Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke Page A

who had been posted to the pleasant city of Hangzhou, known throughout China as ‘the paradise of the south’. In a fenced-off army barracks outside the city, he had served his country, received commendations for his service and become an official member of the Chinese Communist Party. But when the time came for him to be promoted, he had a sudden realization. After much soul-searching and nail-biting, he penned a letter to his commanding officers. It read like a blood oath: in it, he vowed to return to his hometown and help transform Ding Village into ‘a paradise of the north’.
    And so he left the army.
    Over the next few decades, Li Sanren worked day and night helping the villagers to plant and harvest, irrigate their fields and collect manure for use as fertilizer. When the higher-upssaid to turn the soil, he did. When they said to plant wheat seedlings or cotton, he did. But years passed like days, and soon decades had gone by. Other than an increase in population, the village was unchanged, exactly the way it was when he’d started. In all those years, Ding Village had not managed to add a single new tile-roofed house. It had not acquired a single new piece of machinery or farm equipment. Even the number of pull-tractors was exactly the same. The surrounding villages of Willow Hamlet, Yellow Creek and Two-Li Village were also still quite poor, but Ding Village was skeletally poor by comparison. A village of skin and bones.
    One day, a villager walked up to Li Sanren and spat in his face. ‘Li Sanren, you’ve got some nerve, calling yourself our leader,’ the man complained. ‘In all the years you’ve been village mayor and party secretary, my family hasn’t had one square meal. We can’t even afford to have dumplings at New Year!’
    In the end, Li Sanren was removed from office. As soon as the blood-selling began, he was sacked. He became silent and taciturn, hardly speaking to the other villagers. His face turned ashen and grey, as if someone had slapped him with the sole of a dirty shoe.
    The higher-ups, taking notice of my dad’s success in the blood trade, asked him to become the mayor of Ding Village. They hoped he’d help the village set up a few more blood-collection stations and foster a few more successful blood merchants, instead of spending his time collecting blood for his own business. Realizing that more bloodheads meant more competition for him, and less money for his family, Dad turned down the job, leaving Ding Village without a mayor. The post would remain empty for many years. Even today, the village doesn’t have a mayor.
    When the higher-ups called on the people of Ding Village to sell more blood, Li Sanren stubbornly refused to participate. He wanted no part of it. ‘I didn’t spend all those years as mayor,’ he argued, ‘to see it come to this … folks out there selling their own blood.’
    But Li Sanren’s wife, after visiting the fancy new tile-roofed houses of her friends and neighbours who’d sold their blood, took to cursing her husband in public. ‘Li Sanren, you call yourself a man? You’re not even man enough to sell blood. With you as mayor all those years, it’s no wonder that the women in this village can’t even afford sanitary pads! It’s all your fault. You’re nothing better than a eunuch, a coward who’s too scared to sell a pint of blood, much less half a pint, or a drop, even! What kind of man gets scared by a few drops of his own blood?’
    That day, Li Sanren was squatting outside the door of his house, eating his dinner. He allowed his wife to curse him, suffering her insults and abuse without comment.
    When she had finished her tirade, he threw his empty bowl on the ground and walked off without a word. She supposed he had got sick of listening to her and had just gone out for a walk. But later, as she was washing up the dishes and getting ready to feed the pigs, Li Sanren walked into the kitchen clutching a 100-yuan bill. One of his sleeves was