I went for an outdoor photo exhibition held at the central square of the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall, and the displayed pictures feature facets of modern China in the past century. I hold strong sentiment for one of the photos there.
Granny Ren and her family were subsistence farmers living in a poor, rural village of Hunan province, China. Her husband died at an early age, and she had toiled hard to raise her six sons. It paid off eventually, when all her sons married and together with new members of the family, continued to labour hard on the soil against all odds. However, it proved to involve much more than sheer spirit and will to defy the odds, and life was becoming too harsh for the family to bear.
Opportunity to improve their conditions struck when a medical team arrived in the village and offered the villagers hefty sums of cash in exchange for their blood. Hospitals in affluent, urban cities of China have always been low in their blood banks, and rural villages offer a convenient source of blood. It would be easy anyway, with rural farms susceptible to natural disasters and poor weather that discouraged any harvest at times, and all it took were carrot sticks of money.
Granny Ren's sons and daugthers-in-law, along with many other villagers, participated in blood transfusions with the medical team, and had managed to survive the harsh winter with their cash rewards. Within the next few years, however, Granny Ren's family members died successively, and it was known only later that the cause for this was AIDS. Granny Ren was not involved in any unclean blood transfusion then, but had contracted the HIV virus when she cleansed and dressed the infected wounds of her now-deceased fourth eldest son. Her whole family was wiped out within years, and family photos or portraits hung in her room have now become painful memories for the tormented soul of Granny Ren.
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