Both Red Poppies and Hollow Mountain are stories about Tibet. They have taken on an extra level of authenticity because the author is ethic Tibetan. But Alai downplays it, explaining that the label "puts me down". He insists that what he wrote applies not only to the Tibetan area, but also to all of rural China.
"Our urban development comes at the cost of the rural area. An increasing burden is imposed on the countryside, something it has to bear. Things have turned for the better in the past 30 years, but fundamentally farmers' living conditions are less than ideal and their fate is one of tragedy."
Alai says he is not a "brave man" and adds that he should not pretend to be one. "I take history and literature very seriously," he reveals. "I write about the dark side not because I want to expose it, but because it is the truth. The value of charting the sad course of history is to make people think. If something like that happens again, people will be vigilant. If we all forget, in a generation or two nobody will know anything about it, and that'll be our tragedy, just like building on a fault-line even though you know it's there."
As a Sichuan writer of Tibetan ethnicity, Alai has an acute awareness of two of the biggest events of 2008. The earthquake made him realize "the randomness and universality of crisis". The Lhasa riot, on the other hand, exposed what he calls "the beautiful misunderstanding rampant among the rest of the world, including China". This "beautiful" misunderstanding, he says, has sown the seeds of mistrust among people of different ethnicities.
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