Listening to our ancestors

Since its first publication in 2004, Wolf Totem -- Yiang Rong's semi-autobiographical and highly personal account of the Cultural Revolution -- has attracted relentless attention. It has already sold over four million copies in China alone and has recently won the first ever Man Asian literary prize, a fact that is guaranteed to send sales (and publishers' pulses) even further through the roof.
Which is odd, given that at first glance, Wolf Totem -- a study of life among nomadic herdsmen in Inner Mongolia in the 1960s -- might appear to be of limited appeal. But a few pages in, it is impossible to resist being carried away with the author's all-encompassing adoration of his subject matter.
When Chairman Mao encouraged his disciples, during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, to leave the cities and go out into the countryside to "modernise" and educate the backward inhabitants of China's rural hinterlands, Yiang Rong was one of the fifteen or so million officers of the Red Guard to eagerly accept the challenge. And thirty years later, he defrosts the perfectly preserved memories and experiences of that extraordinary decade through the narrative of his protagonist, Chen Zhen.
Over the years that Chen spends among the herdsmen of the Olonbulag -- a fictional grassland setting in Ujumchilin, Inner Mongolia - Chen's understanding of his beloved China and of modernity are overthrown and replaced with an awesome acceptance of the majesty and complexity of Mongolian grassland life, symbolised in the wolf totem.
He begins to learn the greater significance of the wolf -- both feared for the devastation it can wreak on the herd, and revered for its guardianship of the grassland from the sheep and gazelles, maintaining the ecological balance and thus protecting the "greater life". He begins to realise that the twelfth-century military tactics that had enabled Genghis Khan to defeat the Han Chinese had been copied from the wolves' hunting pack formations. And when the Chinese agricultural settlers begin to trickle in to the area, he finds that he has abandoned all links with his previous existence as a scholar in Beijing; "what he wanted was to enter the wolf totem realm of the grassland people".
The combination of the raw, hostile, landscape of the Gobi desert and the Xian'an mountain range, with the warm safety of the Nomadic tribesmen's friendship is a powerful concoction, and however close Rong may let us get to the wolves, they never lose their fearsome mystery -- quite a feat given that the narrative only narrowly escapes getting a bit wolf-heavy after the first four-hundred pages….
Wolf Totem (translated by Howard Goldblatt; 2008; published by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books) is a simple story -- a story that demonstrates the importance of listening to our ancestors and of listening to the land. It is heartfelt and unsettling and Rong is the perfect host, inviting us to accompany Chen through every new experience as we, too, see our "worldview crumble in the logic and the culture of the grassland", following in his footprints on his journey from uncivilised ignorance to spiritual wisdom.

Isobel Shirlaw is a freelance writer who lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh.