Bruce Humes

Ranking 13th on the list of China Best Selling Fiction, Right Bank of the Argun (额尔古纳河右岸) by Chi Zijian (迟子建)  is a first-person narrative told from the point of view of an aging Evenki woman in the last years of the 20th century. She chooses to stay behind when her tribe abandons the forested mountains of Northeast China for “civilized” life among town dwellers, where their beloved reindeer will be cooped up like cattle.  (For details on the real-life relocation of the Evenki, see this news item at the Reindeer Blog).

Right Bank of the Argun has not been translated into English (though recently bought by publishers in Italy and Holland), despite the fact that it won the prestigious Mao Dun Literature Award in 2008. To introduce this piece of “fictionalized anthropology,”  I have translated an excerpt from the author’s Afterword. Intriguingly, Chi Zijian was inspired to write this novel partly based on events in her youth (she lived near mountains inhabited by the Oroqen, who are closely related to the Evenki), as well as encounters with Australian aborigines and. . .Irish pub-goers.

Right Bank of the Argun River

Afterword (Excerpt)

First there was soil, and only then was there a seed—this is how The Right Bank of the Argun came to be. That land that turned muddy as the ice thawed in the spring, shaded by green trees in the summer, piled with motley leaves in the autumn, and endlessly white in the winter, was so very familiar to me.

After all, I was born and raised on that land.  As a child entering the mountains to fetch firewood, more than once I discovered a queer head-shape on a thick tree trunk.  Father told me that was the image of the Mountain Spirit Bainacha, carved by the Oroqen.

I knew the Oroqen were an ethnic minority who lived on the outskirts of our mountain town. They resided in their open-top cuoluozi (teepee) where you could spy the stars at night.  In the summer they fished in their birch-bark canoes, and in the winter they hunted in the mountains wearing their bulky overcoats and boots of roe-deer hide. They liked to go horse riding, drink liquor and sing songs. In that vast and frigid land, their small population was like a pristine spring trickling deep in the mountains. So full of vitality, yet so solitary.

I once believed that those masses of forest workers, those loggers, were the real masters of the land, while the Oroqen in their animal-hide clothing were aliens from another galaxy.  Only later did I learn that long before the Han came to Daxing’an Mountains, the Oroqen had been living and multiplying on that frozen land.

Dubbed the “green treasure house,” the forest grew thick and animals abounded before it was exploited.  There were very few roads and no railroad then. Most paths in the wooded mountains were created by the nomadic hunting peoples, the Oroqen and the Evenki.

After large-scale exploitation of the forest began in the sixties, bevies of loggers stationed themselves in the forest and one road after another—for timber transport—appeared, along with railroad tracks.  Whizzing along those roads and tracks each day were trucks and trains laden with timber, bound for destinations beyond the mountains. The sound of trees being felled replaced bird calls, and chimney smoke replaced clouds.

In reality, the exploitation of nature is not wrong; when God left man to fend for himself in the mortal world, wasn’t it in order to force him to find the answer to survival within Nature? The problem is, God wanted us to seek a harmonious form of survival, not a rapacious, destructive one.

Ten years passed, twenty years passed, thirty years passed, and the sound of tree felling grew quieter, but it did not cease. Continuous exploitation and certain irresponsible, reckless actions made the virgin forest begin to show signs of aging and decline. Like an apparition, dust storms suddenly appeared at the dawn of the new century.  At last, the sparse tree coverage and decimated animal population aroused us: We have demanded too much of Nature!

And it is the nomadic hunting peoples living in the mountain forests who have suffered the most.  Specifically, I mean those we call the “last of the nomadic hunters” who herd reindeer for their livelihood, the Aoluguya Evenki.

Thanks to the media, we know all too well the story of the Aoluguya Evenki who, in 2003, left their homes in the mountains to be relocated. As throngs of people descended upon Genhe City, Inner Mongolia, to witness this grand moment in the civilizing process of mankind, my heart was filled with an inescapable sense of melancholy and gloom.

Just then, my friend Ai Zhen mailed me a newspaper clipping, an essay in memory of the fate of Liu Ba, the Evenki painter.  It told of how she had walked forth from the mountain forest with her dazzling artistic talent, and yet in the end, emotionally drained, quit her job, returned to the forest and, deeply troubled, found her resting place in a river.

“Chi Zi, write this story. Only you can do it!” wrote Ai Zhen next to the essay. She deeply understands my life and creative work, and I found her expectation and confidence in me incomparably moving.

I called her immediately to say that I had been paying attention to the plight of the Evenki and had collected some background materials, but I wanted to wait until the time was right before putting pen to paper.

In May last year I visited Australia for a month, spending one week in Darwin where the aboriginal population is concentrated. Darwin is a small city, lovely and quiet. Each day after breakfast I would take a book and sit in the shore-side park, enjoying the cool ocean breeze. In the park, the people I met most frequently met were aborigines with their petite, dry limbs, slightly protruding bellies, and swarthy skin. They gathered together on the grass, drank liquor and sang songs. The deep, low sound of their singing was like circling seagulls, first discernible, then lost amidst the din of the ocean.

The locals told me that the government implemented many preferential policies for the aborigines, and they received special allowances. But after coming to the city, they would squander their money in bars and casinos. They often returned to their tribes in mountain forests, living as before, unable to part with their old ways. On the streets of Darwin, if the aborigines I saw weren’t snoozing on benches under the scorching sun in a bus station, then they were seated on the ground in the commercial district, painting a tribal totem on a canvas in exchange for a paltry sum.  Even worse, some were leaning against store entrances with their hands outstretched, begging tourists for money.

I left Darwin for the Varuna Writers’ Center in Blue Mountains for ten days. Then I took the train back to Sydney, and just as I exited the arrival platform, right there in the spacious waiting hall I saw an aboriginal wife and husband feverishly having at one another. The woman was fat and short, the man tall and gaunt. She was crying and shouting, pouncing on him again and again as if she had gone mad, and using her very substantial arms to strike the man who reeked of alcohol.

They didn’t have any luggage; the woman’s hands were empty and the man had just a filthy plastic bag in his, filled with a lump of something mushy and nasty.  He didn’t dodge her blows or put up any resistance. He let the woman vent her anger. Very quickly a few white onlookers congregated around them, their faces with a look of regret. The train station police came over too, and they pulled the female aborigine away. But that man who had already been hit so hard that his lip was bleeding, curled up in front on a column, his head hanging dejectedly.

The onlookers slowly went on their way, but since I was awaiting the publisher who hadn’t arrived on time, I had a chance to continue observing.

The woman sat against a column opposite the man and sobbed, complaining loudly about something. She didn’t have a specific target for this outpouring; the expressions of the police and the passers-by were disinterested. But she was speaking so plaintively, so emotionally. Her outpouring seemed to fuse with the sound of the shrill train whistle.

At long last the man stood up, walked over to the woman, passed her the plastic bag, and told her to eat a bit. Only then did I understand that the stuff in that bag was food. She jumped up and shoved him, and told him to get lost. But the man was very patient, and over and over he approached her, very tenderly putting the bag in front of her.

This scene really shook me.  It was heart-wrenching. If only these aborigines lived among their own tribe, I thought, and hadn’t come to the neon-lit big city, perhaps they wouldn’t have experienced this unnecessary conflict.

Feeling a bit despondent, I left Australia and arrived in ancient Ireland. In 2000, I had visited there with the China Writer’s Delegation, but we had only stayed three days. My deepest impressions were the seaside James Joyce Museum and the famous play, Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, which we saw performed at the Queen’s Royal Theatre. It left me feeling that Ireland is a thoroughly refined country, and one that has an air of something profoundly cultural about it.

But this time around, I felt like I had arrived in an unfamiliar land. I was lodged on a very prosperous pub street in Dublin, and late each night when business reached its climax, a mass of people would spill out endlessly from the pubs onto the cobblestone street. They would shout, croon and smooch until the wee hours of the morning.  Virtually every night I was woken by the disturbance.

Standing at my third-floor window, watching the bawdy men and women under the dim streetlight, I kept having a flashback of the waiting hall at the Sydney train station when the aboriginal wife and husband were arguing.  It seemed that scene was so similar to the one right in front of my eyes—they are all probably confused and hurt people, their souls ground to bits by the gyrating wheels of modern civilization!

After I returned home to China, I wrote a short piece entitled Sunset of the Aborigines in which I expressed my innermost sentiments:

Faced with a world that is increasingly prosperous and alien, they, the former masters of this land, have become ‘people on the margins’, a group reduced to accepting handouts and spiritual first-aid! I profoundly understand the grief and loneliness deep in their hearts.  As I bent over to look at the sacred fish, snakes, lizards and great rivers painted on canvas by the aborigines, and saw how these skilled, oil-paint brushstrokes had lost their spirituality and been reduced to empty movements, just then I clearly saw a bright orange-red setting sun dripping blood, sinking into the vast and exuberant ocean. At the same time as we tear apart the life of a living being, we pretend we are philanthropists. How sad! With a clear conscience we watch them perform and display the art we once defiled; we dissect their hearts, and pronounce them full of dregs and insufficiently warm. This cold indifference to culture that pervades the globe—isn’t this the greatest wretchedness in our world?

I decided the time had come to go and see the state of the Aoluguya Evenki, now that they had relocated to the foot of the mountains. After resting up for two weeks in Harbin, with the help of the government of Bei’er City I arrived in Inner Mongolia in August. My first stop was Haila’er. I first made use of my relationship with author Han Shaogong to gain access to Wure’er, the Evenki author who had long been out of the public eye.  Having quietly departed from the literary scene, he was off in a remote corner doing his cultural history research, by himself and merry. I shared my thoughts with him, and he encouraged me to go and take a good look.

Over the next few days I drove to Manzhouli and Dalaihu Lake, and then I cut through the great plains of Lunbei’er and arrived at the destination of my journey, Genhe City.

My premonition was accurate. In the settlement on the outskirts of Genhe, those brand-new, white-walled, red-roofed houses were already largely vacated. Inside the deer corral of red bricks and wire netting, there wasn’t a deer to be seen; just a group of lazy mountain goats wandering about on weed-covered pathways.

According to the head of the City Commission, the failure of the deer corral and the inability of older Evenki to adapt to a new life resulted in group after group of hunters returning to the mountains. It’s said that once the reindeer were placed within the corral, they turned up their noses at the food given them, and after just a few days they took ill one by one. Agitated, and in spite of the advice of the county cadres, the hunters let the reindeer out and returned to the wooded mountains.

I followed in their footsteps and went to their base two days in a row, listening to them voice their difficulties and appeals, and listening to them sing. Virtually every Evenki is an exceptional singer and can break out in song on the spot. The sound of their singing is gloomy and bleak, like a plaintive stream. The old generation still prefers to live in their teepees from which they can see the stars at night. They say that living in the houses at the foot of the mountain, one can’t sleep soundly. But the younger generation yearns for the more convenient lifestyle outside the mountains. They told me they don’t want to follow reindeer all their lives in the secluded mountains.

The Evenki are not good at dissimulation. Joy and anger show clearly on their faces. Once when I posed a question on a taboo subject, one of the old women immediately put on a stern face and pointed to me: “Jianjian is a creep!” she said loudly.

But when I was engaged in friendly banter with the same old woman, she called me “Jianjian” in a friendly way, pulled out a pinch of chewing tobacco, and stuffed it in my mouth.  But when I jumped up coughing from the burning sensation of the tobacco, she chuckled in delight: “Jianjian is a nice person!”

During those two precious days, I drank reindeer milk tea brewed in the Evenki camp, observed the reindeer lie in a leisurely fashion on the forest floor after their search for food, and my mind floated like the pale blue threads of ascending smoke.  Due to the damage to the forest coverage, edible moss grows ever harder to find. So even when they return to the forested mountains, the Evenki have to relocate frequently. In the end, where will they and their reindeer go?

When I returned to Genhe, I heard that the mother of the painter Liu Ba had left the camp in the mountains and checked into a hospital. I rushed to see her. I didn’t dare ask her much about her daughter as she lay weakly in her hospital bed; I just wanted to quietly observe the mother who had raised such an excellent painter. But just when I was about to leave, she suddenly covered her eyes with her hands and said to me in a low voice: “Liu Ba loved to paint. The day she went to the riverside, she even took a bottle of water. She didn’t intend to die!”

True, Liu Ba may not have been thinking of death, but she did indeed disappear with the current, along with her beloved rainbow-colored oil paints. I suddenly had a flashback of that scene at the Sydney train station I’d witnessed when the aborigine kept putting food before his wife, over and over again.  The huge sense of humane tolerance and warmth displayed by members of these ethnic groups moved me incomparably, and as I walked out of the hospital, my eyes filled silently with tears.

I felt like I had at last found the seed for my novel. It was a weighty and ample seed. The vast stretch of forest I possessed as a child would be its seedbed, and I was confident that this seed would sprout and mature in it. [end excerpt]