As China’s Constitution tells us, there are precisely 55 “ethnic minorities” in the PRC. Over the years the designation — ethnicity is marked on one’s China ID card — has had its ups and downs. Most minorities are exempt from the One-child Policy, and benefit from a “handicap” which automatically gains them useful extra points for university admission. But during the Cultural Revolution no-one wanted to admit to being Manchurian (满族), since that meant one was descended from the exploitive ruling class of the Qing dynasty, and thus a prime candidate for a potentially ugly “struggle session.”
But “ethnic” is back in style. Books featuring Uighur or Tibetan themes are “springing up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain,” as one says in Chinese. To wit: The Tibetan Code, whose four installments are all best-sellers, not to mention Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem.
Intriguingly, many of these works of fiction are written by Han Chinese, not the ethnic minorities who figure in them. So how “genuine” are these stories, and that aside, are they a good read?
During February, I’ve promised myself to read three popular ones in order to find out: Land of Milk and Water (水乳大地), a (so far!) fascinating account of heated sparring between native Tibetans, French missionaries, Han officials, and even Naxi emigrants, over a century ending in the 1980s; Right Bank of Argun River (额尔古纳河右岸), a best-seller about the Ewenke, shamanistic nomads who people parts of China, Mongolia and Russia; and Mongolian Tales (蒙古往事).
If you’d like an English-language table of contents, synopsis or excerpt, or further market intelligence on these or similar books, e-mail me at xumushi@yahoo.com and tell me what you want.
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