Do You Have To Read 'Frog?' No, But You Might Want To
Through Xiaopao (Tadpole), Yan relates the history of Gugu, the narrator's aunt — once a legendary midwife famous for her modern medical training. Gugu, so busy that she never ate a meal sitting down, brought thousands of children into the world in her golden years, when Mao Zedong believed that it was the patriotic duty of all Chinese families to have as many children as possible.
But famine, shifting politics, an unlucky engagement, Japanese occupation, the Communist revolution and the slow coming of state-directed capitalism force Gugu to constantly alter her role in the village — from brilliant midwife bringing life to Gaomi, to the head of the communist family planning committee, responsible for the forced abortions of China's one child policy, which she calls, "China's greatest contribution to humanity" in an attempt to justify the terrible things the state has forced her to do.
Xiaopao grows from a young boy who — in one of the book's most beautifully evocative scenes — eats coal during the famine and makes it delicious in his memory, to a middle-aged man living in a place that he barely recognizes. Gugu dies and is reborn. Yan has a half-streak of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in him, offering a world that is, by turns, magical without the realism or grimly real and stripped of all magic. The sprawling cast of Gaomi village lives surrounded by luck and demons and superstition, and it is only the intrusions of the real world, the modern world, the distant world of politicians, soldiers and cadre leaders, that pierce this veil and force them to confront the terrible bleakness around them.
In this, Yan has written a book which details a moment in history peopled by loyal communists and heroic children of the revolution, but still manages to offer a critique of that system — not directly, but simply by showing a world stripped of wonder and too full of death for magic to last. Xiaopao's letter to his unnamed friend becomes like a message in a bottle, set adrift and saying look at how we once were and see what you have made us now.