Yang shone his flashlight at the tunnel. “This is it,” he said. “This is the cave. You crawled inside from here. At the time, I was scared witless, afraid you’d run into the mother wolf and fearful that the wolves outside would attack me. I don’t know where we got our nerve back then.”
Bending down, Yang yelled into the cave, “Little Wolf, Little Wolf, time to eat. Chen Zhen and I are here to see you.” He acted as if he were once again calling out to the cub at the new pastureland, where the young wolf had dug a cave of his own. But this time the cub would not leap out.
Chen rose and brushed the dirt off, then squatted down to pull up the grass in front of the cave. Then he took out seven Beijing sausages. The biggest one was intended for the cub he had raised. After respectfully placing them on the ground, he took out seven sticks of incense, stuck them in the ground, and lit them. Finally, he took out the first page of his completed manuscript and burned it as an offering. With the flame licking at Chen’s name and the title, Wolf Totem, Chen hoped that the souls of the cub and the old man, Bilgee, would receive his promise and his deep sense of remorse. The fire did not die out until it reached his finger. Then he took out a bottle of the old man’s favorite liquor and sprinkled it on the sandy ground around the cave. He knew the old man had left his footprints by every old wolf den on the Olonbulag pastureland. He’d upset the old man by ignoring his objections to raising a cub, and that was something for which he’d never be able to atone.
Chen and Yang stretched out their arms, palms up, and looked at Tengger, following the rising green smoke to search for the souls of the cub and the old man.
Chen wanted to yell out, "Little Wolf, Little Wolf…Papa, Papa…I’m here to see you.” But he couldn’t bring himself to do it, for he didn’t deserve it. He didn’t dare disturb their souls, afraid that they’d open their eyes to see the yellow, dying “grassland” below.
Facing the quiet wolf mountain, Chen Zhen did not know when he’d be back again.
In the spring of 2002, Batu and Gasmai phoned Chen Zhen to say, "Eighty percent of the Olonbulag pastureland is now desert. In another year the whole area will change from settlement herding to raising cows and sheep, more or less like the animal pens in your farming villages. Every family will build rows of big houses.”
Chen Zhen didn’t know what to say.
A few days later, a yellow-dragon sandstorm rose up outside his window, blocking the sky and the sun. All of Beijing was shrouded in the fine, suffocating dust. China’s imperial city was turned into a hazy city of yellow sand.
Standing alone by his window, Chen looked off to the north with a sense of desolation. The wolves had receded into legend, and the grassland was a distant memory. A nomadic herding society was now extinct; even the last trace left by the wolves on the Inner Mongolian grassland-the ancient cave of the wolf cub-would be buried in yellow sand.
Glossary
BANNER: An administrative unit roughly equivalent to a county in China proper.
CAPITALIST-ROADERS: Party officials who implemented pragmatic economic policies in the countryside in response to the disastrous Great Leap Forward. The president, Liu Shaoqi was labeled the “Number one capitalist-roader in the party.” The term became the catchword for witch hunts during the Cultural Revolution.
DEEL: A long belted robe, often made of animal skins.
FOUR OLDS: Old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. “Destroy the four olds” was a campaign, launched in 1966, during which the Red Guards terrorized the countryside.
HEILONG RIVER (JIANG): The river (Black Dragon) after which China’s largest northeastern province is named.
LEAGUE: An administrative unit roughly equivalent to a prefecture.
LI: About one third of a U.S. mile.
PRODUCTION BRIGADE: The largest labor unit in a commune.
STUDY SESSIONS (GROUPS): Meetings, usually scheduled as punishment for political errors, for which reform was the goal, the works of Mao Zedong the tool.
THREE DIFFICULT YEARS: Three years between 1959 and 1962, following the so-called "Great Leap Forward” (1958), during which upwards of twenty million people died of starvation.
WORK POINTS: Computations of labor rewards in the countryside.
YELLOW EMPEROR: The mythical founder of the Chinese race.
YUAN: Chinese currency, valued at the time (the 1970s) at roughly four to the dollar.
YURT: A round felt building. The preferred Mongol term is “ger.”
About the Author
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 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.
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.
