"The language is light yet charming, full of lively poetry, demonstrating the author's exceptional artistic talent." — Award speech for the 5th Mao Dun Literature Prize

"I believe that for A Lai, writing is a divine act, where everything depends on the occurrence of fate. When fate arrives, the story naturally emerges from someone's consciousness and spreads in the world." — Tie Ning

"The success of 'Dust Settles' is less about the narrative and more about the language, ultimately the success of poetic and heterogeneous expression." — Jidi Majia

"His storytelling is a game of signifiers, renaming everything in his world with extraordinary sensibility. That is when the dust settles." — Li Jingze

"With the determination, creativity, and tenacious spirit of a writer, A Lai can not only creatively absorb elements of Latin American magical realism but also successfully break free from the influence of Latin American literary masters, thus avoiding becoming a crawler at the feet of the masters." — Qiu Huadong

"A Lai's novels are filled with a 'simple and unadorned' spirit, which, to a certain extent, is 'anti-technical'. His words run freely in the fictional space. Simple, plain, elegant, and poetic language, natural without seeking splendor, especially 'clumsy', clumsy in a mature and simple way. Therefore, such 'clumsiness' inevitably carries a cunning, and from time to time, it will also cross the boundaries of narrative with 'Zen'." — Zhang Xue Xin

"It is not so much that A Lai is good at telling Tibetan life, but rather he is good at telling the split, wandering, unease, and hidden pain of people living in the crevices of heterogeneous cultures." — Zhang Li

★ Winner of the 5th Mao Dun Literature Prize, a literary classic with millions of copies sold.
★ A Lai, a heavyweight writer who has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the youngest winner in the history of the Mao Dun Literature Prize.
★ Told from the perspective of a fool young master with precognitive abilities, it narrates the collapse of the last local chieftain family on the snow-covered plateau.
★ Poetic and lively language | Inspired by Tibetan folklore | An allegory of the rise and fall of an era.

"Red Poppies" is a lively and cinematic twentieth-century epic that focuses on the extravagant and brutal reign of a clan of Tibetan warlords during the rise of Chinese Communism. The story is narrated by the chieftain's son, a self-professed "idiot," who reveals the scheming behind his family's struggles for power. When the chieftain agrees to grow opium poppies in exchange for modern weapons, he draws Tibet into the opium trade—and unwittingly plants the seeds for a downfall. "Red Poppies" is at once a political parable and a moving elegy to the lost kingdom of Tibet in all its cruelty, beauty, and romance.

A prominent Tibetan chieftain of the Old Maiqi, after drinking, had a fool son with his Han wife. This fool, whom everyone was sure was an idiot, was out of touch with real life but had precognitive abilities and behaviors beyond his time. When other chiefs were planting poppies, the fool young master suddenly suggested planting wheat instead. As a result, with an oversupply of opium and no one to buy it, a large number of hungry people flocked under Maiqi's banner, and the Maiqi family's territory and population reached an unprecedented scale. The fool young master also married a beautiful wife, Tana, and opened the first border trade market in the Kangba area. However, when the fool young master returned to the Maiqi chieftain's official village, a bloody internal family struggle for succession quietly began...

A Lai is a Tibetan writer and winner of the Mao Dun Prize for Literature. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in recent years. His main works include "Red Poppies: A Novel of Tibet," "The Epic of Ji Village," and "The Story of the Cloud."

Excerpts

My dear father asked me: "Tell me, what is love?"
"It's like having bubbles in your bones." It was a foolish thing to say, but my clever father understood. He smiled and said, "You fool, all bubbles eventually vanish."
"But they keep emerging."
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Bones distinguish people's ranks: below the chieftain are the headmen, who govern the common people, followed by the kobas (messengers), and then the household slaves; the synonym for bones is "origin," which is a brief term "ni," while bones are a proud term: "xiari."

The chieftain prefers more free people to become unfree household slaves. Slaves are like livestock, to be bought, sold, and driven at will. Moreover, it is quite simple to turn free people into slaves continuously by establishing rules targeting the common mistakes humans are prone to make.

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"Why didn't religion teach us love, but taught us hate?"
The moon had fully risen, traveling through the thin clouds. Somewhere in the official fortress, a woman was plucking a mouth harp. The sound of the mouth harp was desolate and bewildered, with nothing to lean on.
Who says I am a fool, I feel time, how can a fool feel time?
From a distance, the laughter of the girls, the creaking music from the gramophone, and the warm smell of stewed meat and boiled peas came rushing towards me. I sat down in the downstairs hall, not wanting to eat anything, nor to touch the girl sitting in my lap. I felt the air smelled of syphilis. I sat there, with a clean girl in my lap, listening to the boss tell some funny stories about the chieftains here. Even the girls under his command giggled foolishly at the amusing incidents that happened to them, but I couldn't see anything funny.