Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong
A controversial Chinese tale of environmental destruction, spiritual freedom and the threat modernity poses to the nomadic way of life. It is the final 1960s heyday for the people of the Inner Mongolian grasslands - a time when an age-old balance based on culture and tradition was maintained between the nomads, their livestock, and the wild wolves who roamed the plains. Beijing intellectual Chen Zhen volunteers to live in a remote nomadic settlement on the border of Inner and Outer Mongolia. There, he discovers life of apparent idyllic simplicity based on an eternal struggle between the wolves and the humans in their fight to survive. Chen learns about the rich spiritual relationship, and respect that only equals can feel, that exists between these adversaries. After many years spent living in solitude, Chen's peace of mind is shattered with the arrival of his kinfolk - Han Chinese, sent from the cities to bring modernity and productivity to the remote grasslands. Once the careful balance between the wolves and humans is disrupted, however, culture and tradition is damaged, and the environment suffers.
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.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780143115144 |
| ISBN 10 | 0143115146 |
| Title | Wolf Totem |
| Author | Jiang Rong |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Penguin Books |
| Year published | 2009-03-31 |
| Number of pages | 544 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |