Elephant Herd (An Excerpt)

AbstractTaken from the beginning of Zhang Guixing’s 1998 novel Elephant Herd (Qunxiang), this excerpt opens with a series of flashbacks to incidents that occurred when the narrator was six, seven, eight, and fourteen years old, respectively, focusing on the narrator’s relationship with various members of his extended family and family acquaintances. The novel’s main plotline (which is not introduced in this short excerpt) describes a trip that the twenty-year-old protagonist, Shi Shicai, takes up Sarawak’s Rajang River with his former high-school classmate Zhu Dezhong in search of Shicai’s uncle, Yu Jiatong, who is the leader of an underground brigade of communist guerillas.