Frog

BEFORE THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION, narrator Tadpole's feisty Aunt Gugu is a respected midwife in her rural community. She combines modern medical knowledge with a healer's touch to save the lives of village women and their babies. Gugu is beautiful, charismatic, and of an unimpeachable political background.
After a disastrous love affair with a defector leaves Gugu reeling, she throws herself zealously into enforcing China's draconian new family planning policy by any means necessary, be it forced sterilizations or late-term abortions. Tragically, her blind devotion to the Party line spares no one, not her own family, not even herself.
Once beloved, Gugu becomes the living incarnation of a reviled social policy violently at odds with
deeply rooted social values. Spanning the pre- revolutionary era and the country's modern-day consumer society, Mo Yan's taut and engrossing examination of Chinese society will be read for generations to come.