Dream of Ding Village Read online

  ‘Does everyone really get ten yuan per day?’ the villagers asked.

  ‘That’s what the director said,’ answered Grandpa. ‘And he’s as good as his word.’

  ‘And on the way home, do we really get to tour the capital?’

  ‘If that’s what the director said,’ sighed Grandpa, ‘I’m sure he’s as good as his word.’

  So it was that people and events were set in motion. The trip seeded the way for the people of Ding Village to begin selling their blood, as farmers fertilize their fields each spring in preparation for the autumn harvest. Whenever Grandpa saw that tour of Cai county in his dreams, his eyes would fill with tears and he would toss and turn in bed and sigh.

  Cai county was more than 100 miles from Ding Village. Although the villagers had made an early start, it was nearly noon by the time they reached their destination, Cottonwood Village. Crossing the county line was like driving into some sort of paradise. The villagers were startled to see both sides of the main road lined by modern, two-storey homes of red brick and tile. The rows of houses were as neat and symmetrical as if someone had drawn them on paper with a ruler. There were flowers in every doorway, trees in every courtyard and broad avenues of poured concrete. On the outer wall of each house hung a square, red-bordered plaque with three, four or five shiny gold stars. The five-star plaques were reserved for those who had excelled at selling blood, the so-called ‘Five-Star Outstanding Blood Donor Households’. The four-star plaques were given to the runners-up, and the three-star plaques to households whose blood contributions had been average.

  The county director escorted his visitors on a house-to-house tour of Cottonwood. No one from Ding Village had imagined that another village could look so much like a big city. Even the streets had grand-sounding names such as Sunshine Boulevard, Harmony Avenue, Prosperity Lane and Happiness Road. Each door had a placard with the street name and house number clearly marked. Pigsties and chicken coops that had once cluttered courtyards were now concentrated in the centre of the village and surrounded by a low wall of clean red brick.

  Inside the houses, even the household appliances and furnishings seemed standardized: refrigerators were to the left of the entry hall, televisions in the living room opposite the sofa, and washing machines in the bathroom next to the kitchen. Door and window frames were shiny new aluminum alloy; chests, wardrobes and cabinets were red lacquer adorned with gold leaf. The beds were heaped with silk and satin quilts and woollen blankets, and every room smelled nice.

  During the tour, the Director of Education took the lead. My father followed close behind, with the people of Ding Village at the rear.

  Outside on the street, they ran into a group of laughing, chattering village women loaded down with bundles of fresh vegetables and bags of fish and meat. When the villagers asked the women if they’d been out shopping, the women answered that there was no need to shop, because the village committee gave away food for free. All you had to do was go to the committee headquarters and collect what you needed for the day. If you wanted spinach or cabbage or chives, you just took some from the shelf. If you wanted pork, you got a chunk from the butcher’s block. If you wanted fish, you caught one from the public pond.

  The visitors from Ding Village gaped at the women in disbelief, their suspicion as thick as city walls. ‘Seriously?’ asked my father. ‘Surely that can’t be true.’ His words seemed to offend the women, who stared coldly at my father and the other Ding villagers and then turned to leave without another word. They had better things to do than stand around talking to a bunch of country bumpkins. As the women walked away, they turned back to cast nasty looks at my father.

  For a moment, he stood dumbstruck in the middle of that immaculate and well-planned street. Then, catching sight of another middle-aged woman loaded down with fish and vegetables, he ran over, blocking her path. ‘Hey,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Did you really get all that food for free?’

  The woman gave my father an incredulous look.

  ‘I mean, who pays for all this fish and meat? Where does the money come from?’

  By way of an answer, the woman pushed up her sleeve, revealing a patch of needle-marks on her forearm. They were about the same size and colour of small red sesame seeds. ‘If you’re here for a tour, then you must already know,’ she said, with a sidelong glance at my father. ‘We’re the model blood-selling village for the whole county, for the entire province. Don’t you know that everyone here sells blood?’

  My father stared at the tiny pinpricks on the woman’s arm. Just as the silence began to grow awkward, he looked up. ‘Do they hurt?’

  The woman laughed. ‘Oh, they itch a little when it rains, but they’re no worse than ant bites.’

  ‘Don’t you get light-headed, selling blood every day?’

  The woman looked at my father in surprise. ‘Who says we sell every day? It’s more like once every ten days or a fortnight. If you don’t sell at least that often, your veins start to feel swollen. It’s like being full of milk and not being able to nurse your baby.’

  Having satisfied their curiosity, the villagers allowed the woman to continue on her way. They watched as she carried her groceries through the door of her house at 25 Bright Lane.

  After that, the villagers split up into small groups to explore Cottonwood. They wandered through the alleyways, gawked at the two-storey homes that lined every street and inspected the chicken coops and pigsties in the village centre. They visited the red-tiled, green-roofed kindergarten and admired the spotless new elementary school. They went wherever they wanted, asked whatever questions they wished and marvelled at this seeming utopia – a model for county, district and province – that had been made possible by selling blood.

  The district and county blood stations were located at the village crossroads. Each looked just like a hospital, with a Red Cross insignia over the entrance and doctors in white lab coats bustling in and out. The doctors spent the entire day drawing blood, testing blood and classifying it into types. Eventually, the plasma was collected into larger bags and bottles that were disinfected, sealed and processed before being shipped somewhere else.

  After my father had visited the blood-collection stations, he accompanied a group of young Cottonwood locals to a social club on Longevity Boulevard, the widest avenue in the village. The club was crowded with young men ranging in age from their teens to their mid-thirties. All of them seemed to be in high spirits, their faces ruddy with the glow of good health. Some played poker or chess, while others sat around cracking melon seeds between their teeth as they watched television or read books. My father was surprised to see some of the men playing ping-pong: back then, ping-pong tables were a rarity usually found only in schools or big-city gymnasiums.

  That year, the weather was unseasonably warm. Although it was only mid-spring, the men of Cottonwood had finished the spring planting and had nothing to do but amuse themselves at their club. Caught up in the excitement of card games, chess matches and ping-pong contests, they rolled up their shirtsleeves, waved their arms about and shouted encouragement or good-natured profanity. My father noticed that each of these healthy young men, like the middle-aged women he had encountered on the street, had forearms pocked with needle marks. Each bare arm revealed a patch of tiny dots like dark-red sesame seeds left to dry in the sun.

  After a while, my father left the club and rejoined his friends from Ding Village. They stood together along the broad concrete expanse of Longevity Boulevard, basking in the sunshine and enjoying the warmth and fragrance of Cottonwood. They rolled up their sleeves, exposing their forearms to the hot midday sun. Side by side, their tanned and naked arms resembled a row of plump carrots on display at a greengrocer’s stall. The heat beat down upon their skin, filling the air with the vaguely unpleasant smell of sweaty bodies. Mixed and muddied with other scents, it floated down the avenue like silt through river water.

  The visitors from Ding Village looked down at their smooth, unscarred arms and e
xclaimed: ‘What fools we’ve been, to waste all this!’ They patted their untapped veins and muttered: ‘What the hell, let’s sell our blood. What do we have to lose?’

  They slapped their arms and pinched their veins until the skin was black and blue, as mottled as a chunk of fat-streaked pork, and thought: ‘Screw you, Cottonwood . . . you think you’re better than us? You think that only your blood is worth its weight in gold?’

  3

  And so the inhabitants of Ding Village began to sell their blood. What started as a trickle soon became a stream. Before long, it had turned into a blood boom.

  In this village of 800 people, a dozen blood-collection stations sprang up almost overnight. Nearly every governmental organization got in on the act: the county hospital, the village hospital, the Chinese Red Cross, the veterinary hospital, the livestock breeding centre, the Department of Propaganda, the Department of Education, the Department of Village Administration, the Department of Party Organization, the Chamber of Commerce, the police force and even the local PLA military garrison had blood banks. All it took was a hand-lettered wooden sign, some medical equipment, a couple of nurses and an accountant.

  Blood banks opened in the village market, at the village crossroads and in the empty rooms of private homes. They even opened in converted cowsheds. The owners would simply scrub down the floors and walls, lay wooden planks over the trough to make a table and hang blood-collection vials from the rafters. With this and some basic equipment – needles, syringes, plastic tubes, bottles of rubbing alcohol and more vials – they were ready to begin buying and selling blood.

  Throughout the village, blood-filled plastic tubing hung like vines, and bottles of plasma like plump red grapes. Everywhere you looked there were broken glass vials and syringes, discarded cotton balls, used needles and splashes of congealed blood. Bottles for collecting and sorting blood plasma dangled from rafters and littered the surfaces of benches and tables. All day long, the air was filled with the stench of fresh blood.

  The trees of the village – Chinese mahogany, elm and paulownia – absorbed this same air, and their leaves and bark began to take on a faint red hue. In the past, the leaves of the scholar trees had been soft and thin, pale yellow with greenish-brown threads. But this year, the new leaves were tinged with pink and veins of brownish-purple. The veterinary hospital, which had set up its blood bank beneath a scholar tree at the west end of the village, collected so much blood that the leaves of that tree soon turned reddish-orange, its leaves much riper and plumper than in previous years.

  The village dogs, alerted by the scent of blood, spent all day long sniffing the air and scratching at the doors of the blood banks. Sometimes a dog would manage to run in and grab a few wads of blood-soaked cotton in its jaws before being kicked out. Afterwards, the dog would trot back to its hideaway to gnaw and swallow its prize.

  The village was filled with doctors and nurses in white lab coats. They seemed to work without rest, their foreheads soaked with perspiration, rushing back and forth like shoppers at a temple fair. They spent their days drawing blood, handing out wads of sterile cotton and telling people to keep the cotton pressed to their arms for at least five minutes.

  ‘Press for five minutes . . . press for five minutes . . .’ The doctors and nurses repeated this phrase so often that it became their mantra.

  Doctors advised the villagers to drink sugar-water after having their blood drawn. Soon all of the local shops had sold out of sugar, and people had to order supplies from other counties and provinces.

  Doctors counselled the villagers to take several days of bed rest after having blood drawn. So, on sunny days, the streets, alleyways, courtyards and doorways were crowded with villagers lounging on rattan chairs, wooden beds and cots.

  Doctors encouraged residents from neighbouring villages and hamlets to come to Ding Village to sell blood. Soon the streets of Ding Village were crowded to overflowing with a never-ending stream of visitors. Ding Village added two new restaurants to cater for the traffic, and two stalls that sold salt, sugar, sundries and other blood-enhancing foodstuffs and tonics.

  Ding Village hustled and bustled, flourished and thrived.

  Ding Village quickly became Wei county’s model blood-selling village. That same year, the county director sold his Jeep and bought a brand-new luxury sedan. He returned to the village in style, sauntering around the streets in his chauffeur-driven sedan and stopping to inspect every blood station along the way. He stopped off at my parents’ house, where he ate two bowls of egg-and-mushroom noodles, then he dropped by at the school to shake my Grandpa’s hand and give him a few words of unexpected praise.

  ‘Professor Ding,’ he said, warmly clasping Grandpa’s hand. ‘You’re the saviour of Ding Village. You liberated it from poverty and made it rich!’

  But Ding Village’s blood boom was short-lived.

  Cracks began to appear. The hustle and bustle receded. Things began to quiet down.

  Then my father took the stage.

  4

  The people of Ding Village sold blood on a rotation system based on age, blood type, physical health and other factors. Nearly every villager from the age of eighteen to fifty was issued a blood-donation card, about the size of a small business card, printed on cheap brown paper. The front of the card listed your name, age, blood type and any chronic diseases or ailments. On the back was a chart that recorded the dates and quantity of each blood sale. Your card stipulated how often you were allowed to sell your blood. Fortunately for the villagers, most were allowed to sell blood once a month. Some villagers between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five – by virtue of their youth and good health – were even allowed to sell one vial of blood every fortnight. A few were limited to once every two or three months.

  For this reason, the blood banks were forced to become mobile blood units: they set up camp in Ding Village one month, then moved on to Willow Hamlet, Yellow Creek or Two-Li Village the next.

  After the business went mobile, selling blood in Ding Village became much less convenient. No longer could a villager show up at the local blood bank with a bowl of food and an extended arm, eat his meal as the blood dripped from his veins into a collection bottle slung from his belt, and walk out with full belly and a fistful of cash. Nor could a villager stop at the blood bank on her way home from the fields and leave with a nice crisp 100-yuan note (emblazoned with the smiling face of Chairman Mao), which she held up to the sunlight to check that it wasn’t counterfeit.

  Until, one day, my father made a trip to the city and returned home with a load of needles, syringes, plastic tubing, sterile cotton wipes and glass vials. He dumped his purchases on the bed, fetched a wooden plank from the pigsty and fashioned it into a hand-lettered sign that read: ‘Ding Family Blood Bank’. Then he walked out to the scholar tree in the centre of the village, clanged a rock against the metal bell and shouted loudly enough for the whole village to hear:

  ‘If you want to sell blood, come see Ding Hui at the Ding Family Blood Bank . . . the others only pay eighty per vial, but I’ll give you eighty-five!’

  Sure enough, after my father had repeated this announcement several times, the villagers began to emerge from their homes. By noon, our family’s house was surrounded by people clamouring to sell their blood.

  That was the day the Ding Family Blood Bank was born.

  Within six months, Ding Village had given birth to a dozen more private blood banks. Because the owners were too inexperienced to know where to sell the blood they had collected, they sold it to my father instead. He then resold it at a considerable markup to the blood-collection trucks that loitered outside the village late at night. Once again, blood-selling took Ding Village and the surrounding villages by storm. Ten years later, when sickness descended on the plain and those who had sold their blood discovered they had the fever, death became commonplace. People died like moths to a flame.

  They died like falling leaves.

  Their light extinguished, go
ne from this world.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  It is late autumn, the dawn of a new day. The sun rises above the East Henan plain. A blood-red ball turning the earth and sky a deep shade of crimson. As red unfurls, so follows morning. Another day begins.

  Grandpa woke with the sunrise to begin his rounds, and was now spreading the news about Ma Xianglin’s performance at the school that evening.

  ‘Anyone home?’ he called, poking his head in the door of the first house. ‘There’s a zhuizi concert at the school tonight, to celebrate the new medicine. You should come along . . . it’s better than being shut up at home.’

  ‘There’s really new medicine?’ came a voice from inside.

  ‘I’ve been a teacher all my life,’ Grandpa laughed. ‘Have you ever known me to lie?’

  At the next house, Grandpa pushed open the front door. ‘Hey . . . don’t stay inside all day worrying. Join us at the school tonight for a zhuizi performance.’

  ‘Who’s playing?’ asked the man inside. ‘Is it Ma Xianglin?’

  ‘Who else?’ answered Grandpa. ‘You must have noticed he’s been getting sicker. If we all show up for his concert tonight, it might cheer him up a bit, give him the strength to last until the new medicine gets here.’

  ‘There’s really new medicine?’

  ‘I’ve been a teacher all my life . . . have you ever known me to lie?’

  And so it went, house after house.

  When Grandpa reached New Street, he saw my parents and sister walking home. They had just returned from their field and my mother held several bundles of vegetables in her arms. When they caught sight of Grandpa, the whole family froze in their tracks, as if they’d run into someone they would rather not meet. Grandpa stood in the middle of the street, an awkward smile on his face.

  ‘Yingzi,’ he called to his granddaughter. ‘Come to the school tonight and listen to some songs and stories. It’ll be more fun than staying home and watching television.’