The Astonishing Croaking

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Frogs mainly tells Aunt’s whole life as a rural doctor, whose father was a military surgeon of the Eighth Route Army, and was well-known around the Jiaodong area. After the death of grandfather, she inherited the mantle of him to work in the health center until her graduation at the age of 16, and then she started to promote a new method helping the pregnant women give birth to children in rural areas. Aunt was a shrewish woman, abhorring evil as a deadly foe. She criticized badly on the ridiculous old method of delivery and soon took the place of the traditional midwives (fingersmith) by delivering one baby after another with the new method. Babies delivered by my aunt could be found all over the north east countryside of Gaomi, but the babies delivered by her that didn’t survive in quantity could be found at that area as well. On the one hand, Aunt practiced delivery and helped pregnant women give birth to children, while on the other hand, she led her apprentice to carry out her own Planned Parenthood, disabling the fertility of those men who already had children and aborting those women who already gave birth to children, which became her first two priorities. She had become a devil-like figure in folks mind. However, she did not waver in the least, not hesitating even in face with relatives and neighbors. For this reason, Wang Renmei, wife of her nephew Kedou (which means tadpole in Chinese), lost her life due to abortion on the operating table, while Wang Dan, chased hardly by her, bled to death after giving birth to a child on the raft. Verging upon middle age, my aunt married a craftsman Hao Dashou, claying dolls, which seemed like a sense of confession to her. She was unable to have her own child then, but was full of expectation to children, therefore, she, by fair means or foul, managed to get her nephew and apprentice a child.

In the novel Frogs, published on A Literary Bimonthly Harvest 2009, 6th, the word frog is tightly connected with the word child. Frogs have strong reproductive capacity, just like the society of the past period of time. At the era of advocation for People and World, “frog sounds” could be heard everywhere, but suddenly, the loud crying screeching halted due to certain top-down sound as well. Thus, Mo Yan’s Full-length Works of Frogs, reflecting the Planned Parenthood, slowly expands just like an oil painting with both rigid strokes and enough gentleness.

The works of Mo Yan, especially his novels, have long been regarded as a blend of good and bad, which has masked his ingenious ideas hidden behind the seemingly unrestrained language revelry. Frogs makes me enjoy and appreciate his grand banquet of language again, as well as his elaborate thoughts in terms of novel structure. On the one hand, it is the external technique, mainly manifested in further exploration of the literary form of the novel. In the Sandalwood Penalty, he introduces a local opera Mao-Qiang in the northeastern countryside of Gaomi and skill of role narration, and even in this novel (Frogs), he never stops exploring new things. Generally speaking, the whole novel is about five letters to a Japanese friend Sugitani Yosihito (while the prototype is probably Japanese writer Kenzaburoo Ooe) and five sections led by these letters. What’s more, the last part of the novel turns out to be a drama. Although main characters are the same as those in the former four sections, as well as the story, looking closely, whether it is the character of the story, subtle changes can be found. Letters, together with novel and script, constitute an interesting intertextual relation, enriching the characters and enhancing the internal tense of the novel. On the other hand, it is the internal technique; Mo makes the contradiction of the entire novel develop around the two words mentioned at the beginning. The entanglement of the two words “frog” and “child” composes the most significant kernel of the entire novel.

Why is the Chinese pronunciation of the word “frog” (we pronounce “wa” in Chinese) and “child” (we also pronounce “wa” in Chinese) the same? Why does the newborn baby cry like the sound of frog? Why do most of the clay dolls in our countryside hold a frog in their arms? Why is human’s ancestor called Nvwa, with the same Chinese pronunciation as frog? All these facts show that our ancestor is a big female frog, and humans have evolved from frogs but not apes.

This is a passage Aunt spoke to “me”. It can be said that Mo lets the main character “Aunt” explain the symbolic meaning of frog in this novel.

It is far from enough just saying this, for it would seem far-fetched for the relation of frog and child. Mo also strengthens the link through other plots and details.

For the purpose of the Planned Parenthood, Aunt mercilessly stopped countless babies from surviving. The night she announced retirement, she got drunk and strayed into a marsh land on the way home, surrounded and attacked by numerous frogs. “The sound of frogs on that night was resentment, a grievance, as if it were the complaint of spirits of countless babies.” At this moment, frogs and babies emerge an internal link through her delusion. At this crucial moment, Aunt rushed to the bridge and came across Hao Dashou, a skillful craftsman of clay doll. “Hao Dashou sat on the middle of the bridge, with a shiny silver thing in his hands, which later learned, was a piece of mud. If one tried to make a moonlight doll, he must use the moonlight mud.” Aunt eventually married him after being rescued. This was actually the efforts she made to save herself. The second scene of the fifth section, which could be the weirdest part of the entire novel, in which “Aunt walked back and forth with a pace of light through those hanging babies, like a fish swimming briskly in the water. As she walked through, she gently slapped their butt with her hand.” Those hanging babies are made by Hao Dashou. She tried this action for self-redemption. However, these frogs, or other, babies, never let off my aunt.

A child whose hair was as smooth as a watermelon peel, wearing a green traditional Chinese bellyband with a frog on it, led a group frogs (played by children), some sitting on wheelchairs, some leaning on crutches, some bandaged the forelimbs, drilling out from that dark hole. The child in green shouted, “Pay the debt! Pay the debt!” together with the croaking of frogs.

Many other connections between frog and child can be found in the novel. For example, the bullfrog farms, in front of whose gate stood a huge bullfrog statue, turned out to be a place for bearing babies through other women. Besides, images about frog always intentionally or unintentionally appeared in the text, the narrator’s pen name, for instance, was Kedou, and the literary journal’s name of the county was Frog Croak. It is difficult to tell how much sense these details have made in this novel, but they indeed together constitute the background of the text: All frogs croak.

The most important character of Frogs is the rural doctor Aunt that the author has mentioned in many works. She was a determined executor of the Planned Parenthood policy and devoted her whole life to it, forcing the ligation of those men who already had child and searching every pregnant woman who had born child before. Wang Renmei and Wang Dan both died because of her. She, however, was a gynecologist after all, had a doctor’s conscience and instinct. These two identities collided with each other within her mind, forming the complicated characteristic of her. The most obvious example was the scene when she led Xiao Shizi (Little Lion) to chase Wang Dan. The moment she saw they were going to catch Wang Dan’s raft, Xiao Shizi (Little Lion) who didn’t know how to swim jumped suddenly toward Wang’s raft but fell into water. After saving her from the water, the motor vessel, they took, broke down, the driver Qin He, Aunt’s loyal follower, sweating profusely, started the machine again and again. All these acts brought Wang Dan enough time to deliver the baby. The baby, illegal in its mother’s womb, once delivered, would get protection for being a citizen of the country. Apparently, Aunt understood what they were doing and was furious, but after a while, she calmed down all of a sudden.

A grief smile appeared on her face. A sunlight shone through the cloud on Aunt’s face, as well as the turbid river, making she seem like a hopeless hero. She sat on the side of the boat, whispering to Qin He, “Stop feigning! You could all stop feigning.”

Qin He was a little shocked and then restarted the vessel to catch up with Wang’s raft. Meanwhile, Aunt sometimes lowered down her eyes and sometimes grinned. What was in her mind as a 47-year-old woman who never gave birth to a child? The vessel eventually caught up with Wang’s raft, while Wang was delivering a child on the raft. Wang’s husband Chen Bi whipped out a knife when Aunt attempted to jump onto the raft and asked Aunt to withdraw her hands. “These are gynecologist’s hands instead of the devil’s.” Aunt said. Though Wang died of excessive bleeding, the baby survived. In the last section, Aunt told Kedou that before Wang died she expressed her thanks to Aunt for saving her baby. As that told before, Aunt tried self-redemption in her later years, however, this is never a “Crime and Punishment” type of mistake and a salvation pattern. While she tried to seek peace in self conscience in her later years, she turned to another extreme attitude about children. To ensure that Kedou could have a child, she lied that the child, born by Chen Mei, was the child of Kedou’s wife Xiao Shizi (Little Lion). This act had make Aunt a more complex character. My feeling about the novel is that there are three Aunties in the novel Frogs; one is the Aunt in reality that Kedou mentioned in the letters to Sugitani Yosihito, the second one is the Aunt in the novel, and the third one is the Aunt in the end of the script of the novel. The images of the three Aunties intertwined with each other with reiteration and difference, representing an extremely striking image of Aunt in the literary world.

In this sense, I realize suddenly that I’m far from expressing all my thoughts. I have too much to say about Frogs, but once expressed, many other ideas are about to be covered. It is the talent of Mo Yan, that is, it’s better to appreciate than to express. The plot is not complex, but the idea is sophisticated. Once again, I feel the happiness of reading Mo Yan’s work. To conclude my strongest feeling about the novel, I would like to use the last sentence of the novel: “Spurt like a fountain!”