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Excerpt from Yan Lianke's Dream of Ding Village
By Cindy Carter, published September 6, 12:28p.m.
Since early this year, I have been busy translating [Yan Lianke's] (/authors/yan-lianke/) novel Dream of Ding Village, a story of blood-selling and the subsequent AIDS epidemic in Henan province. In response to some of our readers who have expressed an interest in seeing more of Yan's fiction in translation, here is a brief (unedited) excerpt from the novel, which will be published by [Constable and Robinson] (/publishers/constable-and-robinson/) in 2009.
Although the excerpt is but a very small slice of a novel rich in language and ideas, it highlights the narrative approach Yan has chosen for this book: an admixture of surrealistic dream sequences, omniscient narration and the slightly naive first-person narration of a twelve-year-old boy who has been poisoned in retaliation for his father's activities as a blood merchant or "bloodhead". Balancing these various styles - various voices might be a better way to phrase it - has been my greatest translation challenge.
The sixth thing was that if you got it, you died. AIDS was a new and incurable disease, and no amount of money could save you. But the sickness had only just begun. That was the seventh thing. The real explosion wouldn't come until next year, or the year after next. That's when people would start dying like sparrows, or moths, or ants. Right now they were dying like dogs, and everyone knows that in this world, people care a lot more about dogs than they do about sparrows, moths or ants...
1.
A day in late autumn, a late autumn dusk, the dusk of a late-autumn day. Because of the autumn, because of the dusk, the sun that sets above the East Henan plain bloods up into a ball, making red of earth and sky. As red unfurls, so follows evening, so comes the spreading dusk. Autumn grows deeper; the cold more intense. Because of the cold, the streets of the village are silent, devoid of passers-by.
Dogs in their dens.
Chickens at roost.
Cows come home early, snug in their sheds.
And in that silence, that intensity of silence, that absence of voices or sound, Ding Village lives on. Lives on as if by death. Because of the silence, the absolute silence, because of the autumn, because of the dusk, the village has withered along with its people. They shrink and they wither, in tandem with the days, like corpses buried underground.
Days like corpses.
Grass upon the plain gone dry; trees upon the plain gone bare.
Crops and fields withered, ever since the blood came.
Ever since the blood ran red.
The villagers, shrunken into their homes, never to emerge again.
By the time my grandpa Ding Shuiyang returned from the city, dusk had spread across the plain. The bus he rode, a long-distance coach travelling between the Wei county seat and the distant city of Dongjing, dropped him at the edge of the highway like a leaf from an autumn tree. The concrete highway linking Ding Village with the outside world was built ten years ago, when everyone in the village was caught up in the blood-selling boom. As grandpa stood along the highway looking out at the village, a gust of wind seemed to clear his head, restore some order to his muddled thoughts. Things he hadn't understood before began to fall into place. For the first time since he'd left the village early that morning for a series of confusing meetings with the county cadres, the fog seemed to lift. There, along the road linking Ding Village to the world, realization dawned.
The realization that with clouds come the rain.
The realization that late autumn begets winter's chill.
The realization that those who sold their blood ten years ago would now have the fever.
And that those with the fever would die, as surely as the falling leaves.
The fever hid in blood. Grandpa hid in dreams.
The fever loved its blood. As grandpa loved his dreams.
Grandpa dreamed most every night. For the last three nights, he'd had the same recurring dream: the cities he'd visited – Dongjing and the Wei county seat, with their underground networks of pipes like cobwebs – running thick with blood. And from the cracks and curvatures of pipes, from the l-bends and the u-bends, the spurt of blood like water, the fountain splash of it into the air, a brackish rain, a bright red assault on the senses. And there upon the plain, he saw the wells and rivers all gone red, rancid with the stench of blood. In every city and every township, doctors wept as fever spread, but on the streets of Ding Village, one lone doctor sat and laughed. Bathed in golden sunlight, the village was silent and peaceful, her residents locked up behind closed doors. But day by day that doctor in his white lab coat, physician's bag at his feet, would sit beneath the scholar trees and laugh. Perched upon a rock beneath the scholar trees, he laughed. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. A big loud belly-laugh. A splendid sunlit-laugh, a ringing clear as bells, a peal to shake the trees and make the yellow leaves rain down, as surely as the autumn breeze.
And when the dream had ended, the higher-ups summoned grandpa to the county for a meeting. Since Ding Village no longer had a mayor, grandpa went in his stead. He returned to the village with an understanding of certain facts, a series of links in a chain.
The first thing grandpa learned was that the fever wasn't really a fever at all. Its proper medical name was Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. The second thing was that those who'd sold their blood so many years ago, and had come down with a fever ten days to a fortnight later, would now have AIDS. The third thing was that the first symptoms of AIDS wouldn't appear until eight, nine, or even ten years after the fact. Most people, mistaking the symptoms for a common cold, would take some medicine to bring down their fever and before long, they'd be back to normal. But after a few months, maybe half a year later, the disease would flare up again, and the symptoms would be much worse: weakness, skin sores, ulcers on the mouth and tongue, dehydration and weight loss. By then, you had only a few months to live. You might manage to hang on for six months, maybe even eight or nine, but very few made it through the year. In the end, everyone who got sick died.
They died like falling leaves.
Their light extinguished, gone from this world.
The fourth thing was something grandpa already knew: that for the past two years, people in the village had been dying. Not a month went by without at least one death, and nearly every family had lost someone. After over forty deaths in the space of two years, the graves in the village cemetery were as densely packed as sheaves of wheat in a farmer's field. Some of those who got sick thought that it was hepatitis, while others called it "a shadow on the lungs". Still others, with perfectly healthy livers and lungs, lost their appetites and couldn't stomach food. A fortnight or so later, rail-thin and coughing up or vomiting blood, they died. Died like falling leaves. Their light extinguished, gone from this world. Afterward, the other villagers would claim that it was gastritis or hepatitis or tuberculosis, a disease of the stomach or liver or lungs, but in fact it was the fever. Every one of them had died of AIDS.
The fifth thing grandpa learned was that AIDS had originally been a foreigners' disease, a big city disease, something only immoral or perverted people got. But now China had it, too. It was in the city and in the countryside, and the ones getting sick were normal, upstanding people. The sickness came in waves, like locusts swarming over a field. If one person got sick, you were sure to find a whole bunch more.
The sixth thing was that if you got it, you died. AIDS was a new and incurable disease, and no amount of money could save you. But the sickness had only just begun. That was the seventh thing. The real explosion wouldn't come until next year, or the year after next. That's when people would start dying like sparrows, or moths, or ants. Right now they were dying like dogs, and everyone knows that in this world, people care a lot more about dogs than they do about sparrows, moths or ants.
The eighth thing was about me, buried behind the brick back wall of my grandpa's house. I was only twelve, in my fifth year of grade school, when I died. I died from eating a tomato. It was poisoned, and I found it on the way home from school. Six months earlier, somebody had poisoned our family's chickens. Not long after that, my mom's pig died after eating a chunk of radish somebody threw on the ground. A few months later, I ate a poisoned tomato and died. Somebody had left it on a rock by the side of the road on my way home from school. Almost as soon as I ate it, my whole belly started to ache, like somebody was stabbing my intestines with scissors. Before I could walk more than a few steps, I fell down in the middle of the road. By the time my dad found me and carried me home in his arms, I was frothing at the mouth. By the time he laid me down on the bed, I was already dead.
I died, but not from the fever, not from the AIDS. I died because ten years earlier, my dad had run a blood collection station in Ding Village. He bought blood from the villagers and resold it. I died because my dad was the biggest blood merchant in Ding Village, Willow Hamlet, Yellow River, Plumvale and dozens of other villages for miles around. He wasn't just a blood merchant: he was a blood kingpin.
The day I died, my dad didn't even cry. He sat at my bedside and smoked a cigarette. When he was finished, he went out into the village with my uncle, his younger brother. My dad carried a spade; my uncle, a chopping knife with a gleaming blade. They stood at the village crossroads, cursing and screaming at the top of their lungs.
"Come show your faces, if you've got the guts!" shrieked my uncle Ding Liang. "Don't think you can hide, you poisoning bastards! Come out and see if I don't chop you in two!"
"So you're jealous of me, is that it?" shouted my father, Ding Hui, planting his spade in the ground. "Can't stand it that I'm rich and didn't get the fever? Well, fuck you and all your ancestors! First you kill my chickens, then my pigs, and now you think you can get away with poisoning my son?"
Shouting and cursing, the brothers stood at the crossroads from noon until the sky grew dark, but not a single villager came out. No one wanted to answer to my uncle, or to face up to my father.
In the end, the best that they could do was bury me.
They put me in the ground and buried me.
By tradition, I was too young to be buried in the ancestral grave, so grandpa carried my little corpse to the elementary school and buried me there, behind the wall of his house. He laid me to rest in a narrow wooden coffin, along with my textbooks, homework notebooks, pencils and pens.
Grandpa had always fancied himself a scholar. He was educated, had spent a lifetime ringing the school bell and was known throughout the village as Professor Ding. So it was only fitting that he'd want to bury me with books: a favorite storybook, a collection of folk tales, a few volumes of Chinese myths and legends and two dictionaries (one Chinese, one English).
After I was gone, grandpa would sometimes stand at my grave and wonder if the villagers would try to kill anyone else in our family. Would they poison his granddaughter, my younger sister Yingzi? Or his only remaining grandson, my uncle's boy Xiao Jun? He began to think about making my father and uncle go to every house in the village and kowtow, kneel in the dirt and knock their heads upon the ground three times and beg the villagers to please, please not poison any more of us, to please not leave us without descendants to carry on the Ding family name.
At about the same time grandpa was mulling this over, my uncle was diagnosed with AIDS.
Grandpa knew that it was retribution. My uncle had gotten sick because he'd once worked for my father, buying blood from the villagers and re-selling it for a profit. When he found out that uncle was sick, grandpa changed his mind about asking him to kowtow to all the villagers, and decided to have my father do it instead.
Then there was number nine. The ninth thing my grandpa realized was that in a year, maybe two, the fever would explode all across the plain. It would burst upon us like a flood, engulfing Ding Village, Willow Hamlet, Yellow River, Plumvale and countless others in its path. Like the Yellow River jumping its banks, it would surge through dozens, maybe hundreds of villages and hamlets. And when that happened, people would die like ants. The dead would litter the ground like fallen leaves; their light extinguished, gone from this world. In time, most of the villagers would die, and Ding Village would vanish from the world forever. Like leaves upon a dying tree, the villagers would wilt and wither, yellow and brown, before falling to the ground with a rustle and a crash, to be swept away by the slightest gust of wind.
The tenth and last thing grandpa learned was that the higher-ups wanted to quarantine all of the AIDS patients in the village for fear that they'd spread the disease to those who hadn't sold blood.
"Professor Ding," the cadres said, "your son was the biggest blood merchant in the village, so it's only fair that you step up now. You have to use your influence to convince everyone who's sick to move into the village school."
When he heard this, my grandpa was silent for a very long time. Even now, it made him uncomfortable, made him think thoughts better left unspoken. Because when grandpa thought about my death and about my father, the former blood kingpin, he felt like forcing him to go door to door, get down on his knees and kowtow to every family in the village. And when that was done, my father could throw himself into a well, swallow some poison, or hang himself. Any method would do, as long as he died.
The sooner he died, the better.
So that everyone in the village could witness his death.
At the thought of making my father grovel before the villagers and then commit suicide, my grandfather was shocked. Truth be told, he was shocked with himself. But when the shock had passed, he began walking into the village, walking toward our house.
He was really going to do it.
He was going to ask my father to apologize to everyone and then go kill himself.
Because the sooner my father died, the better.
2.
What happened to Ding Village was unthinkable: in less than two years, this tiny village of fewer than two hundred households and eight hundred people had lost over forty people to AIDS. Over the last year alone, there had been an average of two or three deaths per month. Hardly a fortnight passed without someone dying. But the season of death had only just begun. By next year, the dead would number like the autumn grain, the graves like sheaves of summer wheat. Of those who had died, the oldest were in their fifties and the youngest, just a few years old. In each case, the sickness began with a fever lasting several weeks, which is how the disease got its nickname. "The fever" had spread and grown until it had the village by the throat, and now there seemed no end to the stranglehold. No end to the dying, no end to the weeping.
The village coffin makers had to keep replacing their hatchets and saws. Already they'd worn through several sets of tools.
Death settled over Ding Village like deep black night, blanketing the neighboring hamlets and villages. The news that passed back and forth along the streets each day was just as dark. If it wasn't that another person had come down with the fever, it was that someone else had lost a family member in the middle of the night, or that a woman whose husband had died was planning to remarry into a distant mountain village, as far away as possible from this fever-ridden, god-forsaken plain.
The days were a torment. Death hovered in the doorways, buzzed from house to house like a mosquito spreading disease. Wherever it touched down, you could be sure that three or four months later, someone else would be found dead in his or her bed.
So many people were dying. In one household, a family might weep for a day before burying their dead relative in a black wooden coffin that had cost their life savings. In another household, there might be sighs instead of tears, a family gathering around the corpse in silent vigil before the burial.
The paulownia trees used to make coffins were all chopped down. The village had no timber left.
The three elderly village carpenters worked all day long building coffins. Two of them came down with backaches from overwork.
Old Mister Wang, maker of funeral wreaths, was kept busy cutting and snipping paper flowers. His hands were soon covered in blisters, which later burst and dried into hard yellow calluses.
The living became indolent, indifferent. With death camped right outside the door, no one could be bothered to till the fields or do any planting or leave the village to look for seasonal work. The villagers spent their days at home, door and windows shut to stop the fever from rushing in. But that's what they were waiting for, for the fever to rush in and claim them. Day by day they waited; day by day they watched. Some said that the government was planning to send trucks and soldiers to round up AIDS patients and bury them alive in the Gobi Desert, like they used to bury plague victims long ago. Although everyone knew that this was just a rumour, somewhere in their hearts they believed it. They locked their doors and windows, stayed at home and waited for the fever to come, and for more people to die.
As the villagers died off, so did the village.
The earth grew barren. No one turned the soil.
The fields grew dry. No one watered the crops.
In some homes where a person had died, the family quit washing their pots and pans, bowls and chopsticks. From one meal to the next, they cooked rice in the same unwashed pot and ate with the same dirty bowls and chopsticks.
If you hadn't seen someone in the village for weeks, you didn't have to ask where he had gone. You just assumed he was dead.
And if you happened to run into him a few days later while drawing water at the well, you'd both stop in shock. There would be a long silence as you stared at each other in amazement. Then you'd say: My god, you're still alive." And he might answer, "I was in bed with a headache. I thought it was the fever, but as it turns out, it wasn't." After some relieved laughter, you'd brush past each other, you with your shoulder pole and wooden buckets filled with water, he with his empty ones.
That's what our village had become.
Ding Village in the days of fever, the days of agony and waiting.
Comments
Wow!What powerful writing! I can't wait to see the rest of the book. Constable & Robinson must be delighted to have it. You're doing a fantastic job.
Nicky Harman, September 9, 3:09a.m.
Thanks Nicky - so glad you liked it. Look forward to seeing you soon!
Cindy Carter, September 10, 9:56a.m.
Really great! I'm trying so hard to get a Swedish publisher for this novel, but they can't read Chinese and they're waiting for the English version. I'm sure when they read your translation they will be convinced!
Anna GC, September 11, 7:30p.m.
Thanks, Anna. I hope the English translation will help the novel to be published in a variety of other languages.
By the way, I believe there is a French version of the novel (translated by Claude Payen as Le rêve du village des Ding). Here's a link:
http://livre.fnac.com/a1905141/Yan-Lianke-Le-reve-du-village-des-Ding
Cindy Carter, September 14, 1:35a.m.