MCLC: Dream of Ding Village review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Dream of Ding Village review
***********************************************************

Source: China Beat (6/6/12): http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=4312

Book Review: Dream of Ding Village
By Mike Frick

“Since you have gone, the house is empty, it has been three seasons now /
Extinguish the lamps, let the twilight come, we must endure the setting
sun” —Chinese funeral couplet

In 2000-2001, Elisabeth Rosenthal published a series of reports in the New
York Times that alerted the world to a startling AIDS epidemic among
farmers in central China. Beginning in the early 1990s, thousands of
farmers in the Yellow River provinces of Henan, Hebei, Hubei, and Shanxi
had contracted HIV through commercial blood selling. Local government
officials in Henan promoted blood and plasma selling as a rural
development scheme that would lift farmers out of poverty. State-run
collection centers and private collectors known as “blood heads” would
pool blood, extract the desired plasma, and then inject the leftover blood
back into donors, thereby enabling people to donate more frequently.
Unsafe pooling and re-injection practices exposed thousands to HIV;
secondary transmission then occurred on an even wider scale through the
use of contaminated blood products in hospitals as well as transmission to
sexual partners and children by those already infected. After the epidemic
came to light, the Chinese government banned the sale of blood and worked
to increase the safety of the blood supply. Yet local officials also
denied the scale of the epidemic and harassed journalists, physicians, and
other activists who sought to document the extent of the blood disaster.

Yan Lianke’s novel Dream of Ding Village, a nominee for the 2012 Man Asian
Literary Prize, opens in the waning years of the blood-selling frenzy, as
a small farming community in Henan province watches “the fever” begin to
claim the lives of working-age adults. By the mid-1990s, the Chinese
government had acknowledged the spread of HIV/AIDS among drug users on
China’s southwestern borders, but no one expected AIDS to appear among
poor farmers in China’s heartland. The discovery of aizibing cun, or AIDS
villages, in central China forced government leaders to confront a pattern
of HIV transmission among Han Chinese unrelated to opium trafficking and
injecting drug use among ethnic minority communities along the
Chinese-Burmese border. At the outset of the novel, so many people have
died in Ding Village that families have stopped observing mourning rituals
such as pasting funeral couplets outside their homes, and grave markers
have become “as dense as the sheaves of wheat” that those healthy enough
to work struggle to harvest.

The narrator of Yan’s novel is Ding Qiang, the murdered twelve-year-old
son of Ding Hui, the village’s most notorious blood head. The villagers
poison Qiang in retaliation for his father’s actions; Ding Hui had
established Ding Village’s largest blood bank and used the profits to
modernize the family compound. Not content to wait for customers, Ding Hui
put his plasma bank on wheels, pushing it out to the village’s fields to
collect blood from working farmers, who then fell sick. After Qiang’s
murder, the boy lingers over Ding Village as a clear-eyed observer. His
omniscient narration serves mainly to illuminate the thoughts of his
grandfather, who tries to care for sick villagers while shouldering the
remorse his son Ding Hui never musters.

Yan’s writing is at once richly metaphoric and attuned to the rhythms of
Chinese farming life. He describes needle marks on the underarms of blood
sellers as “angry red sesame seeds” and pinched veins as “fat-streaked
pork.” Mostly this language is effective, though at its weaker moments the
metaphors can feel overwrought, particularly in the dream sequences that
mark major turning points in the plot. Dreams haunt the sleep of Qiang’s
grandfather and serve as convenient devices for moving the narrative
forward, although this sometimes occurs at the expense of good
story-telling. Major revelations about Ding Hui’s greed and artifice are
revealed through lushly animated dreams that allow Yan to transcend the
narrative strictures of time and place. Through these dreams we see Ding
Hui ingratiate himself with government officials until they appoint him
chairman of the county taskforce on HIV/AIDS. In his first move as
chairman, Ding Hui intercepts the free government-issued coffins intended
for AIDS patients in Ding Village and sells them to other AIDS-affected
villages for a profit. For his efforts, he labels himself a
“philanthropist.” Left without coffins, those dying in Ding Village
ransack the school for blackboards and desks to build their own. The
transformation of the school into a funereal supply yard carries
particular poignancy given China’s storied reverence for learning and
scholarship.

Yan sometimes paints the villagers as comical rubes, easily placated by
even the smallest self-serving kindness from Ding Hui and other officials.
The tone of this portrayal borders on patronizing and is surprising given
Yan’s training as an anthropologist. Yan’s academic background comes
across more clearly in his perceptive description of how the sick
villagers reproduce Communist Party bureaucracy in the way they handle a
stream of small dramas, including prosecuting petty thieves, supplanting
Qiang’s grandfather as school overseer, and legislating morality among
amorous (unwed) HIV-positive couples. AIDS quickly infiltrates every level
of Party, village, and clan politics.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese government levied a “three nos” ban—no sales,
no distribution, and no promotion—against Dream of Ding Village after its
publication in 2005. Though the storytelling relies heavily on dream
sequences, Yan takes little poetic license when exposing the depth of the
state’s culpability in spreading HIV among poor, medically-naïve farmers.
He is just as uncompromising when detailing how officials denied
responsibility for the ensuing AIDS epidemic, even as they profited from
its human tragedy. No one in Ding Village receives medical care, mental
health counseling, food assistance, or a chance to hold the blood heads
legally accountable. Cast adrift by government administrators, the sick
villagers quarantine themselves in the school and wait to die.

Yan’s novel dares to imagine the early years of China’s AIDS epidemic,
when farmers in central China awoke from visions of wealth and prosperity
to find instead incurable illness and death. Aside from a few stories in
newspapers, academic articles, and the memoirs of activist-physicians like
Dr. Gao Yaojie, we have few personal accounts from the earliest victims of
the blood disaster. Many of these individuals passed away before the
Chinese government began offering free anti-retroviral treatment for AIDS
in 2003. While the language is sometimes sentimental, Yan’s novel offers
powerful testimony of the suffering victims of the blood disaster, their
families, and communities have endured in the wake of a wholly preventable
tragedy.

Mike Frick is a China program officer at Asia Catalyst
<http://www.thechinabeat.org/www.asiacatalyst.org>, a US-based nonprofit
that does training, research and advocacy on health and human rights in
Asia. Together with the Korekata AIDS Law Center in Beijing, Asia Catalyst
recently released a report
<http://www.asiacatalyst.org/Compensation_report.pdf> on the difficulties
victims of the blood disaster have faced in getting compensation from the
Chinese government.