Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke – review by Yiyun Li

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).