Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke Read Free Book Online

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.
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    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 withfull 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