Environmental Nostalgia from Idyll to Disillusionment: Zhang Chengzhi's Inner Mongolia from Short Stories to Essays

Contemporary writer Zhang Chengzhi 張承志 (1948–), today one of the most prominent voices of the Muslim-Chinese community, identifies his experience as a zhiqing 知青 in Inner Mongolia (1968–1972) as one of the biggest turning points in his life. The grasslands became both his literary cradle and the starting point of an intimate questioning about his own identity and relationship to others. Inner Mongolia is an everlasting fil rouge in Zhang Chengzhi's writing, but with a changing perspective: in the idealistic short stories of the beginnings, in the 1970s and 1980s, Inner Mongolia is an idyllic land, a literary chronotope where life acquires a new meaning through the contact with the harsh climate and untouched environment. From the beginning of the 1990s and especially at the turning of the century, however, his texts bitterly denunciate the contamination and destruction of the grassland and the consequent scattering of his juvenile dreams, resulting in a desperate feeling of everlasting abandonment. Reading the evolution of Zhang Chengzhi's parallel representation of the grassland (jing 境) and of his sentiment of belonging (qing 情) to this land not only provides us with an insight of the literary and personal growth of a multifaceted author but is also a powerful representation of the most intimate consequences of the human damages on natural environment.