extreme repulsion in a way i've never felt before

This afternoon I watched Whiplash and I had such a visceral reaction to it. It was such an intense film full of cruelty and humiliation and pain. Even now as I write about this my hands feel weak, my arms feel weak, my whole body feels weak as if I was stretched out so thin that I became two-dimensional and now I'm back to normal but also not really. I feel a little faint and sick to the core. I want to melt into a puddle of nothingness and let all the particles in my body dissipate and just cease to exist. Of course it's not just Whiplash making me feel like this. Whiplash made me feel a less strong version of this, but it reminded me of the one (as far as I remember) other thing that makes me feel like this: the blood industry in rural China. So a combination of these two things have made me feel this way.

In Scattered Sand: The Story of China's Rural Migrants by Hsiao-hung Pai the author dedicates two pages to talking about the blood industry. She looks at it through statistics and facts and is mainly talking about the AIDS crisis in Henan that rose out of it.

"Throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s, AIDS began to spread most widely in impoverished villages in Henan, where peasants augmented their income by selling their blood, for as little as 45 yuan per 800cc, at unsanitary blood collection stations sanctioned by local authorities and run by private businesses."

Then:

"Poorly informed villagers flooded into blood stations. The officials, collecting their blood cheaply using substandard practices and sanitation, profited; the villagers became infected with HIV."

And:

"The authorities didn't do anything to control the spread of AIDS, and continued to reap profits from the plasma economy."

But it's Yu Hua, in the "Grassroots" chapter of China in Ten Words that really brings the repulsion. I have a love/hate relationship with this man because his writing is so good but it is so violent and sad and makes me feel terrible. He writes from a personal and emotional perspective:

"I remember as a child seeing a man pay peasants for giving blood at the hospital. he dressed in a white coat just like a doctor, but it was grubby, with dirty gray stains on its elbows and seat; a cigarette invariably dangled from the corner of his mouth. [...] In the eyes of the peasants who, from poverty or from some yet more dire cause, had come forward to sell blood, he as sometimes even seen as a savior."

He groomed the peasants so that they would allow him to take blood "straight from their hearts." He also "made them understand that, before leaving home, they should make a point of picking up a couple of heads of cabbage, or a few tomatoes and a handful of eggs. When they presented to him their cabbages, tomatoes, or eggs, they would be paying him a compliment and addressing him with deference, whereas if they arrived empty-handed, this would be to forfeit language and lose the power of speech."

I seem to remember other details. Maybe they were from other books. I don't remember. But if I think too hard and too long about these illiterate peasants who know absolutely nothing except for the fact that cash flows in their veins, who are so poor that they have nothing left to give except for their own flesh, who sell the maximum amount of blood they can, letting it flow out of their bodies, straight from their heart, agua de vida, in exchange for enough money to buy a meal, maybe, and thinking it's a privilege to do so, and then getting sick and not knowing why and dying painfully and then being forgotten -- it's the worst feeling in the world. It's a different kind of emotion that I've never felt before. I don't know its name and I don't know what to do. I remember at first it was so strong and so intense, but now it's a bit better because it's been a while but I'll never get rid of it.

Oh, wait, I think I also felt this way when Mr Coates kept showing us that video about poverty that started out with 3 different scenes of childbirth. The childbirth, with the moans and screams of pain and the goo and the purple babies and the filth and everything, was already bad enough. But there was always a problem with the sound from the smartboard so he kept having to pause it, then call service technique, then play it, then start again. I must've watched those childbirth scenes four times at least. They definitely contributed to my ever-strengthening resolve not to give birth, ever.

Anyway.

I am never going to read Chronicles of a Blood Merchant.

I am also never going to look up the organ industry in China because I'm sure it's just as bad if not worse.