolf Totem, I have been aided by several people. First and foremost, the author and his wife graciously and enthusiastically responded to all my inquiries concerning both textual and cultural matters. Mongolian spellings were supplied by Chigchin, a graduate student in English at the Inner Mongolia University. At Penguin, both the novel and the translator were aided by Jo Lusby in Beijing and Liza Darnton in New York, and, most significantly, by the skillful and imaginative editing of Beena Kamlani. Sandy Dijkstra was instrumental in getting the project started. Finally, Sylvia Lin read and commented on the entire translation, as she always does. To all, my heartfelt thanks.

  1

  As Chen Zhen looked through the telescope from his hiding place in the snow cave, he saw the steely gaze of a Mongolian grassland wolf. The fine hairs on his body rose up like porcupine quills, virtually pulling his shirt away from his skin. Old Man Bilgee was there beside him. This time Chen did not feel as if his soul had been driven out of his body, but sweat oozed from his pores. He had been on the grassland two years but still had not lost his fear of Mongolian wolves, especially in packs. Now he was face to face with a large pack deep in the mountains, far from camp, his misty breath quivering in the air. Neither he nor Bilgee was armed—no rifles, no knives, no lasso poles, not even something as simple as a pair of metal stirrups. All they had were two herding clubs, and if the wolves picked up their scent, their sky burial would come early.

  Chen exhaled nervously as he turned to look at the old man, who was watching the wolf encirclement through the other telescope. “You’re going to need more courage than that,” Bilgee said softly. “You’re like a sheep. A fear of wolves is in your Chinese bones. That’s the only explanation for why you people have never won a fight out here.” Getting no response, he leaned over and whispered, “Get a grip on yourself. If they spot any movement from us, we’ll be in real trouble.” Chen nodded and scooped up a handful of snow, which he squeezed into a ball of ice.

  The herd of Mongolian gazelles was grazing on a nearby slope, unaware of the wolf pack, which was tightening the noose, drawing closer to the men’s snow cave. Not daring to move, Chen felt frozen in place, like an ice sculpture. This was Chen’s second encounter with a wolf pack since coming to the grassland. A palpitating fear from his first encounter coursed through his veins.

  Two years earlier, in late November, he had arrived in the border-region pasture as a production team member from Beijing; snow covered the land as far as the eye could see. The Olonbulag is located southwest of the Great Xing’an mountain range, directly north of Beijing; it shares a border with Outer Mongolia. Historically, it was the southern passage between Manchuria and the Mongolian steppes, and, as such, the site of battles between a host of peoples and nomadic tribes, as well as a territory in which the potential struggles for dominance by nomads and farmers was ever present.

  Yurts had not yet been assigned to the Beijing students, the so-called educated youth, so Chen had been sent to live with Old Man Bilgee and his family, and given duties as a shepherd. One day slightly more than a month after his arrival, he and the old man were sent to headquarters, some eighty li, to fetch study materials and purchase daily necessities. Just before they were to head back, the old man was summoned to a meeting of the revolutionary committee. Since headquarters had said the study materials had to be delivered without delay, Chen was told to return alone.

  As he was about to leave, the old man swapped horses with him, lending him his big, dark mount, a fast horse that knew the way. Bilgee warned Chen not to take a shortcut, but to follow the wagon road back; since there were yurts every twenty or thirty li, he ought to be able to make the trip without incident.

  As soon as he was in the saddle and on his way, Chen sensed the power of his Mongol horse and felt the urge to gallop at full speed. When they reached a ridge from which he could see the peak of Chaganuul Mountain, where the brigade was quartered, he forgot the old man’s warning and left the road—which curved around the mountain, adding twenty li to the trip—to take a shortcut that led straight to camp.

  The temperature began to fall, and when he was about halfway home, the sun shivered from the deepening cold before retreating to the horizon and slipping from view. Frigid air from the snowy ground rose up, turning Chen’s leather duster hard and brittle. The hide of his mount was covered with a layer of sweat-frost. Their pace slowed as the snow deepened and little hillocks rose in their path. They were deep in the wilds, far from all signs of habitation. The horse trotted on, straight and smooth, so Chen relaxed the pressure on the bit to let the horse determine the pace and direction, as well as how hard it wanted to work. For no obvious reason, Chen suddenly tensed; he shuddered, becoming fearful that the horse might lose its way, fearful that the weather would turn ugly, fearful of being caught in a snowstorm, and fearful of freezing to death on the glacial grassland. The only thing he forgot to fear was the wolves.

  Just before they reached a ravine, the horse stopped, pointing toward a spot down the ravine. It tossed its head and snorted, its pace no longer steady. Chen Zhen, who had never before ridden alone deep into the snowy grassland, had no inkling of the danger ahead. But the agitated horse, its nostrils flaring, its eyes wide, turned to head away from what lay in front of them. Its intuition was lost on Chen, who pulled the reins taut to turn the animal’s head and keep it moving forward at a trot. Its gait grew increasingly jerky, an erratic combination of walking, trotting, and jolting, as if the animal might bolt at any moment. Chen pulled back hard on the reins.

  As if frustrated that its warning signals were not being heeded, the horse turned and nipped at its rider’s felt boot, and at that moment Chen recognized the danger facing them by the fear in the horse’s eyes. But it was too late, for the horse had carried him into the flared opening of a gloomy ravine on trembling legs.

  Chen turned to look down the ravine and was so terrified he nearly fell off the horse. There on a snow-covered slope not less than fifty yards away was a pack of golden-hued, murderous-looking Mongolian wolves, all watching him straight on or out of the corners of their eyes, their gazes boring into him like needles. The closest wolves were the biggest, easily the size of leopards and at least twice the size of the wolves he’d seen in the Beijing Zoo, half again as tall and as long, nose to tail. All dozen or so of the larger wolves had been sitting on the snowy ground, but they immediately stood up, their tails stretched out straight, like swords about to be unsheathed, or arrows on a taut bowstring. They were poised to pounce. The alpha male, surrounded by the others, was a gray wolf whose nearly white neck, chest, and abdomen shone like white gold. The pack consisted of thirty or forty animals.

  Afterward, when Chen and Bilgee were rehashing the circumstances of the encounter, the old man wiped his sweaty brow with his finger and said, “They must have been holding a council. The alpha male was likely passing out assignments for an attack on a herd of horses on the other side of the hill. You’d have realized your luck had you known that when their coats shine, they aren’t hungry.”

  In fact, Chen’s mind was wiped clean the moment he spotted them, and the last thing he recalled was a muted but terrifying sound rising up to the top of his head, not unlike the thin whistle you get by blowing on the edge of a coin. It must have been the ping his soul made as it tore through his crown on its way out. He felt that his life had stopped for a minute or more.

  Long afterward, whenever he recalled his encounter with the wolf pack, he silently thanked Papa Bilgee and his dark horse. The only reason he hadn’t fallen off was that the animal had lived its entire life in wolf territory, a battle-tested horse perfectly suited to the hunt. At the critical moment, as their lives hung in the balance, the horse grew extraordinarily calm. Acting as if it didn’t even see the pack or that it had any intention of interrupting their council, it continued on at a leisurely, just-passing-through pace. With all the courage it possessed, and in full control of its hooves, it neither struggled to keep moving nor broke in
to a panicky gallop, but carried its rider at a steady pace that allowed Chen to sit up straight.

  Maybe it was the horse’s extraordinary courage that summoned back Chen’s departed soul, but when that spirit, which had hovered in the frigid air for a moment, returned to his body, he felt reborn and was extraordinarily tranquil.

  He forced himself to sit firmly in the saddle. Taking his cue from the horse, he pretended not to have seen the pack, though nervously keeping them in sight. He knew all about the speed of wolves on the Mongolian grassland. It would take but seconds to close the gap. And he knew how important it was not to show fear. That was the only way to avoid an attack by these grassland killers.

  He sensed that the alpha male was gazing at the hill behind them; all the other members of the pack turned their pointed ears in the same direction, like radar locking on to a target. They silently awaited orders as the unarmed man and his horse pranced boldly past them; the alpha male and his followers were not sure what to make of this.

  The sunset slowly faded away as man and horse drew ever nearer. The next couple of dozen steps comprised the longest journey of Chen Zhen’s life. A few steps into that journey, he sensed that one of the wolves had run up to the snow-covered slope behind him, and he knew intuitively that it was a scout sent by the alpha male to see if other troops lay in wait. Chen felt his soul straining to leave again.

  The horse’s gait faltered slightly; Chen’s legs and the horse’s flanks were trembling. The horse turned its ears to the rear, nervously monitoring the scout wolf’s movements. Chen imagined himself passing through an enormous wolf’s maw, with rows of razor-sharp teeth above and below; once he was in the middle, the mouth would snap shut. The horse began to gather its strength in its rear legs, preparing for a mortal engagement. But the burden on its back put it at a terrible disadvantage.

  Suddenly, Chen Zhen, like the shepherd he was supposed to be, appealed to Tengger, Mongol heaven, in a moment of peril: Wise and powerful heaven, Tengger, reach out and give me your hand. Next he summoned Papa Bilgee under his breath. In the Mongol language, Bilgee means “Wise One.” If only the old man would find a way to transmit his knowledge of the grassland directly into his brain. No echoes anywhere disturbed the stillness of the Olonbulag. Gripped by despair, Chen raised his eyes, wanting the last thing he saw to be the ice blue beauty of the heavens.