Forest fantasy

Chen Yingsong has spent 20 years writing about Shennongjia, a forested area in the northwest of Central China's Hubei province, since he started working there in 2000. The place has become the love of his life over the decades.

Last year, the 64-year-old's latest love letter to the woods, a novel that takes inspiration from Shennongjia, Senlin Chenmo (The Forest Spoke Not a Word), was published by Chinese fiction periodicals.

Jia Pingwa, who won the Prix Femina Etranger Prize in 1997 for the novel Abandoned City and China's top literary award, the Mao Dun Literature Prize, in 2008 for the novel Shaanxi Opera, praised it as the best novel about forests he's ever read.

"With rich content, magnificent imagination and idiosyncratic expression, the novel made me feel like I was in the forests. I could smell the steamy air in the dark shade. I could hear the movements of the birds and beasts. And my hands and face ached as I tried to walk through the brush, vines and weeds," Jia was quoted by the Shanghai-based news network, The Paper, as saying.

Chen's book is slated for publication as a novel in mid-June.

He sets the 416-page story in a mountain called Gulu, which was inspired by Shennongjia, which legend claims has been home to red-haired savages. So, it's natural for the protagonist to appear as such.

Chen named the character Jue, a Chinese word that literally means big ape. There are folk stories about these creatures abducting people in ancient times.

Nobody in Gulu Mountain knew for sure who Jue's father was. Rumors said his dad was a red-haired savage, since his mother suddenly disappeared on the mountain one day and later returned pregnant. She gave birth to a baby covered in red hair, whose face resembled a monkey's.

"Jue is a hybrid living in the ambiguous realm between human and animal," Chen says.

"He's an appropriate character for conveying my thoughts about forests through his eyes. He's also suited to the woods, where he can move much more freely than normal people."

Jue's parents died, and his elder brother worked in a city far from the mountains. So, he lived with his grandparents and uncle.

He didn't speak and spent nights in an old epaulette tree in front of their house. The tree species is unique to central China and is threatened by habitat loss.

"Jue is a great symbol who gives me enough space to describe the forests and express ideas. But the Chinese character jue might be strange to many readers. So, they need to check the dictionary to engage with the story," he says.

"Although Jue couldn't speak (at first), he was psychic. Perhaps what he saw could represent the silent history of the forest objectively. Forests can't speak but are history themselves."

He writes in the novel's postscript: "By creating the fictional forest and people living there, I try to imagine the history and reality of forests."

Chen wrote the novel between January 2016 and February 2019. But he has been immersed in experiencing and writing about forests for two decades.

His other stories are set in other old-growth forests like those in Yunnan province, where he spent two months doing research for a book.

He writes in the postscript of Senlin Chenmo: "In Yunnan's forests, I was too excited to sleep. I was just like a kid who'd returned home after wandering for many years. I felt both my mental and physical wounds had healed there. So, I put a lot of my thoughts about that experience into this novel, especially about people's separation from nature."

He says: "It's impossible for most people to return to their homeland. But I'm very lucky."

His home is near the woods.

Chen "naturally" adopted the style of magical realism to narrate the story and let the forest play an important role by including nearly 100 animals and plants, such as leopards, monkeys, birds, mushrooms and herbs that can be used to treat snake bites and diseases. He also delves into the phenology, geography, climate and imagination.

"It definitely transcends ordinary people's knowledge and conceptions of forests," he writes in the postscript.

"And the forest's descriptions account for at least one-sixth of the total length."

He says that's because of the richness of resources found in wild woods.

"I want to include as many plants and animals as possible," he says.

He likens old-growth forests to gods on Earth and to real utopias.

"The moment humans walked out of the forests, the woods naturally became a source of nostalgia for people."