Elephant Herd - (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan) by Guixing Zhang

About the Book

Elephant Herd is a vivid and captivating novel by the Taiwan-based Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) writer Zhang Guixing. It is an atmospheric account of a Malaysian Chinese young man's journey upriver deep into the Sarawak rainforest of northwest Borneo in search of his uncle, the leader of a Communist guerilla group.

Book Synopsis

Elephant Herd is a vivid and captivating novel by the Taiwan-based Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) writer Zhang Guixing, whose distinctive style evokes the jungles of Southeast Asia. It is an atmospheric account of a Malaysian Chinese young man's journey upriver deep into the Sarawak rainforest of northwest Borneo in search of his uncle, the leader of a Communist guerilla group. Venturing through the jungle, the protagonist--largely referred to only as "the boy"--enters a verdant and vertiginous world of wild creatures and political peril.

Jumping backward and forward in time, Elephant Herd intermingles fractured, fragmentary episodes with lush, immersive descriptions of the natural world. Its main narrative begins in the 1970s and proceeds to explore the repercussions of Sarawak's midcentury Communist insurgency. Focusing on the boy, his extended family, and his Indigenous classmate and travel companion, Zhang examines the complex relations among ethnic Chinese, local Malays, and Indigenous peoples. The novel teems with crocodiles, turtles, elephants, and countless other species of flora and fauna; as the boy's journey progresses, the human and nonhuman worlds begin to blur together and even camouflage themselves as each other. Elegantly translated by Carlos Rojas, Elephant Herd is a hypnotic and compelling work by a major Sinophone writer.

Review Quotes

Elephant Herd is a Malaysian Heart of Darkness beginning in 1973, with the protagonist, Shi Shicai, a six-year-old Malaysian Chinese living in Borneo's rainforest.-- "The Book Beat"

Here in a teeming Borneo rainforest full of pythons, pangolins, and monitor lizards, where crocodiles spit out rainbows and a legendary herd of elephants proves elusive, a boy searches for his uncle, leader of a once-fearsome communist brigade. Suspenseful, evocative, and full of secrets, Elephant Herd is simply extraordinary.--Gish Jen, author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon: Stories

Elephant Herd is the first time Zhang Guixing used a relatively long narrative featuring a fierce wild animal in a gorgeous, romantic, and cruel dramatic form, to imaginatively reconstruct the hidden side of the history of Chinese people in North Borneo. There is an old saying, "People rarely encounter live elephants, but if they find the bones of a dead elephant, they can use them to imagine how a live one would look." A similar point could be made about the relationship between Elephant Herd and the history of the Chinese people.--Ng Kim Chew, author of Slow Boat to China and Other Stories

Zhang Guixing's novels resemble an alien banner within the field of Chinese-language literature. A work like Elephant Herd is not only a rainforest romance featuring overlapping narratives of natural beauty, mysterious fate, human survival, and historical tragedy, but it also represents the author's own distinctive perspective on and approach to world literature. These great novels grant essential nourishment to humanity's strange square-character narratives, as well as to the pain and abundance of the stories that they tell.--Yan Lianke, author of Heart Sutra

About the Author

Zhang Guixing is the author of several acclaimed novels set in Borneo, including Monkey Cup, Siren Song, and Wild Boars Crossing the River. Columbia University Press previously published his My South Seas Sleeping Beauty: A Tale of Memory and Longing in English translation (2007). Zhang lives in Taiwan, where he previously worked as a high school English teacher.

Carlos Rojas is professor of Chinese cultural studies; gender, sexuality, and feminist studies; and arts of the moving image at Duke University. He is the translator of several books by Yan Lianke as well as works by Yu Hua, Jia Pingwa, and the Malaysian Chinese author Ng Kim Chew's Slow Boat to China and Other Stories (Columbia, 2016).