Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke – review

The first paper for my college English course, assigned by an American lawyer teaching in Beijing, was on whether China would see an Aids epidemic in the near future. It was 1992, and more than half of my classmates believed that a disease associated with irresponsible or corrupted lifestyles would not claim China. Yet in less than five years, an Aids epidemic broke out in Henan province (and in many other provinces), a result of a blood-selling enterprise established by government officials and business people, where the practice of reusing needles was common. Tens of thousands of peasants were infected; sometimes an entire village was wiped out.

Dream of Ding Village, a novel by Yan Lianke, one of the most prolific and bravest authors to come from China (periodically banned by the government), brings us a disturbing chronicle of one village's deterioration caused by "the spreading fever" (as Aids was called by the local peasants). The novel centres on three generations of a family: the grandfather and patriarch, a revered elder and self-appointed professor of the village school, who was the first to convince his village people to abandon farming and to sell blood for a living; the elder son, a "bloodhead"-turned-government official/businessman, who feels no remorse toward the dying and the dead; the younger son, who helped his brother's business, yet unwisely sold blood and so was infected; and the bloodhead's young son, poisoned by vengeful villagers.

Surrounding the family are a full cast of characters. Many of them, having caught the disease either by selling blood or being the wives or the husbands of blood-sellers; and the lucky ones, those who have remained unharmed, but now face other dilemmas, which include how to afford a coffin for a family member, or how to ensure that their unmarried children, before or after their deaths, can be matched off and buried with another body of marriageable age so they will not have to remain single and lonely in the afterworld.

If one thinks the portrayla of the epidemic, with the accumulating bodies waiting to be buried, is bleak enough, one soon realises that death in this novel offers relief and solace: the real hell is for those who, infected or uninfected, still breathe and are therefore still able to steal, to bully, to scheme and to murder.

Yan's narrative, satirically aloof at times, reminds the reader of Camus or Kafka, and many of the characters might live in one of their tales. When the epidemic eventually terminates the blood-collecting business, the bloodhead takes up making and selling coffins, and later, when the coffin business dwindles, he becomes a matchmaker for the dead; equally unscrupulous are those who are infected – a man trying to have sex with his wife so that she cannot marry again after his death; a young woman lying to her future in-laws so that she can be married off before the symptoms are apparent. Worse even, when the infected villagers are quarantined in the village school, they spy on and steal from one another; they fight not only for a morsel of food but also for the school furniture to be remade into coffins. And in a most chillingly absurd yet entirely realistic scene, two dying men, after stealing the official village seal, assign themselves as village officials, whom everyone willingly obeys. The two, when death comes calling, scheme to be buried with the seal so that they will continue to exert power in the afterlife.

Anyone who is remotely familiar with recent Chinese history will see an allegory of the country in the novel. Power, money, real estate (not only for the living but for the dead), love and trust betrayed, the omnipotent government and its representatives at all levels. Still, Yan allows us glimpses into the best of human hearts: a young man and a woman, both infected, will go to any length to get divorces from their spouses so they can be married officially before their burial; an amateur actor singing all night long so that his fellow villagers can forget their illness momentarily; a dying man's last wish to buy a red jacket for his wife, as he promised her before their wedding.

Yet the warmth from these ordinary people does not change the cold reality. The story is narrated by the dead poisoned young boy, which, to my mind, slightly undermines the novel. A storyteller as masterful as Yan Lianke does not need the assistance of a boy's ghost. To be fair, the boy does offer an excuse for his father to return to Ding Village so the narrator's grandfather has the opportunity to repay his villagers by killing his own son. Yet is that enough of a tragedy, or is that – like every death in the novel – a small offering? In the fictional world, the evil one is punished; yet in the real world, the truly chilling tale is that hundreds and thousands of bloodheads live on and prosper.

Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl is published by Fourth Estate.