Frog by Mo Yan

 

Frog is the story of a Chinese playwright in a small village in China.  It follows Tadpole, the man's nickname, as he writes to his former teacher about a play he is writing about his aunt, Gugu.  Gugu was an obstetrician who became an abortionist when the government passed the strict one-child policy.  Even those women who hid their pregnancy and were as much as eight months pregnant would be tracked down by Gugu and given an abortion.  She takes Tadpole's wife at this late stage and the woman dies on the operating table. 

Tadpole later marries Gugu's assistant as his second wife but they are unable to have children.  Gugu marries an artist who spends his life making realistic clay children which are sold in market to women who are hoping to have children or those who cannot have more.  By this time, the policy has shifted a bit and Gugu now regrets all the many children she has prevented from living.  Tadpole and his wife go underground to have a child by surrogate mother, an operation being run out of a frog farm.

Mo Yan is arguably China's most famous author.  He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012 for his work.  His books give insight into a culture that is often still mysterious and secretive to the average person although some criticize his work as being only that allowed by the government while more independent authors find their work suppressed.   Most people know about the one child policy and some of the social problems it created as these children who were born grew up but Yan gives an insider viewpoint of the pain it caused families in a society that loves children.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.