Dream of Ding Village (3 page)

‘The new medicine will be here any day now,’ he announced loudly. ‘Xianglin, when do you want to give your concert?’

The old musician beamed. ‘Tonight. Or if that’s too soon, tomorrow night. Tell the villagers I’ll sing anything they like, for as long as they want to listen.’

After parting from Ma Xianglin with promises, Grandpa continued walking towards our house. My family lived on New Street, south of the village. Built during the blood boom,
New Street was the newest street in the village. If you got rich from buying or selling blood, you moved your family from the village centre to New Street and built a brand new two-storey house, which was as high as local building regulations allowed. Each lot was about one
mu
, one-sixth of an acre, with a house at one end and brick walls enclosing the other three sides. Every house was covered in white ceramic tiles, and the walls were built from machine-made red brick. Red and white: the colours of joy and sorrow. All year round, the neighbourhood gave off the smell of newness and wealth. There was also a tinge of gold and a whiff of sulphur. The whole street smelled of sulphur, brick and mortar.

In the midst of all this stood our house. Night and day, the stench of sulphur filled our nostrils, stung our eyes and provoked people to envy. Everyone wanted a house on New Street, and those who couldn’t afford one were willing to sell their blood to get it.

That’s how they got the fever.

In all, about two-dozen families lived on New Street. At the head of every household was a blood merchant, or ‘bloodhead’. The bloodheads made more money than anybody else and that’s why they could afford to live on New Street. They moved south of the village, and built new houses. It was the bloodheads who made New Street what it was.

My father was the first blood merchant in the village and he soon became the richest. That is the reason why our house, which was built at the very centre of New Street, was three-storeys high, even though the local building regulations limited each house to only two. If anyone else had tried to do the same, the government would have put a stop to it. But when my father added a third storey, no one seemed to mind.

We didn’t set out to build a three-storey home, not at first. When everyone else was living in thatched, mud-brick cottages, my father built a single-storey house of brick and tiles. When everyone else started building brick-and-tile houses, my father tore down ours and built a new two-storey in its place. When everyone else started building two-storey
houses, my father added a third storey. When other people tried to add a third storey or build a three-storey home from the ground up, the government stepped in, saying that regulations limited model villages to buildings of no more than two storys.

But our house had three storeys: one more than anyone else.

Like most people in the village, we had a pig pen and a chicken coop in our courtyard. But they seemed out of place, they didn’t match the architecture of our house. Even the pigeon cages beneath the eaves seemed out of place. In designing our house, my father had tried to copy the fancy western-style homes that he’d seen in the big city of Kaifeng. He ordered pink-and-white marble tiles for the floors and paved the courtyard with square slabs of concrete. Instead of a tried and true outdoor squat toilet of the sort that Chinese people had been using successfully for hundreds, even thousands of years, we had an indoor toilet made of white porcelain. But my parents, unable to adapt to shitting while sitting down, ended up building a squat latrine behind the house, anyway.

We also had a washing machine and a laundry room, but my mother preferred to take her basin out into the courtyard to do the washing there.

The toilet and the washing machine were just for show. Ditto for the freezer and the refrigerator, the dining room and dining table. We had these things in our house, but only to show that we could afford them. None of us actually used them.

When Grandpa arrived at our house that evening, he found the front gate locked and the whole family out in the courtyard having their dinner of steamed buns, rice soup and a stew of glass noodles, turnip and cabbage. Confetti-sized bits of red pepper clung to the cabbage, making it look like someone had shredded a Chinese New Year’s calendar into the stew. Seated on low stools around a small table in the centre of the courtyard, my parents and sister were in the middle of eating their dinner when they heard a knock at the gate and saw that it was Grandpa.

My little sister let him in and closed the gate. My mother pulled up another stool and ladled out an extra bowl of soup. Grandpa picked up his chopsticks, but instead of eating, he stared at my father as if he were a stranger. There was no warmth in Grandpa’s eyes.

My father gazed back at Grandpa just as coldly. Two complete strangers.

‘Dad, why aren’t you eating?’ he asked, finally.

‘Son, there’s something weighing on my mind and I’ve got to say it.’

‘Can’t it wait until we’ve eaten?’

‘No, I won’t be able to eat a bite or sleep a wink until I say this.’

My father set down his bowl, laid his chopsticks across the rim and cast a sideways glance at Grandpa. ‘All right, go ahead.’

‘I had a meeting in the county today …’ Grandpa began.

‘And they told you that the fever is AIDS, and that AIDS is a new and incurable disease, right?’ my father interrupted.

‘You might as well eat your dinner, Dad, because you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. Two out of three people in the village know it. It’s just the sick ones who don’t, and most of them are just pretending not to know.’ He looked at Grandpa with disdain. It was the sort of glance a student might give a teacher setting an exam on some subject his students had long since mastered. Then, ignoring Grandpa, he took up his bowl and chopsticks and buried himself in his meal.

Grandpa was a teacher, sort of. He had spent his whole life working in the school and ringing the school bell. Now, in his sixtieth year, he was still the designated caretaker and bell-ringer. Sometimes, when one of the teachers got sick or couldn’t teach for some reason, he was called in to take their place. On these occasions, he might spend half a day teaching the opening stanzas of the
Three-Character Classic
, which he would write out in painstaking, platter-sized characters on the blackboard.

Dad had once been a student in Grandpa’s class, but he no longer deferred to him as a former teacher. Grandpa could see the disrespect in his son’s eyes. As he watched my father take up his bowl and continue eating, Grandpa gently set down his own bowl and chopsticks on the table.

After a long silence, he said: ‘Son, it’s not like I’m asking you to commit suicide. I just think you should kowtow in front of the villagers and apologize for what you’ve done.’

My father glared at him. ‘Why should I?’

‘Because you were a bloodhead.’

‘So was everyone who lives on this street.’

‘They were just following your lead. No one made as much blood money as you.’

My father slammed down his bowl, spilling soup all over the table. He threw down his chopsticks. They rolled across the tabletop and clattered to the ground.

‘Dad,’ he said, glaring at Grandpa. ‘If you ever raise this subject again, you’re no father to me. And you can forget about me supporting you in your old age, or even going to your funeral.’

Grandpa sat woodenly, staring down at the table. Finally, he spoke.

‘Son, I’m begging you … get down on your knees and apologize to the villagers. How can you refuse an old man?’ he said softly.

‘Dad, I think you should leave,’ my father was nearly shouting. ‘Because if you say another word, you’re no father to me.’

‘Hui, it’s not that much to ask. One little apology and we can put this all behind us.’

‘Get out,’ my father screamed. ‘You’re not my father and I’m not your son!’

Grandpa paused for a moment to take in my father’s words. ‘More than forty people in this village have died,’ he said as he stood up to leave. ‘That makes forty apologies, forty kowtows. Or is that too exhausting for you? Would it kill you to apologize?’

Grandpa suddenly looked weary, as if the effort of making this speech had exhausted him. He glanced at my mother, then at my little sister Yingzi.

‘Yingzi, come to school tomorrow and I’ll help you make up those missed classes. Your regular teacher isn’t coming back, so I’ll be teaching language class from now on.’

When Grandpa left, no one bothered to see him to the door. He slowly shuffled out, his back hunched and his head bowed, like an old mountain goat after a long day’s trek.

There are only three streets in our village. One runs east to west, the other two run north to south. Before New Street, the village streets formed a perfect cross, the same shape as the Chinese ideograph meaning ‘ten’. After New Street was added, the village looked more like a cross with a horizontal line underneath, the same as the Chinese ideograph meaning ‘earth’.

After his fight with my dad, Grandpa left New Street and went to my uncle’s house, where he brooded for a while before walking the mile back to the elementary school. The school had originally been part of a village temple dedicated to Guan Yu, the god of wealth. Guan Yu’s shrine had occupied the main hall and the classrooms were in an adjacent wing. For decades the villagers had come to the temple to burn incense and pray for wealth, but when they started getting rich from selling blood, they tore down the temple. They didn’t believe in Guan Yu any more: they believed in selling blood.

After the villagers converted to blood-selling, they built a new school on several acres of uncultivated land, just south of the village. They built a red-brick wall and a two-storey schoolhouse facing east. They installed plate glass in all the windows and wooden signs on all the classroom doors: ‘Grade One, Class One’; ‘Grade Two, Class One’, ‘Grade Three, Class One’, although because the village was so small, there was never more than one class per grade. A basketball hoop was put up in the schoolyard, and a wooden placard reading Ding Village Elementary School was hung from the main gate. And
that was it: Ding Village had a brand new school. Grandpa moved in as the permanent caretaker. And besides Grandpa, there were two other teachers, one to teach mathematics and one for language. Both were young and had been hired from outside the village. The only thing was … when they found out that Ding Village had the fever, they both stopped teaching and never came back.

No way were they coming back
.

No way in hell
.

And so Grandpa found himself alone in the school. He was caretaker to the doors and plate-glass windows. He looked after the desks, chairs and blackboards. Grandpa was the school watchman in the wretched days of fever that swept the village and the plain.

Even now, years later, the place still had that new-school sulphur smell. On certain late autumn nights, the fumes from the school were even stronger than those from New Street. But Grandpa always found the smell of sulphur to be calming. It set his mind at ease, and made him think of days gone by.

On this particular autumn evening, dusk had come and gone and the school was bathed in silence. The blanketing silence of the plain, a quiet that seeped into the schoolhouse and billowed out again like fog. Grandpa sat on the base of the basketball hoop in the centre of the schoolyard and raised his head to the sky, enjoying the feeling of the moist autumn air on his face. It was only then that he realized he was hungry. Because of his trip to the county, he’d hardly eaten that day. His hunger set his nerves on edge and made his heart feel tight in his chest. With each pang of hunger, each tug of his nerves, Grandpa’s shoulders trembled.

His mind drifted back to springtime many years earlier. One by one, the events appeared before his eyes as if it were yesterday. Like freshly budding leaves, the images unfurled and rose up before him, as crystal clear as the full moon in the sky.

Grandpa saw each detail of that spring with perfect clarity, and he
knew
.

A sudden gust of wind set the leaves rustling in the trees, reminding him of a long-forgotten spring. And with that spring came the county Director of Education, with two cadres in tow, to mobilize the villagers to sell their blood. It was only halfway into the spring, but the village had already settled into the warmth and comforts of the season, the fresh spring air and pleasant fragrances wafting through the streets. Until, that is, until the Director of Education blew in to meet with Li Sanren, the village mayor, and informed him that the higher-ups had decided to organize a blood-selling drive among the villagers.

‘You want them to do what?’ Mayor Li’s jaw had dropped in shock.

‘Good Lord. Who ever heard of asking people to sell their blood?’

Three days later, when the mayor had still not held a meeting to mobilize the villagers to sell their blood, the county director made another visit to Ding Village. While the director pleaded his case, Mayor Li squatted on the ground and chainsmoked in silence.

A fortnight later, the director returned again. This time, he hadn’t come to lobby the mayor about the blood drive, but to sack him.

After forty years as the mayor of Ding Village, Li Sanren was fired from his post.

Following a brief announcement, a village meeting was held. Li Sanren sat through the meeting slack-jawed, too shocked to speak. Not that it mattered, because the county director did most of the talking. After taking control of the meeting, he made a personal appeal to the villagers to sell their blood. He talked at length about the past, the future, the development of a ‘plasma economy’ and the need for a ‘strong and prosperous China’.

When he had finished his spiel, the director stared at the silent villagers.

‘Well, did you hear what I said? Speak up!’ he barked. ‘I’m not here just to hear the sound of my own voice, you know.
What’s wrong with you people? Did you leave your ears at home? Has the cat got your tongues?’