Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke

silently to a small room next to the kitchen. It was a storage room used for food supplies and other odds and ends. Somehow, tacitly, it was the room they had decided on.
    The room was warm, and they in turn filled the room with warmth.
    There, in that storage room, they recaptured what it meant to be alive.
3
    Ding Village basked in the warmth of a brilliant sun. In every direction, flowers had burst into bloom almost overnight, sweeping into the village like a tide. Luxuriant blossoms lined every street, filled every courtyard, carpeted the fields outside
the village gates. Even the dried-up channel marking the ancient path of the Yellow River was a profusion of flowers: chrysanthemums, plum blossoms, peonies, roses, wild orchids, winter jasmine, dandelions, dog-tails and several kinds of flowering grasses usually only found on mountaintops. There were shades of red and yellow, purple and pink, orange and lavender and white; purplish-red and reddish-purple, greenish-blue and bluish-green, aqua tinged with jade. There were flowers of every shape and colour, strange varieties you couldn’t begin to name – some as big as serving bowls, others small as buttons. They grew from the walls and roofs of pigsties, over chicken coops and cow pens, their pungent scent wafting through the streets, washing over Ding Village like a flood, a perfumed tide
…
    Unable to fathom how hundreds of flowers could have bloomed so suddenly, Grandpa prowled the streets suspiciously, looking for signs. As he crossed the village from east to west, he noticed that the faces of the villagers – elders, adults and children alike – were all smiling. They bustled back and forth along the flower-lined streets, some balancing cloth-covered wicker baskets swinging from bamboo shoulder poles, others lugging sacks tied with rope and bulging with mysterious contents. Even tiny boys and girls of no more than a few years old seemed to be carrying heavy bundles. When Grandpa tried to ask what they were doing, no one stopped to answer him. Everyone appeared to be in a terrible hurry, rushing to and from their homes, not walking so much as running, racing from place to place
.
    Grandpa began to follow a group of villagers, trailing them through flower-filled streets. It wasn’t until he reached the west end of the village that he saw what all the fuss was about: the surrounding fields were quite literally awash with flowers, a vast sea of them, an endless expanse of petals rippling in the breeze. It was magnificent. Even the sky above seemed tinged with their colours: blushing, feminine pinks and faintly erotic yellows. The villagers clustered in groups, hard at work in their families’ fields. The men wielded pickaxes, and seemed to
be digging up the soil around the roots of flowering plants and trees. It was as if they were rushing to break the soil and get their crops of sweet potatoes or peanuts planted before the winter set in
.
    Grandpa also caught sight of Li Sanren, the former mayor of Ding Village, out in his family’s field. Usually so sombre and silent, he was smiling broadly as he worked alongside the other villagers. His forehead was covered in perspiration, his backside jutting out as he dug his shovel into the ground. Every so often, he would bend over, pick up a flowering plant he had unearthed and shake clods of dirt from its roots before tossing it aside and moving on to the next one. After he had uprooted and shaken a few dozen, he would squat down next to his wife and children to gather the clods of dirt from the ground and toss them into two wicker baskets. When the baskets were full, he covered them with bed sheets, lifted them on a shoulder pole and headed for home. Staggering under the weight of those baskets, Li Sanren seemed in danger of falling, but he soldiered on, forcing himself to keep walking
…
    Once upon a time, Li Sanren had been the mayor of Ding Village. Just a few years younger than Grandpa, he was a former military man