‘Wolf Totem’ is the account of Chen Zhen’s experiences on the plains of north-central Inner Mongolia, the Olonbulag. Those experiences bear a loose resemblance to those of Jiang Rong himself, who became a Red Guard during China’s Cultural Revolution of 1966, enlisting to purge the Gobi of the ‘Four Olds’. On the Olonbulag, the four olds – old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits – are well rooted, and the Mongol tribesmen are depicted as living an ‘almost mythical sort of primitive life’. At the heart of this life dwells the wolf totem.
Chen Zhen is fortunate to fall under the tutelage of Papa Bilgee: sage, prophet and general wolf know-it-all. It is he who initiates Chen Zhen to the wolf cult and teaches him the difference between big and little life. On the Olonbulag, the grass and the grassland are the big life, all else the little life that depends on the big life for survival. Yet the big life is also fragile, and it is only thanks to the wolves that the ecosystem is balanced to preserve it. The wolf is therefore both plague and sacred emissary of the sky god Tengger.
It is also an exemplar of survival techniques, and Bilgee describes how, replicating the wolves, Genghis Khan’s general Muqali drove thousands of Jin warriors to their deaths in a snowdrift, returning months later to collect the preserved spoils of war. Finally, it is Bilgee who personifies the Four Olds, and who dies along with that way of life.
The story is gently paced, with an oral quality weaving together the folklore of the grassland and the wolf. It has sold over four million copies in China and been variously interpreted as a critique of contemporary China, a business manual and even a fascist primer. However, all miss the universal import of its critique of Promethean designs and its suggestion that all people can perhaps forget what constitutes the ‘big life’.
