5 The fever with no name Genre-blending responses to the HIV-tainted blood scandal in 1990s China Marta Hanson Among the many responses to HIV/AIDS in modern China – medical, political, economic, sociological, national, and international – the cultural responses have been considerably powerful. In the past ten years, artists have written novels, produced documentaries, and even made a major feature-length film in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in China.1 One of the best-known critical novelists in China today, Yan Lianke 阎连科 (b. 1958), wrote the novel Dream of Ding Village (丁庄梦, copyright 2005; Hong Kong 2006; English translation 2009) as a scath- ing critique of how the Chinese government both contributed to and poorly han- dled the HIV/AIDS crisis in his native Henan province. He interviewed survivors, physicians, and even blood merchants who experienced first-hand the HIV/AIDS ‘tainted blood’ scandal in rural Henan of the 1990s giving the novel authenticity, depth, and heft. Although Yan chose a child-ghost narrator, the Dream is clearly a realistic novel. After signing a contract with Shanghai Arts Press he promised to donate 50,000 yuan of royalties to Xinzhuang village where he researched the AIDS epidemic in rural Henan, further blurring the fiction-reality line. The Chi- nese government censors responded by banning the Dream in Mainland China (Wang 2014: 151). Even before director Gu Changwei 顾长卫 (b. 1957) began making a feature film based on Yan’s banned book, he and his wife Jiang Wenli 蒋雯丽 (b. 1969) sought to work with ordinary people living with HIV/AIDS as part of the process of making the film. He publicly invited members of HIV/AIDS communities to participate in making a film based on Yan’sDream and conceived of a related doc- umentary filmed on the set (Li 2016: 231). Some officials in the Health Ministry supported Gu’s proposal to combine a feature film with a documentary as integral parts of a broader multimedia HIV/AIDS public health education campaign in conjunction with the Film Bureau State Administration of Radio, Film, & TV. At the time, Gu’s wife Jiang Wenli was also a volunteer AIDS educator for the Min- istry of Health. This may explain their proposal as well as why three other AIDS educators/performers played roles in the film Qian( 2016: 228, fn39). Released in 2011, the resulting Love for Life (Zui ai 最爱) was the first feature- length movie to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Chinese popular culture. Its sympathetic portrayal of HIV+ characters attempts to counter the real-life stig- matization and discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS in China. 84 Marta Hanson As part of this state-sponsored HIV/AIDS public health education campaign, Zhao Liang 赵亮 (d. 1971), one of China’s best-known independent documentary filmmakers, was invited to make the documentary.2 The resulting Together (Zai yiqi 在一起) combines footage of the making of Love for Life and interviews with the film’s HIV+ and non-HIV+ actors and extras with at-home interviews and online exchanges that Zhao Liang arranged through online social networks with people living with HIV/AIDS in China. Zhao Liang clarified the intent of this multimedia collaboration with an intro- duction to his documentary in Chinese and the following English translation: In 2009, director Gu Changwei reached out to the public, seeking HIV posi- tive people to participate in the making of the film Tale of Magic.3 By hav- ing HIV+ people working and living with members of his cast and crew, he hoped it would strengthen the public’s understanding of AIDS, and reduce discrimination against HIV positive people. We documented this process.4 Considered together, Dream of Ding Village, Love For Life, and Together offer a unique case study of the power of blending different cultural forms to tell new stories that have potential to improve epidemiological outcomes, affect social change, and possibly even transform individual lives.5 The following chapter first examines the Dream of Ding Village as a novelist’s direct response to the HIV–tainted blood scandal in rural Henan in the 1990s, secondly turns to Gu Changwei’s Love for Life as part of a government-supported public-health cam- paign, and thirdly discusses Zhao Liang’s documentary Together as navigating the related fine line between independent expression and government censorship. These artists gave ‘the fever with no name’ not just a name but also a history with multiple stories, subplots, and fictional characters as well as actual human faces and testimonies. As the medical historian Charles E. Rosenberg succinctly wrote, ‘In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it’ (Rosenberg 1992: xiii, xxii). Once a dis- ease has been diagnosed, the disease concept itself can be used as a social diagno- sis of broader social ills that contributed to the disease’s manifestation and which the disease’s presence brings into sharper focus (Rosenberg 1992: xxii). Naming the fever in China as HIV/AIDS makes it newly visible as an epidemic with a unique history comprised of complex narratives. People can then use this history to diagnose the broader social, economic, and political problems that contributed to its emergence, exacerbation, and failures to adequately respond. The fever in the Dream The concrete road linking Ding Village with the outside world was built ten years ago, when everyone in the village was caught up in the blood-selling boom. As Grandpa stood at the roadside looking towards the village, a gust of wind seemed to clear his head and restore order to his muddled thoughts. Things he hadn’t understood before began to fall into place. For the first time since he’d left the The fever with no name 85 village early that morning to meet with the county cadres, the fog seemed to lift. There, standing at the roadside that linked Ding Village to the rest of the world, realization dawned on him. The realization that with clouds comes the rain. That late autumn begets winter’s chill. That those who had sold their blood ten years ago would now have the fever. And that those with the fever would die, as surely as the falling leaves. – The fever hid in blood; Grandpa hid in dreams. – The fever loved its blood; Grandpa loved his dreams. (Yan 2009: 7–8) So begins the Dream of Ding Village. The definite article ‘the’ refers to an unspec- ified fever that parallels the central protagonist ‘Grandpa’. The blood where the fever hides is analogous to the dreams within which Grandpa hides. What is this fever that loved blood as much as this Grandpa loved his dreams? The narrative continues in italics with the dream Grandpa had over several nights: the cities he’d visited – Kaifeng and Wei County, with their underground net- works of pipes likes cobwebs – running thick with blood. And from the cracks and curvatures of pipes, from the l-bends and the u-bends, blood spurts like water. A fountain of brackish rain sprays the air; a bright-red assault on the senses. And there, upon the plain, he saw the wells and rivers all turned red, rancid with the stench of blood. In every city and every township, doctors wept as the fever spread. But on the streets of Ding Village, one doctor sat and laughed. Bathed in golden sunlight, the village was silent and peaceful, its residents behind locked doors. But, day by day, the doctor in his white lab coat, his physician’s bag at his feet, would sit perched upon a rock beneath the scholar trees and laugh. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. The sunshine would be filled with the sound of laughter. A big loud belly-laugh, ringing out as clear as a bell, strong enough to shake the trees, and make the yellow leaves rain down, as surely as the autumn breeze. (Yan 2009: 8) The water in the plumbing infrastructure of Kaifeng and Wei county as well as ‘the wells and rivers’ have all turned to blood, implicating state governance in the widespread contamination of what was once clean water. It’s the same blood that has carried ‘the fever’ to ‘every city and every township’ through the ‘net- works of pipes’ in humans as well as cities. Everywhere else physicians weep in despair; only the doctor in Ding Village appears to have gone mad. This short dream sequence signals the nightmare that will weave through the novel. As soon as Grandpa awakens, he is summoned to meet with the local ‘big- wigs’ or county officials. Because Ding Village’s mayor has died from the fever, Grandpa remains the only senior person in the village left to deal with the out- side world. He learned several things from this meeting about the fever that has 86 Marta Hanson ravaged Ding Village. First, and likely most important, ‘was that the fever wasn’t really a fever at all. Its proper medical name was Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS’ (Yan 2009: 9). The scandal behind the Dream This fictional opening matches well the historical reality in Henan province of the 1990s that Chinese villagers had no idea what was the ‘strange illness’ or ‘name- less fever’ that was killing them (Gittings 2001a: 15; Renwick 2002 377 fn2). After the post-Maoist ‘reform and opening’ policies in the late 1970s unraveled the com- mune system underlying the rural healthcare system, the state had to develop new ways to generate revenue for rural healthcare. Building on the blood donation sys- tems established during the Second Sino-Japanese War in Southwest China (Soon 2016) and since the 1950s in Henan province, state and health officials sought to deal with their financial shortfall in the 1990s by encouraging poor villagers to sell their blood and plasma for profit (Hayes 2005: 14; Jun 2011: 78).