Dream of Ding Village is the novel behind the film Love for Life. It tells the story of a village ravaged by AIDS, though the illness is referred to in the book as “the fever.” Before reading it, I expected a bleak and suffocating story, the kind that presses tragedy directly onto the page. But the novel is not really written that way. The disease is rarely described head-on. It is more like the ground beneath everyone’s feet: always present, always shaking, but not always named.
What the book really follows is the way people live with one another after catastrophe has already arrived. There are quarrels over profit, struggles for power, desire, love, calculation, and betrayal. In that sense, AIDS could almost be replaced by another spreading terminal illness and the story would still stand. The novel is less about the disease itself than about what sickness exposes in people.
One of the central figures is Old Ding, a man in his sixties who works as the gatekeeper of the village primary school. His son had once been a blood seller, one of the people involved in the business that helped bring disaster to the village. Because of this, Old Ding carries a sense of guilt on his son’s behalf. He feels that his family owes a debt to the infected villagers. To make amends, he gathers the sick people into the school, giving them a place to live and attempting to manage their daily life there.
But the people who move into the school do not become noble simply because they are dying. They are still ordinary people, and ordinary people can be greedy. They steal, fight for influence, and compete over petty advantage. Some even mix stones into the grain they turn in. They divide up school property and carry it back home. These are people with little time left, yet they still spend their strength scheming, grabbing, and making sure they do not lose out.
The village itself feels almost stripped of warmth. There are hardly any genuinely good people in it. Most follow whoever has money or power. They poison a twelve-year-old child, dig up a grave only three days after burial, and carry away the school’s desks, benches, blackboards, and basketball hoops. When trees are available to cut, they rush to chop them down, as if being one step late would mean suffering a loss.
What is especially striking is that they do not seem afraid of the sick. They eat together, talk together, and continue mixing with one another. In reality, people would probably avoid the infected and flee as far away as possible. Yet in the book, fear of contagion is not what dominates the village. Greed, resentment, and opportunism are stronger.
There is also a pair of lovers who come together because of the illness. Both are rejected by their original spouses after becoming sick. At first, their relationship seems like a way to relieve desire and loneliness, but it slowly turns into love. They make vows to each other and decide that, after death, they want to be buried together. To make their relationship legitimate, they must first divorce their original partners.
At this point, their spouses begin demanding more. The two lovers are already ill and cannot afford to wait, so they endure the humiliation and agree to the terms. In a painful way, they are grateful for the disease: it allows them to find love, and it also lets them see clearly what kind of people their spouses really are.
Old Ding’s eldest son is one of the ugliest figures in the novel. After becoming deputy director of the county’s fever committee, he starts making money from coffins, and later from arranging ghost marriages. He profits from the dead without shame. In his eyes, everything can be turned into business.
His past is just as ruthless. He once used 700 ml blood bags while pretending they were 500 ml, and reused needles for blood draws. Later, when coffins are distributed from above, he relies on connections to monopolize their sale. He even wants to dig up his own son’s bones to match them in a ghost marriage. Other people’s lives, deaths, grief, and bodies are all just tools for making money.
By the end, the village is exhausted. The trees have been cut down, a severe drought arrives, and the buildings and concrete roads once built during the plasma economy fall into ruin. The infected villagers die out, and the living move away. Everywhere the eye reaches, there is only a lifeless, decaying stillness.
The story is told in a plain and steady way, with language that appears simple but carries great force. The characters are vivid and sharply drawn. What the novel reveals most clearly is not merely the suffering caused by disease, but the greed and ugliness that can surface when a community is pushed to the edge. Beneath the calmness of its narration, there is a deep despair toward the world it describes.