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 are damaged, and the environment suffers.
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 are damaged, and the environment suffers.
A controversial Chinese tale of environmental destruction, spiritual freedom and the threat modernity.
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 An in 1966.
His education cut short by events in China, the twenty-one-year-old
Jiang volunteered to work in Inner Mongolia's East Ujimchin Banner
in 1967, where he lived and labored with the native nomads until
the age of thirty-three. He took with him two cases filled with
Chinese translations of Western literary classics, and spent eleven
years immersed in personal studies of Mongolian history, culture,
and tradition. In particular, he developed a fascination for the
mythologies surrounding the wolves of the grasslands, spending much
of his leisure time learning the stories and raising 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. Jason Culp has been an
actor since he was ten years old, with a variety of television,
regional theatre and film roles to his credit. Over the past 14
years he has also put together a sturdy track record as a voiceover
artist. Add to this his forays into cabaret singing and, more
recently, his work on an elaborate memoir of his mad 70s
upbringing, and you have yourself a well-rounded renaissance man.
"A book like no other. Memorable."
*Adrienne Clarkson, Chair of the Man Asian Literary Prize*
"Set to become an
international hit."
*The Independent*
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.
"A book like no other. Memorable." -- Adrienne Clarkson, Chair of
the Man Asian Literary Prize
"Set to become an international hit." -- The Independent
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