ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges the conventional interpretations of Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (Lang tuteng) as an important ecocritical text that illuminates a cultural harmony between Han Chinese urban students and rural Inner Mongolian herders during the Cultural Revolution. Though acknowledging the environmental themes of Wolf Totem, this chapter redefines the novel as travel writing, an interpretive strategy that enables readers to see Jiang Rong’s rhetorical moves and isolates three asymmetrical relationships—hybridity, cultural reciprocity, and gender. Examining Wolf Totem as travel writing also places this text within the larger history of travel writing set in northern China and Mongolia, a discourse that has contributed tenacious and possibly dangerous tropes about Han Chinese and Mongolians over the past 160 years.
