At the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1968, author-illustrator Song Nan Zhang’s brother Yi Nan was sent to the Mongolian border to live in a yurt with a nomadic family. Cowboy on the Steppes, translated from Yi Nan’s diary, tells how, within a short span of eight months, he adapted to this strange environment, overcame language barriers, mastered horse riding, became expert at battling the wolves who menaced their herds, and came to feel “part of this land, this sky, and this people.” Ten full-page and two double-spread paintings, done in watercolour and pencil drawings, illustrate important episodes in his transformation from a Beijing city boy into a cowboy of the steppes.

But Yi Nan reveals very little of his emotions. (In this respect, Cowboy on the Steppes stands in stark contrast to Song Nan Zhang’s outpouring of anger and vivid description of political persecution in his own award-winning autobiography, A Little Tiger in the Chinese Night, written afterward in Canada.) Though Yi Nan describes the train’s bellow as heart-wrenching, he never explains why his parents were forbidden to see him off. And only twice does he openly express his homesickness: when he was lost and half-frozen in a sudden snowstorm, and when a lost calf is found by its mother. Whatever the reason – whether more personal passages were not selected for publication, whether he was stoic or fearful of spying and criticism – the Chinese saying “All is in the unsaid” is significant here. The unrevealed tells as much as the revealed. The subdued colours of the paintings, predominantly greyish blue, match this mood.

Because of this silence, this book needs to be read in conjunction with A Little Tiger in the Chinese Night to set it in its proper context. The brief editor’s note at the end of the book is not enough for that purpose.For its glimpses into Mongolian culture, the book could be valuable for junior high multicultural studies, except that these students are not likely to be attracted to the picture book format.