By JULIA LOVELL FEB. 6, 2015
Credit Lisk Feng
In October 2012, Mo Yan became the first citizen of mainland China to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Since then, he has been attacked both inside and outside China for his collaboration with the Communist literary establishment: for his vice chairmanship of the state writers’ association, for remarking that censorship falls in the same category as airport security. In the summer of 2012, he controversially hand-copied, for a special commemorative edition, part of the 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” Mao Zedong’s statement of orthodoxy on the arts that became the theoretical ur-text of Chinese socialist realism and literary censorship. Yet readers will find little in “Frog,” Howard Goldblatt’s fluent translation of Mo Yan’s 2009 novel about his country’s one-child policy, that validates the society created by the Chinese Communist Party. It is an anarchic, brutal book about the inhumanity of servants of the Communist state, the inadequacy of Chinese men and the moral vacuum at the heart of post-Mao China.
Set in the rural northeast, the novel focuses primarily on the life and times of the narrator Xiaopao’s aunt, Gugu, from her birth in 1937 to her retirement in the early years of this century. In the brave new world of the early People’s Republic, Gugu possesses impeccable political credentials. The daughter of a Communist doctor killed in the latter stages of World War II, Gugu herself is held prisoner for several months by the Japanese Army. After the Communist “liberation” in 1949, she trains as a midwife in the new medical schools and becomes a star obstetrician in the area around her home village. In 1960, however, political catastrophe strikes: Her pilot fiancé defects to Communist China’s bitterest enemy, Taiwan, and Gugu becomes, by association, politically toxic. Like many others, she is beaten and humiliated during the Cultural Revolution. Yet this rough treatment doesn’t alienate her from the Party. Quite the contrary: She vows to prove her devotion by ruthlessly implementing the government’s policy against unauthorized births, which was introduced in the late 1970s after Mao’s death. Aided by her steadfast intern, Little Lion, Gugu imposes a reign of terror involving compulsory IUDs, vasectomies and late-term abortions. Eventually, after two women die at her hands (including the narrator’s wife), Gugu’s zeal for “family planning” fades. In retirement, she devotes herself to making thousands of dolls representing the fetuses she destroyed. Meanwhile, Xiaopao marries Little Lion, despite the role she played in the forced abortion that killed his first wife.
Those anticipating an analysis of Gugu’s innermost psychology will be disappointed. Throughout the book, Mo Yan’s narrative attention darts here and there: Picaresque street fights sprawl across a dozen pages; a delusional villager hallucinates confusingly, convinced he is Don Quixote. Toward the end, Gugu drifts out of view as the narrative closes in on Little Lion’s unsuccessful attempts to have a child of her own. In a fantastical twist that’s all too believable in the commercial landscape of post-Mao China, a nearby bullfrog farm turns out to be a front for a human surrogacy business. Chen Mei (a young woman whose mother died during childbirth thanks to Gugu’s persecutions and who has herself been grotesquely disfigured by a fire in the factory where she was working to pay the government fine levied at her birth) serves as a surrogate mother for Xiaopao and Little Lion’s child. Yet Mo Yan does characterize Gugu sufficiently for the reader to deduce a skeleton psychology: the swaggering uncouthness produced by a Communist education, the desperation to prove herself a good Party member, the dazed guilt this generates in her later years.