ABSTRACT
Jia Pingwa started writing Remembering Wolves as soon as he finished Old Gao Village in June 1998, for he was very keen to experiment with how the imagery the author had in his mind could be made to interplay with narrative plots. He had felt that his previous efforts in this respect had not fully achieved the desired results but he wanted to do it differently this time. In the book’s postscript Jia Pingwa specifically argues that because life itself can be both obscure and clear, the more concrete and actually lifelike the narrative is, the more abstract and imagery-rich the novel becomes (271). He continues to remark that Remembering Wolves is completely different from his previous writings and it may not be the most interesting to some (271-2). This explains why Remembering Wolves is not very long and it has a simple plot. Gao Ziming , a journalist and environmentalist, returns from the provincial capital Xijing to Shangzhou in order to document the remaining fifteen wolves in the area. He meets up with Fu Shan , the former principal hunter of Shangzhou’s regional hunting troop. Fu Shan turns out to be his maternal uncle whom he has never met before. Accompanied by another hunter, nicknamed Broken Head (Lantou ), as well as a hunting dog and a cat, the three set out as a team to undertake the mission that has been endorsed by the authorities of documenting the lives of the wolves. They hike through the villages and the mountains in search of the wolves but in the process they wipe out the wolves as circumstances demand, contrary to their original goal. However, as the journalist returns to the city to report that the wolves are dying out, he is informed that the people of his native village, including his uncle, are becoming wolves and that the area has already been segregated to prevent free movement of people inside and outside.
