Project Descriptions
Ava Berdelman | Replica of an HIV molecule with an incorporated trivia game
What is “The Fever?!”
My project is a large replica of an HIV molecule. However, the arms on the molecule are pieces of paper that have trivia questions on them. While the project is a model, it also is a trivia game, which is where the majority of my information and analysis is shared. In Dream of Ding Village, one of the main problems that the village faces is the lack of information and education on this “fever.” I think that to better understand what challenges the characters were facing and the changes they went through because of it, it is necessary to learn about the infection itself. The trivia questions range from topics about what HIV/AIDS is, to the history behind the AIDS epidemic in China. It will help educate and teach the information that the characters in the story did not have access to and will show how the infection changed Ding Village, and China as a whole. Many of the questions have information that ties into the plot in the book or the quotes that I analyzed as well to give more information.
Meghan Oakes, Jennsen Berg, Brianna Hershberger | Creative Tree Model with interactive leaves
The Blood Tree
The blood tree focuses on the trees in China and the color of leaves. Dream of Ding Village talks a lot about colors and also how the colors relate to leaves on a tree. We made a tree where the colors of the leaves were the same colors as they were talked about in the book. We made them bright green at the top and slowly getting darker and eventually purple, and this shows how people began to get sick. There are leaves on the ground by the tree and that is supposed to represent how people in Ding Village got sick with HIV/AIDs and died so easily and fast, like falling leaves. We wanted to focus on showing how people so easily died from HIV/AIDS and so we chose a tree to represent/symbolize that. The tree represents the text because of how the text talks about how the colors of the leaves changed from green, to yellow, to brown, and to a purplish color as more and more people began to be infected. The colors on our tree are the same and there is information on the leaves about HIV/AIDS in China. The leaves show how easily people got infected and died.
Tessa Whitcomb, Hannah Chung, Anna Dailey, and Lily Molash | Choose your Own adventure
Personal choices and consequences of the blood boom
Personalizing social issues has been proven to help raise awareness, engagement, develop empathy for general audiences. For our analysis project, we created a “choose your own adventure” story based on the novel, Dream of Ding Village. The readers are immersed in Ding Village during the peak blood-selling trends. The reader assimilates a brief description of the current situation and selects a choice between two different pathways. Many of these situations mirror the same circumstances characters directly faced in the book. As the story progresses, the readers must accept responsibility for their past actions and reap the consequences, good or bad. External variables are incorporated into the storyline, throwing in unseen events and creating a darker atmosphere. At the end of each path, there is a concise reflection, recapping the journey and connecting examples from the text into individual experiences. Characters who chose similarly to the readers will also be mentioned. We rely on methods from the youthful element of storytelling to subject the reader to higher emotion-connected thinking. This allows for easier connection and comprehension of the text and pushes meaning behind character choices. By putting readers into the world of a character, they begin to understand smaller details and feel more empathy toward the real-life AIDS crisis. We featured both protagonist and antagonist paths, exploring past the protagonist-oriented book. Multiple viewpoints are analyzed and added to explain different viewpoints and situations. We found it important to explain that the outcome of the book could have been very different if the bloodheads had chosen to stay clean, to create the possibility of a safe blood economy. Our less traditional style of writing uses the second person to create a personal connection to the text and draw in readers.
Max Kuerschner, Hans Larson, Luke Schaefer, and Faith Galica
Our project is about the healing effects music has on people, comparable to its lucid effects on Ma Xianglin when he performed for Ding Village in Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village. Music has played a crucial role in all of our group members’ lives and we could relate to the feelings of weightlessness Ma Xianglin experienced even though his death was near, for a moment, he was as healthy and happy as could be. His soul was free. We created a rendition of one of our favorite songs, Don’t Stop Believing by Journey and titled it, Music Can be Healing.
Rachael Weickert and Maggie Kriege | Designed and painted ¨coffin¨
The Bloodheads Masterpiece
For this project we made a coffin that represents the significance of the afterlife for the dead. Throughout the novel Dream of Ding Village, death became an everyday occurrence, making coffins a novelty for families. The wealthy were able to afford expensive coffins with specialty carvings with items that would benefit the deceased in the afterlife. Every detail has a certain meaning, such as the dragon and the phoenix, which represent prosperity and success. With the mass production of coffins, it was very rare to get them with special carvings. As the AIDS crisis grew in China, so did the death rates, making death a common occurrence for people. As these rates grew, so did the amount of funerals, and this caused them to transition quickly from the mourning of the deceased to the celebration of life.
Aidan Kropidlowski |Visual Representation of the Novel
Face-off Movie Poster
My project is an art piece, reminiscent of a movie poster. It was done completely with several types of pencils – regular pencils, sketching pencils, and colored pencils. It focuses on the recurring theme of coffins within Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke. The coffins were the start of a wedge being driven between Shuiyang and Hui. The coffin selling was what really sent Hui down the path of business schemes. Ding Shuiyang being the grandfather to the deceased narrator and Ding Hui being the father. I chose for the only colors in the piece to be red and gold to allow them to stick out. Their faces are black and white to represent the dreariness of death becoming commonplace. The golden chinese character on the coffin – “Greed”. The red cracks beneath and above the coffin represent the prominent theme of blood-selling within the novel.
Caitie Schneider, Olivia Navin, and Jade Laibly | Four tree diagrams that follow the four seasons
Leaf Fever
The intriguing story Dream of Ding Village by YAN Lianke inspired us to create a project reflecting the progressing symptoms of AIDs through the developmental seasons of trees over a year’s time span. The quote that motivated our project helped us to develop a deep analysis and inspired our work. “The day he buried his brother, my dad moved his family to the city. They were leaving Ding Village forever, and they had no intention of ever coming back. They blew out of town faster than the fallen leaves carried on an autumn wind. As for the chances of my family ever returning to Ding Village, it was as likely as a pile of leaves hopping back on to the tree they had fallen from. There was no going back to the tree” (Yan 273). When reading this story, the seasons seemed to play a major role in the lives of those living with the fever. Just like the climate impacts a tree’s condition, it can also influence those infected especially because AIDs weakens a person’s immune system. As the leaves change and fall off, it signifies the falling apart of a person as each flaw continues to grow ultimately leading to death. This project consists of four tree diagrams that represent the four different seasons. Located on the trees are leaves which contain symptoms of the fever that demonstrate the phases of AIDs and provide a visual of the progression in not only the effects of the disease, but also the leaves on a tree.
Ian Smith and Jennifer Mehn | Interactive and symbolic group activity
Agency of Info Protection Center ( A.O.I.P.C )
This Project explains and shows how China censors media, info, and news from their people. It elaborates on how China’s government controls what they think and what they know compared to what the U.S.A shares with their country. This also amplifies the reasoning in Which China would want to censor many books including the novel Dream Of Ding Village. We use sticky notes as a way for people to write what they know about any political or social subject, then place them in or on top of the bowl representing the different flow of information between people. The bowl that is placed face down acts as a shield to China’s inside while the cut out of the U.S is taped to the top signifying the U.S.A information coming in and being blocked by China. We gathered multiple quotes from the novel, that also represents the censorship in China and exemplifies why China wanted this book censored.
Sarah Pizon | Interactive tree trivia presentation
The Leaves of Life
“They died like falling leaves. Their light extinguished from this world” (Yan 9 & 42)
My project is an interactive game of trivia where teams pick cards with facts and important information on the HIV and AIDS crisis. Something that people tend to take for granted is knowledge. I created my project as an attempt to educate my peers on HIV and AIDS to help prevent the spread on a local level. Now that people know how AIDS is spread, they are being more cautious unlike so many people who didn’t know and died because of it. Similar to the book, the cards will gradually diminish until nothing is left. Slowly, the people of Ding village began to fade away, and it became such a common occurrence that it meant no more to anyone than leaves falling off of trees. The leaves in this case represent their life leaving the world as it is an action that cannot be undone. When a leaf falls, it is almost never alone, and just like leaves, the people were falling by the dozens per village until eventually, the village was as bare as a tree in winter. Towards the end of the book, the whole village chopped down tree after tree, and although each life was not directly tied to a tree, it was a tangible representation of what the virus had done to the village. The falling of the leaves is my attempt at putting the losses during the AIDS crisis into perspective, just like the author Yan Lianke did.