“The Trader Fox” by Shen Shixi book review

The book I read for this assignment is The Trader Fox by Chinese author Shen Shixi. Shixi is a recognized Chinese author in the area of children’s literature, he is best known and credited for his animal novels but only some of them have been translated to English. Among those are The Trader Fox, The Glorious Dream of the Mother Wolf, Scarface the mother Jackal, The Seventh Hunting Dog and When Mu meets Min. I chose the first one because it was the only one that I found for sale. Shixi is referred to as the king of animal science fiction and has been the winner of multiple awards in that field.

The Trader Fox is a compilation of seven different short stories, each of them having a taste and parts of one of his major stories. All these stories have animals and their portrayal in common. They are described and presented almost as humans; with feelings, understanding, and by showing deep connections with humans. The way in which the animals behave and are portrayed goes beyond what I saw in the other books we read. In this case, the human characteristics that they get are very real and in my opinion the reader gets experiences them as if they were another human. The interactions between human characters and animals are just like one between two humans. The animals in the stories are different but with some exceptions, the second and third stories are stories of foxes. Others include a tiger, a horse, a doe, and an elephant. The seven stories are mostly of equal lengths except for “The guilty horse”, which is almost twice as long but even so, it was my favorite. The titles of the seven stories were “Dandelion the Tigress Cub,” “Tricked by Foxes, Not Once but Twice,” “The Trader Fox,” “The Guilty Horse,” “Avalanche,” “Caught in an Elephant Trap,” and” Just a Stray.” The depiction and portrayal of animals in this delicate and specific way reminded me of Anthropomorphism as the inclusion of animals in children’s literature, except in this case the traits are more humanized. Comparing it to the novels we read, Winnie the Poohand The Birchbark House,this Chinese novel ends up being more sad and cruel and the animals in the stories either suffer or die. They have a good life, interact and are loved by humans but for some reason don’t end up the same way, which was the case with the American stories. I think that in these stories, each animal that Shixi chose to represent is important and has a significance in the Chinese culture. For example, the role of horses is explained in the book as “people relied on horses to travel, haul carts and transport goods. Carts were pulled by horses, soldiers rode on them, goods were transported by them, and they still are an important, multi-directional piece in Chinese chess” (p. 101).

Going back to the very vivid depiction of animals, I can think of two clear examples in which this is presented. First one happens in “Tricked by Foxes, not once but twice”. In this case, a fox was able to trick the main characters by pretending he was injured. Every time the main character tried to approach to help, the fox was fine again. It was all a plan to keep the human away from a den so that a vixen could move some cubs to a safer place. The two animals were working together to protect themselves from any danger, which they thought that the main character represented. In the very last attempt to trick the guy, he didn’t approach anymore because he had realized. However, that was the time when the fox was actually injured and “suddenly fell down, never to rise again. The fox had lost too much blood. He was dead.” (Shixi, 58). In the end, the vixen and the cubs were safe, but the fox died, which is what I mentioned early about the book dealing with the deaths of animals. This also leaves us a message of how animals will protect each other at any costs, which sometimes applies for humans as well, especially when I think of families. Also, it seems interesting that the one time that the main character didn’t help, was the determining one and the fox died, which leads me to think that we always need to be aware and no matter how fake or repeatedly something looks, there may be something laying underneath.

The second example is in “The guilty horse” when White Coral, the horse, is completely depressed after the death of Aija, her master. She refuses to eat, which makes her weak and unable to perform her tasks. Even if it was an accident, she feels guilty. “Her face was haggard and since she was starving herself, her ribs were clarly visible” (Shixi, 103); reading these descriptions reminds me of symptoms and changes that humans go through when they are depressed, which is humanizing the horse. However, it is indeed possible that animals feel this way. I have never experienced it but have heard of pets, specifically dogs, that get depressed when their owner or someone important dies. My host family had two dogs and one of them died recently, the dog still in the house was sad and lost a lot of weight. So, even if we feel and connect these symptoms with humans, they are still possible for animals as well.

One last example that I would like to talk about presented in “The trader fox”. The main character tries to take advantage of a fox by keeping her baby fox locked in a cage at her house, which he found outside of his house. The older fox kept coming back every night to rescue her son but couldn’t because of the cage. Every time she would leave a pheasant and the narrator would take it. He realized the pattern of the fox leaving pheasants with the purpose of trading them for her son so he took advantage of it and wanted more every time, because he knew that the fox wouldn’t give up on her son. He said, “that was the first time I’d seen an animal initiate mutual trade with humans, and it intrigued me” (Shixi, 61). He was impressed but felt smarter than the fox and wanted to set his own terms, wanting more pheasants. He was already imagining how much he could get by tricking the fox, “of course it would be cruel to do something like that… I would flout the principle of two-way trade which is to be fair, just, and favorable to all. But these rules only applied to humans, and it seemed unnecessarily picky to apply these same rules to animals” (Shixi, 63-64), which shows exactly how he underestimated the fox and was taking advantage of the situation. Eventually, the fox changed his strategy and after a couple of attempts, he found a way to rescue her son by plucking the feathers of the boy’s favorite hens. That is when the man realized that “there was something almost human about the vixen” (p.64) and that he had no choice but to release the little fox. He learned the lesson that business is business and even if it is with animals, “we should still play by the rules” (Shixi, 65).

The age range that I found for this book said that the targeted audience was between 7 and 17 years old. In my opinion, after reading the book, some ideas and vocabulary of the book could have been complex for the younger side, and more convenient and appropriate for the older side, not to mention that some of the stories were longer than others, specifically “The Guilty Horse” which is 72 pages long. I enjoyed reading this book and I think that every story had a good and interesting message that we could use in our lives and in this specific case they relate a lot to animals. I only focused on three but there are more to be found and analyzed.

works cited:

Shixi, Shen. The Trader Fox. Translated by Ziyun Fang, Integrator International Education and Publishing Ltd., 2018.