The gov’t officials wouldn’t let us eat in that village, out of some irrational concern that we would get AIDS from the interaction. In Henan, I met grandparents struggling to raise orphaned grandchildren in their crumbling houses, the generation responsible for income had died a few years earlier. In a small town near Ningming, Guangxi I met a man whose family had forced him to live in a tent outside of their home out of fear of his disease.

Furthermore, the disease destroys the family structures that make village life work, and will take generations to repair. Aid to the families is minimal, and those infected are ostracized from the community. In each place the story is roughly the same: the disease begins to spread, the local gov’t denies it, and then when a large number of villagers are on the verge of death, the old leader is tossed out and a new one is brought in. Over the past five years I’ve had the opportunity to visit AIDS villages in Henan, Guangxi, and Hunan and felt a personal connection to this tale. (you can read more about the story itself in these other reviews, but I think they include far too many spoilers). The story focuses on the Ding Family, which at this point as been reduced to just a few members- Grandpa, one of the few likable characters, who struggles to right the wrongs of his blood-selling eldest son, Ding Hui Ding Hui, a detestable man who sees nothing but opportunity in the midst of tragedy and Ding Hui’s brother, who is infected with AIDS, but still wants to enjoy the life he has left. It is also an interesting view of how village life is portrayed in Chinese literature and the ways in which extended families operate in rural life. It is a tale of the gov’t’s failure to prevent/control the spread of the disease and inability to provide basic assistance to those afflicted.

Even though it is a work of fiction, the author is a respected anthropologist who did a large amount of field work prior to writing this book. Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke is the Man Asian Literary Prize nominated story of a small village in Henan as it is ravaged by the AIDS epidemic that spread through central China nearly a decade ago (and continues to devastate communities to this day).

Dream of ding village review