Ding Village Dream

Author's name: Yan Lianke

My father was one of those men born into this world to achieve great things. Fate had made him a son of Ding Shui Yang, a son of Ding Village, and a father to me.

To begin with, he found himself responsible for the blood of Ding Village and the blood of other villages miles away. He was responsible not only for their blood, but for their fate as well. In the end, he found himself responsible for their coffins and graves. My father had never imagined that, one day in his life, he would be responsible for so many things, but he felt compelled to try. Believing in trial and error, he went to visit an official he knew in the county, not knowing whether the meeting would bear fruit. He was like a man trying to open a door in the hope that the sun will shine behind it.

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Based on true events that took place in the early 1990s, when the AIDS epidemic decimated entire villages, villages whose inhabitants, encouraged by local officials, tried to escape abject poverty by selling blood. The events could seem like imaginary dystopias: from the corruption of officials and the silence of rulers to the blackmail and commodification of people, from the malice of merchants and the decline of morals to the ignorance of villagers dreaming of quick riches. This is a novel about death and shirking responsibility, about crimes without retribution, about greed that distorts family ties, and dreams that are like prophecies. In captivatingly beautiful prose and the innocent tone of a child, we read the masterpiece of Yan Lianke, the eternal Nobel Prize nominee, as he mythologizes an officially obliterated history.

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