State of power

Lead review

When the Chinese writer Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012 and was warmly lauded by the Communist government, he became one of the most reviled winners in the history of that great honour.

Among the more benign accusations lobbed at him was that he was undeserving. Herta Müller, a fellow literary laureate, called the choice “a catastrophe”; Salman Rushdie called him “a patsy” for not supporting the jailed Chinese Nobel laureate and dissident Liu Xiaobo; and he was labelled an apologist for not denouncing the government. By the time he made his acceptance speech, Mo said he felt as if he were watching a play about someone else.

Too easily lost in all this howling was Mo’s writing. His latest novel, Frog, gracefully and colloquially translated by Howard Goldblatt, is not the work of a hack or an ideologue. It is a rich and troubling epic — and a very human story — about China’s one-child policy, and Western readers who think they understand how this works have another think coming. Frog is a startlingly dramatic book because of its clashes between prospective parents and family planners (read: government abortionists) who truly believe they are doing what is best, not just following orders.

In retrospect and from afar, it may seem as if China enforced this policy with an iron fist and no resistance. Hardly. The two main characters in Frog — set in a part of northeastern China that is Mo’s version of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County — are the narrator, who uses the pen name Tadpole, and his Aunt Gugu, whom he regards as an intrepid heroine. Gugu was born in 1937 and was the first modern midwife that Tadpole’s hometown had ever known.

In fact, she was the first person to approach childbirth as anything but an unskilled witch. Gugu’s descriptions of the old practitioners’ methods are chilling: “They grew long fingernails, their eyes emitted green will-o’-the-wisp-like glimmers, and their breath stank,” Mo writes. “She said they pressed down on the mother’s belly with rolling pins and stuffed rags in their mouths to keep the foetuses from coming out there.”

These primitive methods were in place before Gugu, as a teenager, performed her first delivery, combining the compassion of a doctor with the authority of a general. She might have had a brilliant career as a doctor and party officer, had she not fallen in love in 1960 with an air force pilot who then defected to Taiwan to join Chiang Kai-shek. Had the pilot not referred to Gugu as “Red Blockhead” in his diary, thanks to her party loyalty and his covert bourgeois thinking, who knows what the price of her treason would have been?

Mo Yan, whose real name is Guan Moye, says everything he needs to about the Cultural Revolution with a scene in which Tadpole and other schoolboys eat coal and claim to find it delicious. The strength of Frog is bleak humour, not overworked misery. So yes, the famine is terrible, but it abates with such a bumper crop of sweet potatoes that starving young adults suddenly become fertile again. And along come the pregnancies that could bring back hunger if all those children were allowed to be born.

The family planning rules set by the government are not one-note. More than one baby is allowed if the family is not blessed with a son, but the children must be spaced eight years apart. Try telling that to newly healthy and hot-blooded young couples. Actually, Gugu does try to tell them; educating becomes her job, and the book describes her efforts to work for the sake of the greater good. But in case after case, she is undone by situations that spiral almost into madness. In one case, Gugu stands outside a household that harbours a pregnant woman, threatening to knock down a precious tree of life, then to knock down other neighbours’ houses and leave the father of the expectant mother financially responsible.

What has she become? Throughout the book, Tadpole asks himself and an unknown authority figure that question. (This book’s chapters are couched as Tadpole’s long letters to this older man. Ultimately, Tadpole writes a disappointingly clumsy little play about Gugu’s life and sends that, too.) Is she a good woman gone mad? Is she a saviour or destroyer of lives, a friend to women or a danger to them? Another unforgettable part of the book has the forces led by Gugu trying to trap a very pregnant woman before she can give birth. A foetus in the womb is still fair game for her. But if it can manage to be born, it becomes a Chinese citizen, and she has no right to take its life anymore.

To make these matters even more surreal (Mo’s imagery and hothouse atmospherics have justly led to comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez), there are the frogs of the title. This is not just a reference to Tadpole and his nickname. Their slimy presence signifies every stage of fecundity, from sperm to baby; they even come to represent a black market in surrogate infants for the childless. They are objects of both horror and desire, and they give the book a strange, nightmarish quality that undermines all the government-imposed orderliness that is supposed to prevail.

There is more magic in the creation of dolls that look like babies and are treated like children by women eager to determine exactly what kind of children they will produce. One artist has some unaccountable power to create just the right doll for the right person, and Frog is just as comfortable with his inexplicable, mystical talent as it is with China’s concrete reproductive rules. Which part of this story is stranger? If Mo Yan were nothing more than what his detractors make of him, this hauntingly inventive book would have an answer.