The North American debut of one of China’s most celebrated authors, “Chi Zijian’s beautifully realised novel offers a detailed portrait of a way of life hard to imagine today” (The Independent).
At the end of the twentieth century, an intergenerational Indigenous family of the Evenki tribe living deep in the forested mountains of China’s eastern edge encounters existential change. An elder spins the daily tales of community drama against the fray of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian nation-building and resource extraction. As our narrator’s world is forced to the margins of empire and industrialization, her abiding and tender attention to her people’s core relationships—human, animal, spiritual, environmental—becomes itself an act of resistance.
In Bruce Humes’s inspired translation, acclaimed author Chi Zijian gives us an unabashedly intimate account of how an entire culture can be pushed to the vanishing point over the course of one lifetime. Through distinctive pace and slowness, the book renders an Evenki experience of interdependence and reciprocity with the natural world, where wilderness is infused with domestic life and spiritual intervention. From reindeer herding and ice fishing, to Shamanic songs and rites, to tallies of marriages, births, and deaths, this nomadic clan contends with preserving traditions and legacy alongside the threat of progress and displacement.
This essential addition to the Seedbank series shows real lives that don’t conform to the march of modernization, speaking profoundly to real endangerment of Indigenous communities and knowledge across the world. “When I look again at the fawn that is nearer and nearer to us, it feels as if the pale-white crescent has fallen to the ground,” our narrator concludes. “I’m crying, because I can no longer distinguish between heaven and earth.”
This epic, internationally recognized work humbly challenges us to see that all is shared and interconnected—joy and loss, creatures and peoples, the material and the magical.
In this sweeping epic, full of love and loss, a woman from one of the last remote reindeer-herding tribes of northeastern China tells the story of her family and the last century of her country’s history.
“A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them.”
At dawn, an elder sits among the birch trees while the rest of her tribe descend the mountain to permanently inhabit the town at its base. A member of the nomadic Evenki tribe, who traverse the forested mountains of China’s eastern edge with herds of reindeer, she tells the tale of her life to the rain and fire, a life lived in close communion with nature at its most beautiful and cruel. Over the course of the twentieth century, her world is pushed to the margins of empire and industrialization. But holding steadfast against the fray of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian nation-building and resource extraction is the elder’s abiding and tender attention to her people’s core relationships—human, animal, spiritual, environmental—which in itself becomes an act of resistance.
An illuminating translation by Bruce Humes—with an introduction by Diane Wilson, author of The Seed Keeper—The Last Quarter of the Moon renders an Evenki experience of interdependence and reciprocity with the natural world. Wilderness is infused with domestic life and spiritual intervention: reindeer herding and ice fishing, Shamanic songs and rites, and tallies of marriages, births, and deaths. Contending with the preservation of tradition and legacy alongside the threat of progress and displacement, acclaimed author Chi Zijian depicts lives that resist the march of modernization, speaking profoundly to the real endangerment of Indigenous communities and knowledge across the world.
Winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize, China’s most prestigious literary award, The Last Quarter of the Moon asserts that all is shared and interconnected, humbly challenging us to bear witness to both loss and wonder.
