Red Poppies – Review

In 2000, Alai, the Tibetan author of Red Poppies, won China's most prestigious literary award – the Mao Dun Prize. Coincidentally, the Crossword Book Prize for the same year – India's equivalent award for books written in English – was won by Jamyang Norbu, a Tibetan born and brought up in exile, for his novel, The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes. After more than four decades of living either under occupation or in exile, it seemed Tibetans were finally beginning to find their voice – albeit in languages alien to them – and making the first tentative steps towards giving shape and meaning to the profound changes and experiences that they as a people had undergone since the takeover of their country by Communist China in 1959.

As an exile Tibetan myself, I approached Alai's novel with an equal mixture of expectation and trepidation. This, after all, was the first novel written by a Tibetan from inside Tibet, one that had captured the imagination of the Chinese public and was now being feted in the West. Despite the problems the book had initially faced in finding a publisher in China – purportedly for its political overtones – it had finally not only been officially sanctioned but also found favour among China's literary establishment. Clearly, a trenchant attack on the Chinese occupation of Tibet was not on the cards and I could understand Alai's dilemma; as a Tibetan living in China, how do you write a book about Tibet that doesn't ruffle official feathers and yet remains true to your own identity?

Red Poppies is set in the dying days of the chieftains who had ruled the borderlands between Central Tibet and China for centuries before they were forever swept away by advance of the People's Liberation Army in 1949. Ethnically and culturally Tibetan, these areas had existed largely independently of either Tibetan or Chinese overlordship, sometimes paying tribute to one, sometimes to the other and more often to neither. This is the region where Alai himself was born and although he was educated at a Chinese boarding school and writes only in Chinese, one assumes that he has strong familial and cultural links to the place and an insider's insight into the world of his ancestors.

The story unfolds through the eyes of the nameless, idiot second son of Chieftain Maichi and charts the rise and fall of his family as the patriarch and his two sons manipulate, fight and fornicate their way into becoming the most powerful and wealthy of the chieftains before predictably disappearing under the onslaught of the Red Army. The eponymous poppies and their deadly harvest of opium set the Maichi clan on their road to wealth and power, although the real instigator of the family's good fortunes turns out to be our narrator, the idiot.

The idiot is supposedly modelled after the popular Tibetan folk figure, Aku Tonpa, whose lewd and bawdy exploits belie his real identity as the emanation of the Buddha of Compassion and whose hilarious and often ribald adventures are lessons in the true nature of human existence. However, our narrator is neither an Aku Tonpa, who purposely wears his mask of foolishness in order to expose human weaknesses, nor a genuine idiot so suffused with childlike innocence that his mere presence transforms events around him. In fact, there is nothing remotely idiotic about the way he schemes, manoeuvres and ultimately outwits everyone around him. But despite his exploits, everyone continues to treat him like an idiot and he himself takes great pains to constantly remind us of his intellectually challenged status: "I was hopeless. A hopeless idiot." The idiot narrator is simply a literary device and not a very convincing one at that.

The world of the chieftains that Alai describes is a far cry from the meditative and peace-loving Shangri La of current Western imagination. On the contrary, it is a hellishly brutal place where despotic cruelty, casual violence, ready sex and the relentless pursuit of blood feuds are the order of the day. Heads are lopped off (there is no evidence that this Chinese custom was ever carried out in Tibetan areas), tongues cut out and ears and hands chopped off at the slightest of transgressions. Buddhism, rather than being an ameliorating influence, is a superstitious mélange of magic, incantations and meaningless rituals, its lamas controlled by the chieftain and routinely humiliated by him. This is a depiction of Old Tibet that could have rolled straight off the presses of the Communist Party's propaganda machine, which, to this day, happily accuses the Dalai Lama and his followers of rape, murder and child cannibalism.

Of course, we are no longer so naïve as to believe that Old Tibet was a Buddhist paradise. We know it was feudal, backward and deeply conservative, that power lay entrenched within the aristocracy and the religious establishment, which resisted all efforts at change or reform. But Alai's picture of life in the days before the Communists came is so relentlessly without any redeeming qualities, so over-the-top that it loses any sense of reality and becomes a grotesque cartoon creation. Is Alai simply a victim of his Chinese upbringing, faithfully spewing out the party line, unable to distinguish the truth from lies? I don't think so.

There are intimations that this exaggeration is deliberate and that Alai may have a deeper, more subtle agenda, which is to show that the downfall of the chieftains and their loss of humanity and spirituality stems from the time when they forgot that they had originally come from Tibet proper, and instead, turned to the east, to China, the source of their titles and material wealth. The chieftains "had always preferred the worldly empire of the east, not the land of western deities." But this choice would prove to be their undoing for eventually, only negative and corrupting things would come from this direction; opium, prostitution, syphilis and finally, destruction, in the form of the Red Army. The ambiguity of Alai's attitudes towards his native land can be heard, echoed in the idiot's final thoughts before life ebbs away from him, "Dear God, if our souls can really be reincarnated, please send me back to this place in my next life. I love this beautiful place."

But even if this were the case, it is too late to save the book, for long before the narrative lurches to its predestined conclusion, we no longer care about what happens to the idiot or to the Maichi clan or to the two-dimensional cartoon world of the chieftains.