Jiang Rong was born in Jiangsu in 1946. His father’s job saw the family move to Beijing in 1957, and Jiang entered the Central Academy of Fine Art in 1967. His education cut short by events in China, the twenty-one-year-old Jiang volunteered to work in Inner Mongolia’s East Ujimqin Banner in 1967, where he lived and labored with the native nomads for the next eleven years of his life. He took with him two cases filled with Chinese translations of Western literary classics, and spent years immersed in personal studies of Mongolian history, culture, and tradition. A growing fascination for the mythologies surrounding the wolves of the grasslands inspired him to learn all he could about them and he adopted and raised an orphaned wolf cub. In 1978 he returned to Beijing, continuing his education at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences one year later. Jiang worked as an academic until his retirement in 2006. Wolf Totem is a fictional account of life in the 1970s that draws on Jiang’s personal experience of the grasslands of China’s border region.
"An intellectual adventure story. . . . Five hundred bloody and
instructive pages later, you just want to stand up and howl."
-Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle
"[Jiang Rong] is on the way to becoming one of the most celebrated
and controversial Chinese novelists in the world."
-The Guardian (London)
"Electrifying. . . . The power of Jiang's prose (and of Howard
Goldblatt's excellent translation) is evident. . . . This
semi-autographical novel is a literary triumph."
-National Geographic Traveler (Book of the Month)
A publishing sensation in China, this novel wraps an ecological warning and political indictment around the story of Chen Zhen, a Beijing student sent during the 1960s Cultural Revolution to live as a shepherd among the herdsmen of the Olonbulang, a grassland on the Inner Mongolia steppes. Chen Zhen is fascinated by the herdsmen, descendants of Genghis Khan, and by the grassland's wolves, with whom the herdsmen live in uneasy harmony. When Mao's government orders the mass execution of the wolves to make way for farming collectives run by Chen Zhen's own people, the Han Chinese, he makes for a somewhat passive hero. Except for Bilgee, the wise old herdsman, and Director Bao, the face of the Communist government in the Olonbulang, the novel's secondary characters make little impression. The wolf packs, however, are vividly and beautifully described. As Chen Zhen helplessly witnesses the consequences of the order, he risks the enmity of both the herdsmen and the state officials by capturing a wolf cub and lovingly raising it as his own wolf totem. Jiang Rong writes reverently about life on the steppes in a manner that recalls Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf. (Mar.) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.
"An intellectual adventure story. . . . Five hundred bloody and
instructive pages later, you just want to stand up and howl."
-Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle
"[Jiang Rong] is on the way to becoming one of the most celebrated
and controversial Chinese novelists in the world."
-The Guardian (London)
"Electrifying. . . . The power of Jiang's prose (and of Howard
Goldblatt's excellent translation) is evident. . . . This
semi-autographical novel is a literary triumph."
-National Geographic Traveler (Book of the Month)
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