Forest fantasy

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."