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Guixing Zhang : 傀儡花 (Elephant Herd)
Guixing Zhang is a Taiwanese writer. He writes in Chinese and is a Taiwanese national. However he is what is known as a Mahua, a Malayan Chinese, born in Borneo and his writing is generally set in Sarawak. This book is set in the late 1960s/early 1970s, with the main plot taking place in 1973. In his introduction translator Carlos Rojas describes the book as a really weird novel, written in a really weird style, and the translation captures that, but it could maybe be a bit weirder. Yes it is weird in the sense that it is set in a part of the world most of us will he unfamiliar with. It is both the environment that is weird to those of us used to an urban or (semi-)rural Western-style environment. This book is set in a rain forest whch means that strange fauna and flora are found everywhere, The book opens with a rich panorama of plants and animals from jackfruit trees to green rain frogs, a green snake and scorpions. Throughout the book we will see a host of plants and animals, including larger animals such as crocodiles (one character is eaten by one) and, as the title tells us, elephants.
Our hero is called Shi Shicai but generally called quite simply the boy. He is still very young when we first meet him. He is He is the youngest of five brothers, generally known as Brother One, Brother Two etc. He has a younger sister who, as the only girl, gets a name, Junyi.
We open with his grandmother dealing with her husband’s opium addiction. She threatens his suppliers. She physically attacks and locks him a shed – Shicai has to look after him. She falls ill so Shicai has to look after the pigs. Eventually he wanders off and his corpse in a coffin is brought back many years later by the Yangtze River Brigade. This a guerilla troop fighting for Chinese communism against the Malays and will play a key role as many of Shicai’s male relatives will fight and die for it. Grandma also disappears.
When he was six he went to Chinese class. He was the youngest in the class. He has three strange books but we can work out that they are by Marx, Lenin and Mao.
One key event of his childhood is going on a long jungle expedition. They get lost. They get ill. Shicai is so ill that his uncle has to carry him. The uncle seemingly drops him in a gully without realising it but he is rescued by a strange creature and replaced back on his uncle. We are not sure if this is a dream as no-one else seems to have noticed. It is clear that the strange creature was an elephant. We now learn that the expedition is hunting elephants. They find no live ones but do find a massive elephant graveyard and assume they were killed by the British. We do learn that there used to be. a large elephant herd in the forest and that a smaller herd still exists but is very good at concealing itself.
His next role is looking after his sister but that does not go well.
We now jump to 1973. Shicai, now nineteen and his friend Dezhong, a Chinese-speaking Iban are sailing up river. Shicai wants to find his uncle , Yu Jiatong, leader of the The North Kalimantan People’s Army and persuade him to surrender as others have done. Shicai’s four brothers have all been killed fighting for The North Kalimantan People’s Army.
Not surprisingly the two young men have a host of adventures from seeing a human corpse floating in the river covered by a variety of insects to getting mugged by alleged members of the North Kalimantan People’s Army. They spend some time chez Dezhong where Shicai gets seriously drunk, falls for Dezhong’s sister and is given a parang, a Malay knife which comes in very handy. He is imopressed by the human heads hanging on the longhouse including four Japanese and quite a few Englishmen’s heads.
With some difficulty they do find The North Kalimantan People’s Army and Yu Jiatong, guarded by crocodiles. There are only a few left (guerrillas, not crocodiles). Those few are not necessarily to be trusted as there is a bounty on Yu Jiatong’s head. Yu Jiatong, knows he is going to die soon and tells Shicai he has various requests before he dies, one of which is that they go and look for legendary elephant herd. They do this, though it takes them several months.
Even when we are following Shicai later in his story, we are jumping back and learning more about Shicai’s childhood, not least of which the famous elephant herd appeared the day he was born, causing a lot of damage. The men proposed following them but heavy rain washed away their tracks. It is claimed that the elephants knew that it was going to rain which is why they came them. (Yes, magic realism also puts in an appearance in this boook.)
So we have a book that is weird, uses magic realism, jumps back and forwards in time and place and is often confusing in that many of the characters are referred to only by title, i.e. father or Fourth Brother so we are not always clear who they are and as mentioned, he mixes Shicai’s later story with the early parts suddenly putting in an appearance in the middle of this later story . All this is, of course, deliberate as we are in the middle of a major rain forest where life is confusing. Apart from the complicated but definitely fascinating plot, we have a whole lot more going on. Virtually all of Shicai’s relatives die violent though colourful deaths. Large numbers of animals also die, some killed by humans, some killed by other animals and some we are not sure about. As mentioned I do not think I have read a novel with so many different animals and plants.
I must say I thoroughly enjoyed this book with its complexities, its weirdness, its magic realism and its incredible local colour. If the killing might put you off, it should not as it is treated as more or less the normal way of life in the rain forest. People kill animals and people, animals kill people and other animals. Life goes on. If you as a human are going to live there, particularly during a period of communist insurrection. you will encounter death as a normal part of life and take it in your stride.
Publishing history
First published in 2006 by麦田出版
First English translation in 2025 by Columbia University Press
Translated by Carlos Rojas