The Precious Sword

The Precious Sword is a collection of novellas and short stories by the Tibetan writer Alai, published in 2009 by Writers Publishing House as part of the "Library of Republic Writers" series. The title novella is narrated in the first person: after graduating from the Nationalities Institute, "I" am assigned back to a small mountain-ringed town where Han and Tibetans live side by side, and at the long-distance bus station I run into my former classmate Han Yue. Han Yue was once the girlfriend of Liu Jinzang, a celebrated figure at the institute—a man of mixed Han-Tibetan blood from a well-off family, dashing in manner, who in the end failed to graduate because of trafficking in antiquities. Han Yue and "I" marry quietly in the small town, and the days pass as monotonously as the wind that blows through the hills on schedule. Then Liu Jinzang forces his way back into their lives, and a legendary "precious sword" entangles folk legend with worldly desire, loosening the human heart and the course of fate. Taking the legend of "the precious sword's appearance" as its thread, the novella weaves surreal touches into its realistic depiction of everyday life on the borderlands, writing of the clash between tradition and modernity and of ordinary people's endurance and struggle amid the changes of the times. The book also includes "The Old House," "The Wild Man," "The Silversmith in the Moonlight," "Eryi the Executioner," "Gela Grows Up," "Zhuoma Who Sold Herself Willingly," "Running Accounts," and other pieces, spanning old chieftain lore, village life, and small-town routine, and presenting a concentrated view of Alai's short fiction from his early to middle period in a poetic and restrained language.