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The Right Bank of the Argun River

 “I’m an Ewenki woman. My husband was the last headman of our tribe.”

The Right Bank of the Argun River begins with a 90-year-old woman of the ethnic Ewenki group, telling the story of her life and her people in Northeast China’s mountain forests. The Ewenki, one of the smallest among China's 56 ethnic groups, engage in fishing, hunting, and used to live on reindeer farming. Reindeer feed on moss; so from time to time, the nomadic Ewenki people follow their reindeer in their search for moss deep in the forests.

Chi Zijian, author of the book, was born in 1964 in Heilongjiang Province and lives there today. When a child she noticed some mysterious images carved on the tree trunks. Those images are worshiped as mountain gods by ethnic-minority mountain dwellers such as the Ewenki. But with the commercial development of today’s forests and logging, mossy ground is getting more difficult to find. In the novel, there is a vote among the Ewenki to answer the question: Are we going to leave the forest, give up our nomadic lifestyle and bring our reindeer to a settled village?

The book won the 2008 Mao Dun Award, the highest literary prize sponsored by the Chinese Writers Association. According to the award committee, the book “...tells, in a poetic way, the saga of the persistence and evolvement of a minority culture using frank dialogue between the author and the Ewenki people.”

The Ewenki ethnic minority is considered the last minority group living under primitive conditions in China. They once lived on the right bank of the Argun River, which seperates China and Russia.

The Right Bank of the Argun River （《额尔古纳河右岸》）

By Chi Zijian（迟子建）

Beijing Publishing House （北京出版社）November 2008, 29 yuan