Three layers of cotton quilts and a large pile of firewood lay inside a conical tent in the middle of a vast wood on the night of February 7. The outdoor temperature was expected to drop to minus 40 degrees Celsius by midnight. These materials were almost all that Suo Yuguo, a 28-year-old Evenki man, had prepared to survive a night in the tent.
Challenging himself to spend a freezing night in a traditional Evenki tent was an idea that had lingered in his mind since 2020, several months after he returned to live in his hometown in the forests of the Greater Hinggan Mountains in northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
He considered doing so a tribute to his mother, Liu Xia, an Evenki woman who has lived in the woods for most of her life. The normal temperature at night in winter there is often below minus 40 degrees Celsius. The conical tents of the Evenki, propped up by timber poles, were traditionally covered in reindeer hides or birch bark, but the makeshift one Suo built was covered with canvas. "My mother and other Evenki people living in the woods spent all their winter days in such tents before," he told Beijing Review. "It is a miracle they survived."
He finally acted on the idea on February 5. The tent he would stay in overnight was a five-minute walk from his "house" in the woods—a larger and much warmer tent he shares with his mother. After preparing the cotton quilts and firewood, he started a fire, fried up some sausage slices and eggs, ate them and then lay down. He set an alarm that would sound once every two hours in case he passed out from the bitter cold.
The challenge was finally ended by his mother. "You will freeze to death," Liu told him, dragging him to their home tent right before midnight. "We used to use animal furs to keep warm, and cotton quilts cannot keep this cold at bay."
Back into the woods
Suo made a short video of this experience and shared it on Douyin, China's TikTok. He has 35,000 followers on the platform—not a big number, but he has been known among some niche movie lovers since 2011 when a documentary titled Yuguo and His Mother was released. This was one part of a documentary trilogy on the Evenki people's life shot by an independent filmmaker in China.
Yuguo and His Mother introduced audiences to Evenki life. Before the release of the film, most had known very little about this ethnic group, the forest hunters and reindeer herders with a population of just over 30,000 in China.
Unlike his mother, Suo, born in 1994, had left home as a young boy and spent about 15 years outside Inner Mongolia. At the age of 8, thanks to Project Hope, a charity project helping children from poor families go to school, he was sent to a primary school in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province in east China. A much warmer place, and a completely different world, for the young boy.
He spent 10 years in Wuxi, then went to Beijing and then Chengdu, Sichuan Province in southwest China, where he engaged in cool things including starring in movies, performing stand-up comedy and rapping.
The major reason for his moving back into the woods in 2019 was his mother. Liu's health had continued to deteriorate due to aging and alcohol addiction. In 2003, the Evenki people living in the woods were resettled in the suburb of Genhe, a county-level city in Inner Mongolia, for the sake of wild animal protection. The new place is about three and a half hours by regular train from the people's old home in the forest. Suo and his mother were given a two-story house at the resettlement site.
Some Evenki people, though, couldn't get used to life outside the woods and became addicted to alcohol. Some chose to move back into the woods later with their reindeer. Not having any guns for hunting, they carried bows and arrows. They removed the arrowheads from their arrows to make them just sharp enough to fend off a wild animal instead of hurting or killing it.
Currently, more than 10 households live in the woods. They occasionally go into town to buy supplies and then return. They live far apart from one another in case their reindeer intermingle and get mixed up. There are no telecommunication signals in the woods and solar panels are the only source of power.
As a young man swinging back and forth between traditional life in the woods and modern life in the city, Suo took several months to get used to life in the woods after his return in 2019. What made him feel completely settled in was a new baby reindeer he spotted in spring 2020. The innocence and purity in the deer's eyes defeated all the noise in Suo's brain trying to lure him back into city life.
"Living in the woods is fully free of pressure," Suo told Beijing Review. "It is a freedom that people in cities can't really understand."
The reindeer king
Last year, a local reindeer competition in Genhe returned after a 10-year hiatus. Suo took his reindeer to participate—along with 20 other reindeer herders. It was a reindeer herding competition that tested both the condition of the deer and herder's ability to herd them, and that saw Suo and his reindeer take first place.
The award was 20,000 yuan ($3,000) in cash. He spent about 9,000 yuan ($1,340) on an iPhone 13 Pro, which he now uses to shoot and edit videos for Douyin.
In the videos, he shares everything that goes on in his and his mother's daily life. "All my followers love my mother," Suo said. "They love her plump cheeks and hail her for being natural and unique."
In one video, Suo and his mother made a special tobacco that Evenki people love. They roasted the tobacco leaves over a fire until the leaves were dry, then ground the leaves into a powder and mixed it with black tea and liquor. Liu showed how to enjoy this tobacco. "It is not for smoking," she said as she picked up a small portion and put it directly into her mouth. "You have to put it under your tongue to taste it. Oh, it is so good!"
She used to speak only the Evenki language. But more than 10 years ago, she started to learn standard Chinese and now speaks it fluently. One headache for Suo today is that his mother can't use a smartphone, even though he has tried to teach her many times. "But she loves to watch movies on the phone—with my help," Suo said.
Liu's favorite movie is Django Unchained. In her eyes, it is a love story rather than a story of freeing slaves, which is a heavy and complicated theme for her. Her favorite movie director is, of course, American director and screenwriter Quentin Tarantino.
Suo likes to watch more emotional movies, such as Heidi, which is about a young orphan girl living with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps. Suo, dubbed the reindeer king, now has over 60 reindeer. "Most of the young Evenki returned home and picked up reindeer herding," he said. "I think it is the cultural root that made them decide to do so; and our culture must be passed on."
Now, media and independent movie makers contact Suo from time to time, either for interviews or making films about him and his mother. Suo also plans to shoot a documentary about himself.
"I would showcase, from my perspective, the unique culture and lifestyle of the Evenki people," he said. "It would be different as it would be life through my eyes, an Evenki's perspective, not through those of an outsider."
Copyedited by G.P. Wilson
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