Pack Man

Bespectacled and graying, 62-year-old Jiang Rong doesn't look as though he could have written Wolf Totem — an eccentric, blood-soaked eulogy to the fiercest inhabitants of the Mongolian plains that has sold millions of copies in China since its publication in 2004. In fact, publicity is something of a strain for a man who, until recently, was so averse to exposure that he refused to be photographed. But Jiang is enduring it as part of the worldwide launch of the much touted English-language translation of his book, which has just been released by Penguin.

Although he still hasn't revealed his real name (Jiang is a pseudonym), the obligation to promote Wolf Totem means that these days Jiang will reveal previously guarded details of his life and the creation of his unlikely best seller — and they make it clear that behind the slightly donnish exterior, he has lived with the same willful spirit as the wolves he writes about. He has, for instance, been arrested five times for being a "counterrevolutionary," experiencing beatings and five years in prison (the last stint for leading a group of students to the protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989). "It is ironic, isn't it," he says, flashing a grin, "that a book written by a counterrevolutionary should become such a best seller."

The scale and speed of his book's success has shocked him. Within weeks of its original release, the semi-autobiographical tale of a Chinese student being taught the ways of the steppe by a wise old Mongol herder was being devoured by hundreds of thousands of readers — government officials and students, traditionalists and bohemians, workers and business types. Huge Chinese enterprises like Lenovo, Haier and Huawei bought copies for their employees, and the book quickly spawned a host of self-help and management texts that claimed to be imbued with its spirit — works with titles like The Wolf's Way, Wolf Soul, The Cool Wolves, Think Like a Wolf and Wolf Strategy. Illegal reproductions of Wolf Totem, of course, were rampant. No one knows the exact number of pirated copies sold but usual estimates are between five and 10 times the authorized version, which sold around 2 million. Total sales in China could therefore be as high as 20 million.

"Different people saw different things in the book, which accounts for its universal appeal," says Jo Lusby, head of Penguin's China operations in Beijing. But it can be equally argued that they perceived different components of the same thing: a searching song of the ascendant Chinese nation, seeking to know itself. The U.S. had its Whitman and Thoreau; China has Jiang, wandering the huge grassy expanses and singing of primordial elements — blood, death, soil — to which the nation is no longer attuned. "The heat caused by Wolf Totem ... is a symptom of Chinese people's collective depletion of spiritual belief," wrote critic Zhang Hong in the highbrow Wenhui Readers' Weekly. "The book is like a stimulant injected into the decadent contemporary spirit that allows people to fantasize about becoming aggressive and successful." Fittingly, those are the very qualities demanded by the new society evolving from China's economic boom.

But what of the non-Chinese audience? Penguin reportedly paid a $100,000 advance for the English-language rights (company policy is not to comment on such issues, Lusby says) — respectable by the standards of international best sellers but an out and out record for China. Lusby believes it will prove a commercial hit, and on the face of it Wolf Totem — rendered by renowned translator Howard Goldblatt — seems to be the kind of bildungsroman that many could relate to, telling of how boy becomes man, and touching on themes of environmental degradation and the conflict between tradition and modernity. Based on Jiang's experiences as a student volunteer living with nomadic Mongol herders in the 1960s and '70s, the 500-page tome is packed with descriptions of life on the steppes, ranging from the predatory behavior of wolves, to an explication of the sex lives of marmots. "It is an extremely Chinese book," says Lusby, "but also extremely universal as well."

Well, yes and no. Readers may find some of Jiang's purplest prose indigestible. "Desperate cries rose from the herd as the wolves tore into one horse after another — sides and chests spurted blood, the stench of which drove the crazed predators to commit acts of frenzied cruelty," is his description of a wolf attack on a herd of prize horses. "The raw meat in their mouths meant nothing to the wolves: only the murderous tearing of horseflesh mattered." More problematically, the book contains puzzling chunks in which Jiang details his pet theory: that thousands of years of farming have turned the Chinese into a spineless people who placidly accept direction from above and are too timid to seize what they want. If the country is to avoid decadence and decay, he argues, the Chinese must emulate the ferocious independence of the wolves and the nomadic Mongols who lived in harmony with them. And not just the Mongols but the Europeans also. "The stories of the wolves are Chinese stories but they manifest the Western [European] spirit. Nomadic people are prone to explore, fight, and develop commerce, like what has happened in the West," he explains. "While farmers have a narrow minded attitude that puts themselves in a cage. That's why, even if Chinese people were given democracy, they wouldn't want it. Chinese are not wolves; they are sheep."

Jiang's attempts to marshal modern history to conform to his ideas result in some passages that will strike many readers as far-fetched, if not downright silly. They also prevent a simple enjoyment of the book — its pleasant pastoral passages are sooner or later interrupted by jarring expositions that wouldn't look out of place in a 19th century manual of eugenics. Here's one from the novel's main character, Chen Zhen:

"The way I see it, most advanced people today are the descendants of nomadic races. They drink milk, eat cheese and steak, weave clothing from wool, lay sod, raise dogs, fight bulls, race horses, and compete in athletics. They cherish freedom and popular elections, and they have respect for their women, all traditions and habits passed down by their nomadic ancestors."

Despite this sort of encumbrance, Jiang says he is confident that the book will find a mainstream Western audience, and believes that foreigners may even "be able to understand the point I am trying to make about freedom and independence better than many Chinese." Perhaps his faith in Western civilization — he names Jack London's White Fang as his favorite novel — is a vehement reaction to everything that modern China has done to him. Jiang says that one of the reasons he went to Mongolia in 1967 was because its remoteness would allow him to bring along banned "bourgeois" literature, impossible to possess almost anywhere else in China at the time. "Freedom, personality and liberation are the things that the Communist Party wanted to crush," he recalls, "but they were my dream."

Ultimately, this is the kindest reading one can make of Wolf Totem — that of a howling if confused paean to liberty, born of sublimated political frustrations that millions of Chinese can relate to. "In 20 years, I think it is inevitable that China will evolve into a freer society," says Jiang. But curiously there is no such optimism in the book. The wolves — those symbols of perfect freedom — are exterminated by officials as part of a plan to turn the grasslands over to large-scale farming, and Chen Zhen, the protagonist, can find only hackneyed, metaphysical solace as he meditates upon a wolf-cub pelt, imagining the cub's spirit in "the place where all the souls of Mongolian wolves that had died in battles over the millennia congregated." One is left wondering if millions of Chinese readers also believe that freedom only waits in heaven, or if they feel it to be something worth striving for on earth.