Narrating death in Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village

Abstract

Building on the real story of the tragic results of the blood-selling business in China’s Henan province in the 1990s, Dream of Ding Village (2006), the first Chinese novel to deal with AIDS in China, represents Chinese peasants’ complex relationship with wealth, power, desire, and death. In the novel, desires for wealth and power both lead to and fight against death. The novel also narrates an experience in which trauma is always folded within a duration that mixes past, present, and future, combining different perspectives. Through the depiction of an ill society filled with insanity and official corruption, the author Yan Lianke offers an existential parable that embraces absurdity and nihilism in contemporary post socialist China.