Actor Yu Entai plays the role of the "idiot", the second son of a Maichi chieftain in the play Settling Dust. (Photo provided to China Daily)
A Lai says, in the novel's Maichi family, only idiots can survive the bloody struggles for power. Moreover, the perspective of an idiot gives the narration an objective quality for readers to better observe the society and family.
For A Lai, Settling Dust preserves a sample of a Tibetan chieftain's life at the end of the feudal society in a fictional form.
Tibetan ethnic writer A Lai speaks at an international seminar on his works on Nov 17. (Photo provided to China Daily)
At the end of the 1980s, as a high school teacher, A Lai became bored teaching the same texts year after year and began to focus more on writing poems and fiction in his spare time.
When he turned 30 in 1989, however, he found his work unfulfilling, so he began investigating the local Tibetan history of his hometown in Barkam county in the part of Sichuan where his novel is set.
One day, in May 1994, all the legends, religious and historical stories that he had collected over the years started to boil over in his head. He wrote down the first sentence and just kept writing. In July of that year, during the FIFA World Cup in the United States, he stopped for a month, but returned to it as soon as the final game had ended. By December, he had completed the novel.
