Archive for November, 2021

In Welcome to Our Hillbrow, the author is highly critical of the treatment of foreigners/immigrants in post-apartheid South Africa. Right off the bat, readers are given a sense of how grave the hatred or bias against immigrants in Hillbrow is. I decided to do some research of my own and see how during COVID-19, the […]

After writing Dream of Ding Village, and with the recent rise in the book’s popularity, Yan Lianke has given several interviews to provide more insight into the book and into his writing in general, and several articles about him have been written. One of these articles written in 2006—the year the book was published—especially interested me. The article focuses […]

Welcome to our Hillbrow… Welcome to our Hillbrow, the land where crime, prostitution, and violence prevails, the land where laws do not bind its people. Throughout the novel, we observed multiple cases where violence takes place in Hillbrow, from a seven years old child getting hit by a car to hearing gunshots ringing in the […]

A recurring theme of Contagion literature is death – and boy did the authors come up with creative ways to kill off our beloved characters amid pandemics. Some deaths were as memorable as the singer in Orpheus collapsing in the spotlight (Camus), others were private as Tarrou’s final exhale (Camus), and few were revealed abruptly […]

In Yan Lianke’s Ding village, blood represents the possibility of prosperity and creates a chance to increase one’s economic standing. The commodification of blood indirectly leads to a lot of the deaths we see in the story through the reuse of infected needles. The irony is that the blood, intended to give life, instead takes it […]

Just wanted to share these very relevant articles that I read a while ago. The Coffin Business Is Booming in Central America Due to Gang Violence This first one is almost a modern-day mirror of the events of Ding Village as it follows how one family in El Salvador switched from the bakery business to producing […]

In a previous conveners post, Listen to the Dead Man Sing, the authors explained how “in Chinese culture, there is the idea of doing good (积福）to pay back your sin, so you will have a good afterlife [and how] these themes and ideas are also shown throughout the novel.” The authors highlighted how in Chinese society […]