Frog by Mo Yan

Published in China in 2009; published in translation by Viking on January 22, 2015

Wan Zu (also known as Tadpole, among other names) writes to a man he addresses as sensei, who gave a lecture on "Literature in Life" in Wan Zu's remote village. Impressed by his meeting with an obstetrician who is Wan Zu's aunt, the scholar asks Wan Zu to send him the story of his aunt's life. Frog tells Gugu's story, but it is also the story of China over the course of Gugu's lifetime.

While she is still a young village girl, Gugu learns the healing arts from a visiting westerner. Her knowledge of obstetrics soon shames the elderly midwives who are more likely to kill their patients than to help them give birth. At the age of 70, forty years after leaving the village, Gugu returns for a celebration.

The politics of China are inseparable from Gugu's story. The background to Book One is the struggle between Mao and Chiang Kai-shek. Gugu is a steadfast Communist. Her advocacy of planned pregnancies and of treating male and female babies as equals impairs her popularity despite its consistency with Mao's edicts. Living in changing times, Gugu discovers that it is possible to a friend of the revolution one moment and an enemy of the masses a moment later.

Book Two begins in 1979. The Cultural Revolution is an unhappy memory but Gugu is still a devoted Party member who is even more committed to the policy of one child per family. The policy of enforced birth control also shapes the story in Book Three. While much of the focus remains on Gugu, the "one child" policy also plays a defining role in the life of Wan Zu.

China has undergone more changes by 2005, when Book Four begins. People are free to live where they please (as long as they live in China). The entrepreneurial spirit prevails, which means family planning rules apply to the poor more than they apply to the nouveau riche. Gugu has also changed, or at least her opinions have changed. Despite her regrets, she remains determined to follow her principles (even as they shift), while Wan Zu has always felt that his life is subject to the whims of fate. Those whims take his life in interesting directions (which, as we all know, is a Chinese curse). By the time Book Five rolls around, Wan Zu has been inspired to write a play that he aptly entitles "Frog." The play adds a new dimension to the story and sheds additional light on some of the characters.

Naturally, frog imagery pervades the novel. Frogs have an impact on the lives of several characters, while other characters recount the role that frogs play in Chinese mythology. Appropriately, given the novel's subject matter, Wan Zu tells us that the title (wa) can be taken as either qingwa (frog) or wawa (baby).

Wan Zu discusses his struggle to write the play throughout the course of the novel. He talks about the darkness of the play when his thoughts are dark, how he wants to write about life rather than death, about hope rather than despair. But life includes all of those things, as does the novel. The story Mo Yan delivers is about persevering in the face of adversity, about feeling and releasing guilt, about adapting to and instigating change. It is also about the value of freedom, even if freedom introduces disharmony into a society that values harmony (and that institutionalizes anyone who threatens that harmony). Frog is a novel of great breadth and depth. It is nothing less than the story of modern China told with humor and compassion.

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