Gao Xingjian - Soul Mountain

“As for scientific research, a research unit has artificially cultivated seven hectares of dove trees, and spice bush has also been successfully propagated by cloning. Wild medicinal herbs have also been cultivated — pearl on top, a bowl of water at the river-bank, one of King Wen’s writing brushes, seven leaves to one flower, and the dying and returning to life plant (none of which seem to have scientific names).

“There is also a wildlife unit which carries out investigations into the Wild Man, the golden monkey, the leopard, the white bear, the civet, the muntjac, the masked civet, the serow, the golden pheasant, the giant salamander, as well as yet unnamed animals such as the pig-bear, and the donkey-headed wolf which peasants have reported to be eating their piglets.

“After 1980, animals started returning, and last year a fight between a grey wolf and a golden monkey was discovered. The screams of a golden monkey were heard and a king golden monkey was seen blocking the path of a grey wolf… in March they caught a small golden monkey but it refused food and died. The sunbird, which eats the honey of azaleas and has a red body, an orchid tail and a small pointed beak, has also been sighted.

“Problematical issues: There are conflicting views on environmental protection. If the workers protest they don’t get bonuses. If the lumber supply decreases the higher authorities complain and the finance organization refuses to allocate funds. There are 4000 peasants in the reserve and it’s hard to manage them. There are twenty cadres and workers in the reserve still living in rough worksheds; they are extremely unhappy about it as they don’t have any facilities. The crux of the matter is inadequate funding, we have appealed many times…”

The cadres all start talking in earnest and it is as if I can appeal for funds on their behalf. I stop taking notes. I am neither one who leads writers nor one of those writers who leads other writers, who can speak with assurance, talk off-the-cuff about anything and then make a whole lot of empty promises such as: I’ll talk about the matter with this bureau chief and report on it to the leadership of relevant departments, I’ll make a lot of fuss and stir up public discussion, mobilize the whole population to come forth to protect the ecology which sustains our people! I can’t even manage to protect myself, so what can I say? I can only say that protecting the environment is important work and has implications for later generations of our children and grandchildren. The Yangtze has already become a brown river bringing down mud and silt, and yet a big dam is to be built on the Three Gorges! Of course I can’t say this and so the best thing is for me to change the topic to the Wild Man.

“The Wild Man is really creating a stir throughout the country…” I begin, and in an instant everyone is talking about the Wild Man.

“That’s right, the Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing has organized a number of investigations. The first was in 1967, then in 1977 and 1980, people were sent here especially. The one in 1977 was the biggest, with the most people, the research team alone numbered one hundred and ten and that’s not counting the cadres and workmen sent by our reserve. Most of the research team were army personnel and there was also a commanding officer…”

They start giving reports again.

What sort of language can I use so that I can chat freely with them? Should I ask what it’s like living here? They will certainly want to talk about the availability of commodities, prices and wages. But then my own financial resources are sorely deficient. However, this isn’t a venue for idle conversation and I can’t say, when the world is becoming increasingly incomprehensible, where man and mankind’s behaviour is so strange that humans don’t know how humans should behave, why are they looking for the Wild Man. So apart from the Wild Man what else is there to talk about?

They say that last year a primary school teacher saw the creature. It was in June or July, round about this time of the year, but he didn’t dare publicize it. He just mentioned it to a close friend and told him to keep it to himself. That’s right, not so long ago someone published an article called “Tragic History of the Wild Man of Shennongjia” in the Dongting Magazine of Hunan Province. Someone got hold of it, circulated it and everyone read it. The search for the Wild Man started here and has spread to the provinces of Hunan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Fujian, Sichuan, Guizhou, Anhui… It’s been reported everywhere (except Shanghai!). In Guangxi they actually captured a small Wild Man, it’s called a Mountain Devil there. The peasants thought it was unlucky and set it free (unfortunately). Also there have been reports of Wild Man flesh being eaten. It’s all right to talk about it. When the research team came this was investigated and confirmed and books have been published on it. It was in 1972 that Zhang Renguan, Wang Liangcan and about twenty others who were mostly workers from our reserve, ate the foot and calf of a Wild Man in the dining hall of Sunshine Bay Farm! The foot was about forty centimetres long, the big toe five centimetres in circumference and ten centimetres long. The documentation they put together has all been stamped. The calf was twenty centimetres in circumference and weighed fifteen kilograms and they all had a big bowl of it. The Wild Man was killed by a peasant in Panshui with a rifle fitted with a silencer and he sold a leg to the Sunshine Bay Farm dining hall. Also, in 1975, on the mountain road from Qiaoshang Commune to Yusai Number One Work Brigade, Zeng Xianguo was struck on the face by a two-metre-high Wild Man with red hair. He blacked out for some time and when he regained consciousness ran home but couldn’t talk for three or four days afterwards. This is all from a comparative anatomy statistical analysis carried out on a documentation of his oral account. Didn’t Zhao Kuidian see a Wild Man eating coriaria fruit when he was on the road back to his home village? What year was that? 1977 or 1978? It was a few days before the investigation team came for the second time from the Academy of Social Sciences. Of course, you can believe or not believe all this, the people of the investigation team are also divided about it. But if you listen to the peasants in the mountains talking about them it is quite sordid. The Wild Man chases women, looks for young girls to play with and for sex, some even say that the Wild Men can talk and makes different sounds when happy and sad.

“Are there any here who have seen one with his own eyes?” I ask.

They all laugh and stare at me but I can’t tell if it means they’ve seen one or not.

Afterwards, I go with a cadre guide into the cleared central section of the reserve. In 1971 an army truck convoy came and logged the main peak for two years for national defence material, or so they said, and left it denuded. At an altitude of only 2,900 metres I can see an expanse of beautiful low sub-alpine marshland, young green grassy waves undulating endlessly in the mist and rain, dotted with tangled clumps of Cold Arrow Bamboo. I stand for a long time in the icy wind, thinking to myself that this stretch of natural wilderness is probably one of the last bits of primitive ecology.

Zhuangzi, who lived more than two thousand years ago, said that useful timber dies prematurely by the axe and only useless timber enjoys good fortune. People today are greedier than the ancients and this casts doubt on Thomas Huxley’s theory of evolution.

In a mountain homestead, I come across a bear cub in the shed. It has a rope collar around its neck and looks like a little brown dog as it clambers up and down a pile of wood. It keeps growling and still doesn’t know to bite to defend itself. The owner says he picked it up in the mountains and there is no point asking if he had killed the mother, but the little dog-like bear is very cute. Seeing how much I like it, he says for twenty yuan , I can take it with me. I don’t have plans to learn a circus act and if I take it with me how can I go on wandering? It’s best for me to leave the cub where it is.