Ecological consciousness has been slow to get off the ground in China. But Beijing writer Zhang Kangkang is a leading member of a circle of Chinese writers concerned with issues of environmental protection, and two of the three stories collected in this book deal with the issue. One of them has proved to be a major contribution to debates.
But things ecological are not the book's subject as such. Its subtitle is "Post-Urban Youth Fiction." "Urban youth" or "educated youth" (zhishi qingnian
Between 17 million and 30 million zhiqing were sent to rural provinces in 1967, 1968 and 1969, many staying there for 10 years until the policy was finally abandoned. Zhang Kangkang herself spent eight years in the Great Northern Wasteland (China's far northeast), in exile from her native Hangzhou. But on account of her family's suspect status -- it was thought that they might have sided with the Nationalists in the Civil War -- she was never a red guard.
The main story in this modest collection is entitled Sandstorm. It's longer than the two other stories combined, and has served as a sort of flagship for China's new-found ecological awareness, at least in Beijing literary circles. It concerns a returned zhiqing called Xin Jiansheng. During his time in Mongolia he had become expert in shooting eagles. This was something only the zhiqing did, and had not been the custom of the local shepherds. The city youth did it did because of the high price that eagle claws fetched in the south where, steeped in spirits, they were considered a prime cure for rheumatism. But they also did it for fun, the author asserts, and to supplement their meager diet with eagle meat.
Xin Jiansheng has several close encounters with the magnificent birds. On one occasion his dog chases one that had remained on the ground a little too long after catching a snake. The youth looks into its eyes -- something his dog had refused to do -- and sees there the power and glory of the sun itself. (This is something of a cliche, but just about excusable.)
On another, he climbs up to a crag and takes two eggs from the chaotic bundle of twigs and rags that passes for an eagle's nest. On his way down the bird hovers in front of his face, talons outstretched, so that he scrambles back up and replaces his illicit booty.
But eventually all the eagles in the area are shot out of the skies.
The result is that the fragile ecosystem is disrupted and the grasslands suffer from a plague of field mice, breeding at an enormous rate and chewing away at the roots of the grass. The sheep decline in numbers and their wool, previously the finest to be had, is officially downgraded. Fights break out between the different groups of pastoralists, sandstorms ensue, and what had been a well-balanced and productive environment becomes an impoverished wilderness.
Sandstorms are invading the Beijing streets as the story opens. Xin Jiansheng has been invited to a reunion with his former zhiqing friends, but whereas many of them have become affluent following China's new-found commercialism, he remains a rough boy grown middle-aged.
The reunion is held in a smart hotel, and Xin Jiansheng is covered with embarrassment. At the party, however, he meets a former co-worker, Wu Tun, who suggests they go back on a trip to the north and shoot any remaining eagles they can find in order to profit from the ever-increasing price of their talons. Xin Jiansheng, who has by this time achieved a measure of ecological awareness, is initially shocked by the idea. But then he contemplates his position. Some people have money, he reasons, others status or power. He has none of these things. The only thing he ever did well was shoot eagles. Only in this, in his eyes, lay his value as a human being.
And so it is that in the story's last page he climbs into a white Beijing Jeep, and settles down beside Wu Tun. Together they set off once again for the north. Each of the three stories is followed by an extract from an interview with the author that the book's editor, the University of Victoria's Richard King, conducted in Beijing last May. In each, Zhang Kangkang discusses the preceding story. About Sandstorm, she says that it was indeed the case that it was the urban youth who decimated the eagle population in the 1970s. She heard the story from Mongolia, where her husband was sent, rather than in the far northeast where she was herself.
Environmental issues are not all that the story addresses. There is also, as the author points out, the sense of displacement many returning migrants experienced, the feeling that the years in the outback were in fact the good years, something that their subsequent life in the city has offered nothing to equal, or to compensate for.
The other two stories also highlight problems afflicting the educated urban youth in distant parts. The Peony Garden focuses on the puritanism of hard-line ideologies, not least in the Great Northern Wasteland, while Cruelty centers on the rivalries and self-sacrifice surrounding a murder. The stories have been translated by two professors of Chinese at Canada's University of Victoria, together, in the case of Sandstorm, with five of their students studying Chinese at the college. All three stories read fluently, and the translations provide no obstacle to the English reader's enjoyment.
The book is published by Renditions, the organization specializing in literary translation from Chinese into English that is based at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is next year celebrating its 30th anniversary.
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