Yan Lianke - Dream of Ding Village
Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke. Translated by Cindy Carter
Corsair £12.99
Reviewed by Leyla Sanai
It was prescient that literary award winner Lianke’s novel was
published
within weeks of his fellow outspoken creative Ai WeiWei’s arrest. His
uncharacteristic cowed silence since release suggests continuing
government intimidation or threats.
Lianke’s novel, based on a true blood-selling scandal, was banned when
first published in China, which is ironic because he self censored it
by toning down his initial idea to try and avoid the ire of the
censors, having previously been banned for fierce satires criticising
the authorities. He was left feeling as if he’d compromised his initial
idea in vain.
Lianke’s dedication to truth is clear: he worked undercover for years
assisting a Beijing anthropologist studying the destruction of a
Chinese village in Henan Province by AIDS in order to obtain the facts
on which this novel is based.
The tale is narrated by a dead child, poisoned by villagers resentful
of the decimation caused by his father Ding Hui’s actions: Hui pounced
on an initiative introduced by county officials to generate money by
paying villagers to sell blood. Hui’s father, the narrator’s grandpa,
is decent and worked as caretaker and teacher at the school, but his
sons are weak, Hui becoming rich by unscrupulous blood-selling and
Liang causing gossip by having an affair with his cousin’s wife.
Hui milks the villagers of blood, sapping their strength, and his
immoral cost cutting, re-using needles and swabs, leads to the spread
of AIDS. As the villagers become too sick to tend their crops, Hui
generates more income unethically by selling coffins donated for the
sick by the authorities, and offering costly post-humous match-making
services for victims. Grandpa has premonitory dreams which, together
with his sagacity, place him in the role of wise village elder, but the
villagers pay scant attention because of the behaviour of his sons.
Lianke’s portrait of a small rural community hurtling to its demise
through the greed of a few is powerful, sobering and untinged by
sentimentality: even in the throes of terminal illness, villagers still
scrabble for power, engage in petty conflicts, steal, bribe and
blackmail. Lianke’s concession to the censors is obvious – blame is
deflected from the authorities onto the avaricious criminal Hui, and
the authorities are shown to implement measures to try and compensate
villagers for the devastation wrought by AIDS. But at best, the
authorities still appear naive, and the unspoken sub-text is clear –
pushing high-tech medicine as a way of generating income without
providing resources and expertise is so foolhardy it’s
indistinguishable from amorality.
The contrast between the simplicity of village life and the ravages
that follow lend a cinematic quality to the prose: ‘Across the plain,
those well enough to work were out in the fields. Their figures stood
out beneath the distant sky like scarecrows swaying in the wind. And
now, blowing in from the village, was another small figure, dragging a
child behind her.’
Occasionally, Lianke’s tendency to repeat key events seems superfluous,
but this is a compelling and shocking story of a traditional village
pillaged by the greed of a few. Lianke is masterful at capturing the
red tape of bureaucracy: ‘a sheaf of documents...mainly memos about
memos, notices about notices, all sent down from higher levels of
government.’ And he is brutally honest about the difference money and
power make, buying everything from an easy life to a sumptuous death in
an ornately engraved tomb.
Carter’s translation is fluid and natural, the only fault being that
her avoidance of stilted speech leads to western
colloquialisms/cliche’s (‘moth to a flame’, ‘mark my words’, ‘if looks
could kill’, a dog running off with its ‘tail between its legs’, ‘get
your arse out here’, ‘has the cat got your tongue?’) which occasionally
sound out of place in the rural Chinese setting. But there are also
wistful poetic images in keeping with the mood – grandpa dropped off
by the bus ‘like a fallen leaf’; a philandering husband left by his
wife and son thinking ‘if I die tomorrow, they’ll find me with two
tears in my eyes: one for every good thing I’ve lost.’
Both as faction specific for this scandal and as allegory for other
tragedies that occur wherever egregious appetites of the elite lead to
devastation of the many, this chilling novel's power belies its
simplicity.
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