This allows time to synthesize and translate your questions.ĭrawing on his experiences in the military and the Cultural Revolution, Yan is a satirist and one of world’s greatest chroniclers of modern Chinese society. Preference will be given to those questions submitted by Monday, April 5. Please register in advance, where you can also submit a question for Yan. Students from participating schools will also attend this event and will pose pre-submitted, translated questions to Yan during the audience Q&A.

Great World Texts connects scholars at UW-Madison with high school teachers and students across the state through the shared project of reading and discussing a classic piece of literature. During the 2020-2021 Great World Texts in Wisconsin program, teachers and students at 26 high schools throughout the state are reading Dream of Ding Village. Presented in partnership with Wisconsin Book Festival. This talk is free and open to the public.

How does the Chinese public health system work? What are the inner lives of the suffering and those who allow suffering? What do we do with our fear and uncertainty in a time of illness? And ultimately, what is our responsibility as participants in a public health crisis, and how can we respond here in Wisconsin? Yan’s virtual visit provides us an opportunity to ask the questions on all of our minds during this moment of global health crisis. Officially censored upon its Chinese publication, Dream of Ding Village was the result of three years of undercover work by Yan, who once worked as an assistant to a well-known Beijing anthropologist in an effort to study a small village decimated by HIV/AIDS as a result of unregulated blood selling. He will reflect on the novel’s perspective on pandemic profiteering, government corruption, as well as trauma and hope. In this special virtual Humanities Without Boundaries talk, Yan will discuss his experiences researching and writing Dream of Ding Village, the prescient story of a public health crisis of the 1990s when rural villages selling their blood led to an AIDS outbreak. Yan Lianke is a Chinese novelist frequently mentioned for the Nobel Prize for Literature he’s often called the country’s most controversial writer.

Dream of ding village review