Author: Jiang Rong
Penned by Lu Jiamin under the pseudonym Jiang Rong, Wolf Totem is a semi-autobiographical work about the experiences of a bookish Beijing student during an 11-year sojourn in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution. At times more a series of ethnological meditations than a novel, it caused a sensation after its release in 2004, primarily for its comparison of the Han race to a flock of sheep as part of a sustained comparison with the lupine qualities of noble Mongolian nomads.

Given the chronic geopolitical envy so prevalent in more reactionary portions of the Sinosphere, such a fixation seems inevitable; but to reduce the debate on this sprawling work to a mere slight on the Han national character is grossly unfair. During the course of its 524 pages (including a freshly written 19-page epilogue in place of the rambling 60-page “Call to Action” that capped off the Mandarin version), Wolf Totem touches on everything from the practical difficulties of domesticating a wolf club in a society that treats wild wolves as divine, to ancient Mongolian military tactics, to why nomads are better than farmers at building democratic societies (the last bit being built slightly ridiculous to anyone with more than a passing acquaintance with the evolution of Western democratic institutions). Despite the multiplicity of leitmotifs, Wolf Totem’s most sustained, most passionate, most elegantly-argued and most universally relevant theme deals with the delicate ecological balance society upsets when it combines an agricultural lifestyle’s demands for comfort and predictability with industrialized modes of production. The ecological destruction wrought on the Mongolian grasslands by Han cadres (which the book renders in vivid, albeit clinical, detail) was the genesis of the process by which we enjoy the Gobi Desert along with our morning jianbing once every couple weeks each spring. Although Lu’s critique is targeted specifically at China, the issues raised are of critical concern for thinking people everywhere.

Howard Goldblatt’s translation is the first rendering of Wolf Totem into another language. For the most part, it’s excellent-it slides quietly into the background. In the passages describing the beauty of the grassland, the words are damn near poetic, rising above the rest of the novel’s earthy, matter-of-fact language. Some of the dialogue between the Han students has come through the translation matrix sounding a little robotic (“You know,” Zhang said, “I now share your view that the wolf is a very complex subject, one that touches on many important issues.”), but such instances are mercifully few and far between.

Matt Schrader