Red Poppies (review)

Abstract

Written by one of the most exciting Chinese writers to appear in English since 1988—when Zhang Xianliang's Half of Man Is Woman made it clear that something new was happening in the Middle Kingdom—Alai's Red Poppies arrives as an unforgiving portrait of life in outer Tibet that no amount of feel-good, Free Tibet dharma liberalism will ameliorate. A fat novel in tour de force translation by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chun Lin, it instructively knocks our Western infatuation with everything Tibetan. The author, an ethnic Tibetan born in western Sichuan Province—formerly part of Greater Tibet, now a grungy intercultural drift zone in Han China—takes us back to the heyday of feudal eastern Tibet in the 1930s. Clan chieftains operate under the nominal suzerainty of distant Beijing and the equally remote Inner Tibetan religio-cultural suzerainty of Lhasa. This is not the Tibet of sympathetic Hollywood film stars. Instead, Alai impastos a profoundly impressionistic portrait in which Buddhism and Bon shamanism contend in displays of one-upmanship and in which serfdom, slavery, casual brutality, ritualized murder, mate stealing, and the worst of sexual exploitation flourish under tribal patriarchies—something between the old Scottish highlands and honor-obsessed Sicily. Nevertheless, folks in the novel generally make it through, aided mainly by their raunchy peasant capacity for joy and raising supreme hell under the guise of religious, astrological, and agricultural revels. As lousy as their social situation is, Alai makes these Tibetan hillbillies easy to love.