Dream of Ding Village Read Online Free PDF Page B

to dig, transforming the half-dry pit into a living spring. Water gurgled up past the rim of the hole and overflowed onto the dry sand. A broken chopstick, caught up in the eddy, was carried away like a willow twig.
    My twenty-three-year-old father sat back on his heels and laughed.
2
    It was after midnight when Grandpa went to bed. Images of blood-selling filled his dreams. He saw plainly the course of the fever: its causes and effects. He felt the pulse and flow of the blood-selling business and blood-wealth. Cause and effect were clear: what you plant in spring, you harvest in the autumn. You reap what you sow.
    Grandpa slept in a squat, two-room brick building next to the school gate. The only furnishings in the inner room were a bed and desk. The outer room contained a simple stove, stools, bowls and chopsticks, a basin and a chopping block. If there was one thing Grandpa knew, it was the importance of keeping those two rooms shipshape. Each night before bedtime, he stacked stools against the wall, arranged bowls and chopsticks on the chopping block and stowed pails of drinking water beneath the stove. In the inner room, he swept up bits of broken chalk and placed them in a box on the top-right-hand corner of the desk. He gathered piles of oldtextbooks and homework notebooks and stacked them in desk drawers. If Grandpa could keep his house in order, with a place for everything and everything in its place, then he could keep his dreams neat and orderly as well. And in the morning, when the sun rose and Grandpa opened his eyes, the dreams of the night before would stay with him, as vividly real as stalks of wheat in a field or beans upon a vine. Not a word forgotten, not a detail lost.
    Each night before bedtime, Grandpa put his house in order. And, each night, his dreams were as neat and orderly as the homework of a diligent student.
    In his dreams, he saw so clearly the events that had led to the blood-selling
.
    In his dreams, he finally understood
.
    With a clanging of hammers, they drove in the stakes of Ding Village’s first blood-collection station, a dark-green canvas tent that sprang from the soil like a fresh green turnip. Red lettering on a wooden signpost outside the tent identified it as the County Hospital Blood Bank. But on the first day, not a single villager came to sell blood. It was the same on the second day. On the third day, the county Director of Education showed up at the gate of the school in his Jeep. He had a few things to say to Grandpa.
    ‘Professor Ding, the county governor is going to fire me if I don’t get this blood station up and running. What do you suggest we do?
    ‘I’m not trying to put you in an awkward position, Professor Ding. Tomorrow I’ve arranged for trucks to take some people from Ding Village on a tour of Cai county. It is the richest county in Henan; a model for the whole province. All I need you to do is recruit one person from each household to join the tour.
    ‘In addition to giving each person a travel subsidy of ten yuan per day, we’ll also be passing through the provincial capital, so everyone will have the chance to see the sights and do some shopping.
    ‘I’m sorry, Professor, but if you don’t help me organize this trip, you needn’t bother ringing the bell at this school any more, because Ding Village won’t have a school.’
    With this, the Director of Education climbed back into his Jeep and set off for the next village on his list. The vehicle sped into the distance, the engine purring softly, unlike the noisy tractors that rumbled across the plain. Grandpa stood at the school gate and gazed at the clouds of exhaust that the Jeep left in its wake. His face had turned pale. He had always heard that Cai county, located in another region of Henan, was destitute. How on earth had it become a model of wealth for the entire province?
    After the county director breezed out of the village, Grandpa had no choice but to go door to door and try to recruit one