Elephant Herd

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.

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 Ping, and the Malaysian Chinese author Ng Kim Chew’s Slow Boat to China and Other Stories (Columbia, 2016).