Frog

A Japanese writer visiting Gaomi encourages the playwright Tadpole to write about his aunt, Wan Xin, and Tadpole sends him five letters, the last of them containing a play. Daughter of a martyred army doctor, his aunt becomes a midwife in the 1950s, cycling to every village to deliver babies by modern methods, and is admired by every woman she has helped. Her engagement to an air force pilot ends in disgrace when he defects to Taiwan. When the state launches its birth-control campaigns in the 1960s and again at the end of the 1970s, she enforces them without mercy, through vasectomies, abortions and confrontations with angry villagers. Tadpole himself, an army officer, wants a second child, and his wife hides from the family planning team.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Family, Politics, Historical (assigned by AI)

Set in

China, 1950s–2000s

First published

2009 by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House

Author's age

54 when first published

ISBN

9780241967324 (Penguin Books, United Kingdom)

9780525427988 (Viking, United States)

9780143128380 (Penguin Books, United States)