Thinking with the Elephant: Lin Wang and Teenage Soldiers in a Biographical Trilogy

This essay discusses Ru-Qing Lee’s The Last Veteran Elephant: Trilogy of Private Lin Wang (Zuihou de Zhanxiàng—Dabing Lín Wang Sanbuqu [The Last Veteran Elephant: Trilogy of Private Lin Wang], Pace Books, New Taipei City, 2022) as an animal biography along with the insights gained from the existing scholarship in this field. Taking my cue from Éric Baratay’s view of animal biography as well as picturebook research, I’ll first elucidate the historical significance of the Trilogy in reframing Lin Wang the elephant as a soldier, acknowledging the connections between the elephant and teenage soldiers. I will then investigate how the Trilogy re-counts Lin Wang and teenage soldiers, who have been involved in the historical narrative but remain relatively obscure. The essay demonstrates that the Trilogy extends Baratay’s idea of biographizing animals, deploying the picturebook as an artistic medium through which to experiment with its modes to address the experience of the uncounted, including Lin Wang’s experiences, elephant-human relationships, and the forgotten soldiers. It argues that the Trilogy is a new instance of picturebook, suggesting a new way of participating in animal-human literary equality, re-staging a new mode of perception as modelled by Lin Wang, veteran soldiers, zoo animals, and histories from below.