Novel
Elephant Herd
群象
Chang Kuei-hsing · 1998
Synopsis
The herd of elephants: in the forest of Sarawak, in Borneo, at the time of the communist insurgency, the young Shi Shicai, who has lost his grandparents, sets out to find his uncle, leader of a group of guerrillas hidden in the jungle. His quest takes him through a world of forests, elephants and crocodiles, fractured by politics, ecology and relations between peoples; the narrative blends the past with the present and reality with the marvellous.
Context
The novel appeared in 1998. Its presentation recalls that the elephants of Borneo, numerous a century earlier, were decimated by hunting. It takes as its background the communist insurgency in Sarawak, which lasted from the sixties to 1990, and the ambiguous place of the Chinese community among the peoples of the island. Carlos Rojas translated it into English for Columbia University Press in 2025, and studies place it within the Cold War in Borneo.
Who it is for
A novel in Chinese, mixing reality and the marvellous; it has been available in English since 2025, but not in French.
Prizes and reception
Read by academic critics as an ecological and political fable; translated into English in 2025 by Columbia University Press.
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