Mo Yan’s Frog: Rethinking Life as “Wa”

Abstract

Mo Yan’s 2009 novel Frog (Wā 蛙) traces the dramatic career of a rural obstetrician who saves lives through modern medicine, forces vasectomies and abortions through her implementation of the one-child policy, supports her nephew’s black market surrogacy scheme, and finally ends up withdrawing into a spiritual state of atonement for her previous deeds. This article examines the relationship between human and animal in the novel, suggesting that the conceptual separation of these categories is intimately related to the various problems the novel depicts throughout Chinese modernity. By focusing on the critical possibilities offered by the novel’s title, Wā 蛙, as a homophone with both “baby” (wá 娃) and the “wa” of the mythical female progenitor Nüwa (娲wā), I suggest that Mo Yan offers a new concept of life, best referred to simply as wa, in response to certain crises of modernity. As an ambiguously generative reconceptualization of life, wa denies conventional and simplistic distinctions between human and animal while incorporating elements of spirituality and unknowability into an otherwise overly rationalized and monetized idea of the human.

1. Introduction

Less than three years before winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, Mo Yan published his novel Frog (Wa 蛙), the culmination of over ten years of work, which narrates a history of the one-child policy as experienced in rural northeast China. A stylistic departure from his previous works, which are known for their bombastic language, fractured narratives, and grotesque depictions, Frog presents a slightly more restrained tone and reflective narrative perspective. Even so, the novel exhibits Mo Yan’s characteristically innovative form, written in five parts consisting of four letters to a Japanese writer and a nine-act play that blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality. Mo Yan himself has referred to the novel as “a solitary peak” in his writing (Yan 2013, p. 201), and of his numerous works, Frog was one of the five novels mentioned by the Nobel committee when they awarded the prize.1 Addressing the themes of guilt, regret, atonement, and compassion, the work draws heavily upon the real-life figure of Mo Yan’s aunt, as well as the author’s own experiences.

My examination of Frog will center on the polysemous nature of the original Chinese title, suggesting that it offers a new way of conceptualizing human existence that circumvents the particular problems of contemporary life depicted by the novel. Mo Yan explains how the pronunciation of the title, “wa,” implies three different words the novel brings into relation with one another:2

In the north there is a sort of religious reverence for the frog, the traces of which can be seen today in many works of folk art; clay folk sculptures, for example, often depict a small child holding a frog, a symbol of fecundity. The characters 蛙 (wā, “frog”), 娃 (wá, “child”), and even the 娲 (wā) of “女娲” (Nüwā, the goddess of creation) all have the same pronunciation as well as a symbolic meaning regarding birth, belief, and children.3

(Yang 2012, p. 221)

Because the spoken name of the novel, Wa, implies all of these different meanings, I will refer to the new conception of life I suggest the novel offers simply as “wa” in its Romanized form. I hope to show how the novel necessarily constructs the notion of wa from these human, animal, symbolic, and religious elements in response to the dehumanizing conditions emerging under the rampant neoliberalism of 21st-century postsocialism. First of all, I will examine some of the novel’s significant intertextual implications, which incorporate not only basic questions of traditional philosophy but also several of Mo Yan’s previous works. This will help to articulate some of Mo Yan’s persistent concerns with several of the core issues related to the idea of human existence in Frog. I will then demonstrate how Frog depicts the reproductive human body as governed by two competing biopolitical regimes: those of state power and the market economy. Both of these regimes, I argue, bring suffering through their imposition of a dramatic conceptual distinction between human and animal: in general, the body becomes merely a means of production to be controlled and manipulated by the state and profited upon by private individuals in the market economy. Finally, I hope to show how Mo Yan appears to offer a critique of this bleak scenario through the notion of wa as an ambiguously generative reconceptualization of life—one that denies simplistic distinctions between human and animal, materialism and idealism, and good and evil, and which reincorporates elements of spirituality and unknowability into an otherwise overly rationalized and monetized idea of the human.

2. Frog, Intertextuality and the Question of the Human

Frog, which won the prestigious Mao Dun Literature Award in 2011, is a bold attempt to reimagine and reevaluate Chinese history and experience with regard to “family planning” (计划生育), or the “one-child policy” as it is often called in English.4 As with most of Mo Yan’s novels, Frog is set in rural Gaomi County in Shandong Province. The story focuses primarily on the life of Gugu (姑姑, literally “Aunite,” occasionally referred to by her name Wanxin 万心), as told by the first-person narrator Tadpole (Kedou 蝌蚪 is his penname; he is also known as Wanzu 万足 and Xiaopao 小跑) through his letters to the Japanese writer Shan’guyiren (杉谷义人). The letters narrate the colorful and controversial life of Gugu, who, after being held captive by Japanese occupiers as a child, becomes trained in modern medical practices to work as a midwife during the years following the establishment of the PRC (1949). Reported to deliver an astounding 2868 babies in the year 1963 alone, Gugu becomes highly regarded throughout the commune for combining Chinese and Western practices and achieving an excellent success rate (50–51). The years surrounding the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76), however, mark a turning point for Gugu: as the director of the commune’s obstetrics division, she begins enacting the government’s first sterilization directives, going as far as having unwilling men tied up so she can perform vasectomies on them. Shortly afterward, her hotshot aviator boyfriend defects to Taiwan, and Gugu is denounced as a whore and publicly beaten. Exonerated through a journal her boyfriend, fortunately, left behind before his escape, Gugu wholeheartedly sets to work proving her steadfast devotion to the party and commits herself, along with her protégé Little Lion (小狮子), to the task of implementing the government’s initiatives to lower the birth rate. This includes an array of outlandishly uncompromising behavior, such as chasing the pregnant Geng Xiulian (耿秀莲) and Wang Dan (王胆) into the river on separate occasions, effectively killing them, as well as threatening to destroy the neighbor’s house if Tadpole’s wife refuses to get an abortion (to which she eventually agrees, although it ends up killing her).

At this point, Gugu retreats from the narrative, which turns its focus toward Tadpole and his new marriage with Little Lion. As indicated in letters to Shan’guyiren, the couple moves to Beijing for a time, but they end up returning to Gaomi, which they find to be rapidly modernizing and increasingly affluent. Little Lion tries to get a job at the new hospital, constructed with the help of American funds, but she finds it to be too fancy and exclusive and instead seeks a job at the frog hatchery established by Tadpole’s old classmate Yuan Sai (袁腮). Tadpole learns through word-of-mouth that Yuan Sai is actually using the hatchery as a cover for an illegal surrogate mother business, which, as a budget option, offers to artificially inseminate young women who were disfigured in a factory fire. While Tadpole has just discovered this news, Little Lion has already secretly purchased a surrogacy, having stolen Tadpole’s sperm in a blindfolded sex game. Tadpole is furious when he learns of this, although he eventually decides he would like to keep the child. Little Lion’s intense desire to have a baby results in a bizarre sort of psychosomatic pregnancy, and the section ends with the arrival of a newborn, presented as if it were birthed by Little Lion herself.

The final section of the novel consists of a play called “Frog,” written by Tadpole. It provides a semi-fictional account of his experience surrounding the birth of his new child. Chen Mei (陈眉), the un-aborted daughter of Wang Dan who survived her mother’s death in childbirth, insists that she has given birth to a baby and has been under-compensated: while she was originally promised a hundred thousand yuan, she claims she was shown the corpse of a skinned cat and told she had a stillborn, and therefore received only ten thousand yuan.5 Not only is she positive that her baby is alive, but she no longer wants to give it up and searches for it frantically, eventually finding it in the possession of Little Lion. Chen Mei steals the baby and runs away, with Little Lion, Tadpole, and Yuan Sai in hot pursuit. The chase happens to bring the group upon the set of a historical television drama in the process of filming a court case at a Republican-era yamen. Chen Mei runs up to the presiding “county magistrate” and begs him to decide her case, as Yuan Sai quietly consults with the show’s director in the background. In a scene recalling the judgment of King Solomon from the Bible, the magistrate says that Chen Mei and Little Lion must fight over the child. When only Chen Mei rushes for the baby, the magistrate decides that Little Lion must be the mother, since it was clearly her concern for the child’s safety that kept her from action. The final act of the play reveals it to be a mise-en-abyme, with Tadpole reading the script aloud to Gugu. Once he has finished, both the play and novel come to an end when Gugu, elderly and ridden with guilt, hangs herself.6

Characteristically, for one of Mo Yan’s novels, Frog incorporates several rewritten episodes from his previous shorter works, which in turn are loosely based on his own experiences. A plot similar to that of Wang Renmei, for instance, appears in the short story “Tunnel” (地道, 1991), in which a woman gives birth to three girls in a secret passageway, and in the resulting search, her house is pulled down by tractors. In “Happiness” (欢乐, 1987), a woman who has exceeded the birth limit is forced to undergo a tubal ligation. “Explosion” (爆炸, 1985) tells the story of a military wife who wants a son and whose obstetrician aunt (also called Gugu 姑姑) helps her have a miscarriage.7 Many of these and other elements that make their way into Frog are furthermore based on Mo Yan’s memories from youth: the scene at the very beginning of the novel in which the village children delight in eating coal, for instance, is an embellishment on Mo Yan’s own childhood memory of eating coal and other non-comestibles (Mo 2011a, pp. ix–x). As far as the novel’s characters are concerned, Mo Yan explains in an interview that not only is the character of Gugu based on the memory of his own aunt, but that Tadpole embodies certain characteristics of his own self (Yan 2013, pp. 191–95).8

The idea of frogs, in general, can even be traced to his childhood memories, which seem to give rise to specific scenes as well as a more general contemplation of the mysteries of the natural world. In a short essay entitled “Floods and Bullfrogs” (洪水·牛蛙), Mo Yan tells of a flood during his childhood that produced an astounding profusion of frogs (Mo 2009b, pp. 159–62). Although the frogs were considered to be a natural disaster, devouring everything in sight and croaking so loudly it was difficult to sleep, the great number of frogs constituted “a majestic scene presented by Mother Nature, completely unimaginable; writing such a scene into a novel would certainly add a mystical element” (Mo 2009b, p. 160).9 He goes on to say that when a load of bullfrogs was imported from Cuba as a sign of Chinese–Cuban friendship, a frog hatchery was built for them in Gaomi County, thus providing a real-life basis for Yuan Sai’s hatchery in the novel. A flooding rain allowed the frogs to escape, and these hideous-looking, inedible Cuban specimens spread everywhere, calling to mind the grotesque scene in which Gugu is aggressively attacked by hundreds of frogs on her way home one night. Frogs are even linked with family planning in this essay, as Mo Yan tells of reading in one of the newspapers pasted on the walls of his home that swallowing twenty raw tadpoles could act as a contraceptive.

In addition to all of these narrative forerunners, Mo Yan’s 1986 short story “Abandoned Child” (弃婴) anticipates several of the issues and characters that appear many years later in Frog, such as the problem of an unsanctioned child’s legal status, an indecisive protagonist (loosely associated with Mo Yan himself) struggling with the truth of life, and his obstetrician aunt (Mo 2011a, pp. 155–89). More significantly, the story explores questions of human nature that are forced by the government regulation of birth, making this work, therefore, worth a brief examination as a precursor to Frog. In a sense, it also forms an interesting complement to the novel, focusing on the discarding of excess children once they are born rather than the parents’ desire, rights, and ability to produce them.

After the story’s main character, who we may assume to be some shade of Mo Yan himself,10 discovers an infant abandoned in a field of sunflowers and brings it home, he finds himself stuck caring for a baby that no one wants. Because the baby is a girl, his wife is reluctant to expend the family’s meager resources to raise a useless child that is not even their own, and even after tireless searching, he can find no one in the community willing to take in the tiny life. His predicament, furthermore, is tied explicitly to the one-child policy, noting that “the period after Liberation, owing to improvements in living standards and hygiene, saw a significant drop in the occurrences of abandoned children. But the numbers began to rise again in the 1980s, when the situation grew very complicated” (Mo 2011a, p. 172).11 This “complicated situation” refers to a combination of government-enforced family planning and a traditional preference for boys, which resulted in the widespread abandonment of girls. Both traditional mindsets and modern biopolitics combine to complicate the story’s specific ethical dilemmas.

With his characteristic layers of intertextuality referencing past, present, and even future works of both himself and others, Mo Yan indicates that while the specific contents of his stories are clearly contingent upon their historical moment, his investigation of humanity is not. In “Abandoned Child,” this literary technique effectively incorporates the particular scenario of the story’s present moment into a grand, timeless inquiry into the nature of humanity. First of all, the story most readily brings to mind Mencius’ famous assertion that human nature is essentially good, because anyone seeing a child about to fall into a well would rescue it for no reason other than sheer human compassion (Mencius 2003, pp. 82–83). Although the protagonist of Mo Yan’s story acts in accordance with Mencius’ positive view of human nature by thanklessly rescuing a child on the verge of death, he is decidedly in the minority, alone in a sea of hard-hearted family members and neighbors who want nothing to do with the baby.

Mencius’ example is further questioned when we learn that, actually, the protagonist picks up the girl only after the intervention of the intertextual present, when he first sees a note announcing the location of the baby—“In the sunflowers, hurry, save a life!!!”12

And as I ran anxiously, images of something from the past…surged up in my mind. Two summers before…I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in years, a girl called Aigu. That chance meeting led to a whole string of events, which formed the basis of a short story I later wrote entitled “White Dog and Swings.” 13

(Mo 2011a, p. 159)

Not only are we familiar with this “string of events” from Mo Yan’s 1985 story “White Dog and Swings” (白狗秋千架) (Mo 2012, pp. 65–89), but this reference actually modifies our understanding of it. In that story, the narrator, who is at the time not yet married but affianced, returns to his hometown after a ten year absence. There, he finds his old friend Nuan (暖), who was once the belle of the village but who, after her eye was gouged out in an accident on the swings, was married off to the brutish town mute and subsequently gave birth to a dumb set of triplets. The narrator secretly meets her in a sorghum field, where the story ends with Nuan imploring him to impregnate her with a child that will be capable of speech: “If you agree, it will save me; if you don’t agree, it will kill me” (Mo 2012, p. 89).14 While the narrator’s decision is never made explicit, his flashback to this incident in “Abandoned Child” implies that he may have indeed granted Nuan’s wish, which may thereby motivate his decision to save the baby through the thought of his own possible culpability.15 By shrouding the narrator’s decision in this vague sense of guilt, Mo Yan complicates any clear sense of human nature, demonstrating that “Mankind has evolved to the point where all that separates it from the animal world is a line as thin as a sheet of paper. Human nature is in fact as thin and fragile as a sheet of paper, which crumples at the slightest touch” (Mo 2011a, p. 160).16

Implied here, of course, is the sense that “human nature” (人性) refers to some sense of goodness involving compassion as well as a sense of shame and a sense of right and wrong (i.e., in reference to the story from Mencius), or a more general empathy for fellow humans, as this statement about mankind’s separation from the animal world directly follows the protagonist’s statement that “it would have been unthinkable to abandon [the baby] and just as unthinkable to keep her” (Mo 2011a, p. 160).17 In other words, the whole issue of abandoning children as it relates to human nature centers on an idea of compassion or empathy, which in traditional Chinese thought has been viewed as an exclusively human trait (regardless of whether or not it is innately present or if it instead must be cultivated, as according to Xunzi). From these traditional, anthropocentric markers of the human, however, the protagonist of “Abandoned Child” eventually moves toward a more expansive vision of life: seeing a pair of locusts mate at the story’s end, he notes that “in at least one significant way, they and humans are alike; that is to say, they are no more lowly than we, and we are no more noble than they” (Mo 2011a, p. 188).18

Probing deeper into the heart of this question of human nature are Mo Yan’s invocations of Pu Songling (蒲松龄), which incorporate a mystical, otherworldly realm and the ambiguous relations between human and animal.19 When the protagonist goes to the hospital to see his aunt, who is an obstetrician, before even mentioning the topic of the abandoned child, she launches into a story about a fox spirit that the protagonist says could be included in a new edition of Pu Songling’s classic work, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (聊斋志异). In his aunt’s story, a young battalion commander shoots the fox his father had been nursing back to health and puts it into a soup. That night the doors and windows rattle, and the soup yields only donkey turds. The father and son are able to put a stop to these unnerving events only by performing funeral rites for the fox. Of the many types of fox spirit stories that are contained in Pu Songling’s original tales, the formula employed here—overstepping traditional Confucian boundaries by extending the important practice of funeral rites to a fox20—is both common and significant. The separation between human and animal thus becomes indistinguishable, as both seem to overlap in some sort of spiritual realm, as indicated through these supernatural occurrences. If foxes are worthy of funeral rites, how different is shooting the lame fox from abandoning a burdensome baby?

Like Pu Songling, Mo Yan challenges the dominant and authoritative logic of society by questioning the foundations of human existence.21 Beyond this mystical affinity with animals through local folklore, however, the narrator’s physical encounter with a dog that bites his leg demonstrates a much more immediate and concrete unity between human and animal. After the dog bites him, drawing a considerable amount of blood, he thanks the dog in his mind for making him realize that “true danger is not embodied in a mad dog with bared fangs, but in the sweet smile of, say, a Mona Lisa” (Mo 2011a, p. 174).22 Before he can tell the Township Head of his predicament with the baby, he must first beg him not to shoot the dog. Then, when he tells of the abandoned child he found, the Township Head responds that if no one else is willing to take the baby, the narrator will be fined two thousand yuan for exceeding the limits of the one-child policy. Faced with the Township Head’s gross lack of empathy or understanding, the narrator reacts by identifying with the dog in opposition to the human government official. This affinity with the dog even reaches a physical level, with biological urges surging within him that seem to have been transferred from the dog itself. “My leg itched terribly,” says the narrator at the end of the meeting, “I figured it had to be rabies…. I had a powerful urge to bite somebody…. All I wanted was to take a bite out of him!” (Mo 2011a, p. 178).23 The narrator is the only human in the story who has demonstrated not just a Confucian mark of human nature but a generally humanist empathy for the most innocent and helpless of fellow humans; yet these same innate and natural urges that drove him to rescue the baby are the same forces which drive him towards an animalistic identification with the dog in the face of the government officials.

The hint of cannibalism here also indicates a reference to the most prominent literary figure of twentieth-century China, Lu Xun.24 The connection becomes more apparent in the writers’ similar presentations of infanticide and cannibalism. Just as Lu Xun’s famous madman suspects everyone around him has practiced cannibalism, eventually including himself (Lu 2000), Mo Yan’s narrator suspects everyone around him of infanticide. Lu Xun’s madman is convinced that he

…knows how they go about it. They would never be willing to kill someone outright, nor would they dare. Instead they all conspire to set traps everywhere, forcing me to kill myself. Just looking at the men and women on the street a few days ago, as well as my brother’s behavior, makes it fairly obvious.25

(Lu 2000, pp. 34–36)

Mo Yan’s more reliable narrator in “Abandoned Child” voices a similar suspicion that there must be many in their midst who have abandoned babies:

Of course, even if I’d asked the local elders, none of them would have owned up to such infanticide. Yet I recalled the looks on their faces as they sat by wattle fences or at the base of a broken wall; to me those were the looks of baby killers, and I was sure that some of them had ended the lives of their own sons or daughters….”26

(Mo 2011a, p. 171)

By calling to mind Lu Xun’s May Fourth enlightenment rhetoric, Mo Yan not only invokes a particular tradition of social critique, but he also points toward a hope for new possibilities for humanity beyond its current social articulation.27 While the final lines of the madman’s diary famously consist of an appeal to “save the children” from the indoctrination of cannibalism,28 Mo Yan’s final lines offer an interesting twist:

Doctors and the township government can work in concert to force sterilization upon men and women…but where might we find a wonder drug capable of uprooting and eliminating the petrified notions that cleave to the brains of people in my hometown?29

(Mo 2011a, p. 189)

Both endings refer to the shackles of a social mindset perpetuated by a sort of Heideggerian “they” that is seemingly inescapable. As the final lines of the story make clear, Mo Yan’s criticism rather surprisingly ends up being not so much of the government policy but of the narrator’s fellow villagers, who disregard readily available forms of birth control and seem hell-bent on producing males. The narrator has already shown that, in some sense, he is more separated from such inhumane humans than he is from the government office’s dog: the primordial aggression that wells up in both him and the dog is a life-affirming violence, in contradistinction to the life-destroying violence of infanticide which both arises from and is perpetuated by society.

Reading “Abandoned Child” several decades after it was written, the references to Mo Yan’s works written after the story inscribe not only the narrator’s hopes for the “brains of people in my hometown,” but also a general contemplation of what it means to be human, into an ongoing yet timeless and non-progressive universal notion of humanity.30 The vivid image of a braised baby seasoned with vinegar and garlic (Mo 2011a, p. 187), for instance, unmistakably anticipates the central focus of Ding Gou’er’s investigation in Republic of Wine (酒国, 1992). The narrator’s aunt projects even further into Mo Yan’s literary future when she seems to make a reference to Frog more than two decades before it was published: when she first sees her nephew enter the hospital, she exclaims, “After you were here last year, you went back and wrote a book that made me look like some kind of demon!” (Mo 2011a, p. 184).31 The historical moment of the story allows for its specific articulation of a more general rethinking of human nature, which transcends time, stretching from the most ancient texts into the future.

3. Competing Biopolitical Regimes and the Separation Between Human and Animal

As the novel traces Gugu’s career in obstetrics, it implicitly reveals the way the concept of the human undergoes implicit changes in response to different forces regulating childbirth.32 As the novel progresses, the conceptual gap between an abstract notion of the human and the human’s physical, embodied, animalistic existence becomes greater, supported by both the government regulation of birth and the possibilities opened up by neoliberal economic forces. Eventually, as the crises precipitated by these circumstances become increasingly hyperbolic, the notion of wa emerges as a way of conceptually intervening in this spiraling human tragedy and Gugu’s overwhelming sense of guilt. First, however, it is necessary to trace the novel’s own history of the particular forces leading to this situation.

3.1. From Pre-Modern Conceptions of Life to Modern Obstetrics and Family Planning

The scene of Gugu’s first delivery—of Chen Bi in 1953—presents the positive image of modern science coming to the rescue. The description of Chen Bi’s birth demonstrates the stark contrast between the new and old orders, as represented through the juxtaposition of Gugu with the traditional midwife. With teeth that are gleaming and white from brushing with fluoride, Gugu rides one of the village’s few bicycles up to the scene of Chen Bi’s birth, where she is horrified to find a traditional midwife assisting Chen Bi’s mother.

Gugu couldn’t control her anger when she saw the scene on the kang…. She threw down her medicine satchel, rushed forward…and threw the old [midwife] off of it. Her head crashed into the night pot, and piss splattered out all over the floor, filling the room with the smell of urine. There was a gash in the old woman’s head, out of which dark black blood was flowing.33

(Mo 2009c, p. 17)

The stench of excrement is immediately contrasted with Gugu’s donning of sanitary rubber gloves to deliver the baby. She then returns to the bleeding midwife to continue her physical and verbal assault, kicking her repeatedly and claiming that if the old woman had presided over the birth, both Chen Bi and his mother would be a couple of corpses. In the interest of saving lives, the government-backed medicalization of bodily experience has vanquished the old ways and safely brought Chen Bi into the modern world.

At this point, the change that Gugu brings to childbirth is overwhelmingly positive. The years following Chen Bi’s birth and up to the Great Leap Forward (1958–62) are portrayed as a golden era for both Gugu and the nation, as the production of bodies and industrial production become inextricable from each other in one progressive narrative of modernity:

The years from 1953 to 1957 were a time during which the nation’s productivity developed and the economy flourished. The weather was favorable, and each year there was an abundant harvest. People ate their fill and had warm clothes to wear; they were happy in their hearts, and the women practically competed with one another to become pregnant and produce children. Gugu was extremely busy.34

(Mo 2009c, p. 22)

Not only is childbirth juxtaposed with economic production in its presentation here, but the Chinese words are one and the same: shengchan (生产) means both to produce and to give birth, and both meanings of the term are employed in this passage. In addition to this linguistic overlap, which links the production of babies with the production of goods, childbirth is further alienated from the realm of human experience through its numerical presentation in statistics. In the specified time period, Gugu is said to have presided over precisely 1612 deliveries, resulting in 1645 infants, of which five were stillborn and one died at birth. These statistics, furthermore, are symbolically linked with the new communist state, as Gugu delivers her thousandth baby on the same day that she officially joins the communist party.35

During this period, Gugu’s implementation of modern, government-supported midwifery proceeds smoothly—the standard of living has increased, the infant mortality rate has decreased, and the people are happy. At this point, the modern medical management of birth becomes clearly demarcated from, yet exists without incident alongside, several nonscientific ideas about birth and life in general, which eventually come into conflict with one another. One of these notions introduced at this early stage is the simple human emotional experience of childbirth. Even for Gugu herself, despite her “very strong class consciousness,” “in the moment when she delivers a baby from the birth canal she forgets about class and class struggle, and the joy she experiences is a pure and unadulterated human emotion” (Mo 2009c, p. 18).36 This remains true for Gugu throughout the novel, even in her most extreme phase as a violent implementer of the one-child policy.

Alongside the emotional aspect of birth is the presence of traditional Buddhism and folk religion, which asserts a whole religious, metaphysical conception of life that is fundamentally at odds with both modern science and the materialist philosophy of Marxism. Because Chen Bi’s birth immediately follows the burial of his mother’s dog, Chen Bi is said to be the dog’s reincarnation (Mo 2009c, p. 10). The origin of his most prominent physical trait—his large nose with an acute sense of smell—thus becomes unclear: is it owing to his Russian mother, or, as the narrator suggests, his previous life as a dog?

After Chen Bi is born, Gugu helps deliver the narrator, Tadpole, and the next delivery that she is described as facilitating is that of Tadpole’s family’s cow. Although Gugu is at first hesitant to assist, Tadpole’s mother convinces her with Buddhist-inflected flattery. For humans and animals, she says, not only are the principles of birthing the same, but Gugu has a responsibility to help:

Everyone says you’re a reincarnated bodhisattva, and bodhisattvas deliver all living creatures from suffering and are the salvation of all things. A cow is an animal, but it’s also a life—could you just watch it die without saving it?37

(Mo 2009c, p. 24)

The cow, furthermore, presents a powerful image of this basic and inclusive traditional religious/metaphysical nature of life: Gugu agrees to help with the birth, and the tearful, pregnant cow kneels before her.

When the mother cow saw Gugu, it bent its front legs and knelt down. When Gugu saw the cow kneeling, tears began streaming down her face.

The rest of us also then began shedding tears.38

(Mo 2009c, p. 24)

Not only are both human and animal emotionally affected by the experience of birth, but the compassion across species instigated by the cow’s suffering calls to mind another famous example from Mencius—that of King Xiang of Liang, who is moved to spare a sacrificial ox from slaughter when he sees it cowering.39 In contrast to the anthropocentric Confucian tradition, however, this compassion for the animal in Frog arises from a sense of unity between human and animal, which is both physical and metaphysical (through Gugu’s role as bodhisattva). Gugu ultimately saves the cow through a combination of pre-modern thought systems, which move her to action, and the power of both medical science and the modern state (which trained and employs her).

Human and animal, furthermore, are linked not only through compassion but also through the physical similarities of birth: as Gugu points out, the calf is born feet first, just like Tadpole. This affinity with animals is also part of Gugu’s personal heritage, as she was not only captured by the Japanese as a child because of her father’s excellent treatment of the general’s horse, but her father was eventually blown up along with his donkey on his way to rescue her. In fact, the connection of Gugu with the extra-scientific existence of living things extends even beyond animals to plants: when Tadpole describes his father talking about chopping down an ancient tree to make furniture for Gugu’s dowry, “the branches of the tree began to shake in the face of its felling, the leaves rustled as if it were sobbing” (33).40

Through Chen Bi’s birth and Gugu’s early career as a midwife, Mo Yan reveals the multifaceted and contested nature of childbirth by demonstrating how it incorporates the realms of human experience, tradition,41 science, modernity, and politics. These opposing forces soon begin pulling much harder in their own directions. Government control over reproduction steadily increases, first by using slogans to encourage just one or two children and by propagating information about contraception and sex.42 Soon afterward, condoms are distributed, and women are forced to take birth control medications. Gugu ominously begins practicing vasectomies on animals and then on inmates facing the death penalty. Finally, all overly reproductive bodies come under the control of the state, as Gugu, who is now the commune’s leader of family planning, begins forcing surgeries on prominent members of the community: Shao Shangqun is threatened with the loss of his job, and Yuan Lian is forcibly tied up.

At the most extreme points of Gugu’s ideological mission, no one is exempt from her implementation of the government’s restrictions on birth. She even subordinates her own emotional life to her official and ideological responsibilities: after her fighter-pilot boyfriend defects to Taiwan, she is temporarily emotionally (and, for a time, politically) devastated, and she steadfastly refuses the romantic advances of Qin He, who consequently attempts suicide. After a brief period of public denouncement, she becomes a crazed devotee of the communist party, becoming nothing more than, as Guan Xiaoxiao puts it, “a cold, hard, revolutionary screw in the giant unfeeling machine of modernity” (Yang 2012, p. 225).43 When floods hinder transportation, and people begin using this to their advantage in skirting the policy, Gugu gets a boat. When she sails up to Zhang Quan’s wife in an effort to force her to abort her fourth pregnancy, both sides have drawn definitive battle lines. On Zhang’s side is the individual right to reproduce as well as the traditional notion of the patrilineal family, as the other three of Zhang’s children are girls and cannot carry on the family line. Gugu, however, ignores these concerns and acts on the village branch secretary’s orders to “mobilize as much force as necessary, and to use whatever methods necessary, to get Zhang Quan’s wife to the commune for an abortion” (Mo 2009c, p. 105).44 She braves driving rain and beatings from the entire Zhang family, and her efforts eventually lead to the death of Zhang’s wife when she attempts to swim away.

This general scenario repeats itself several times, with Gugu, once the guarantor of safety and life in childbirth, now bringing death to those unwilling to submit. Tadpole’s own wife, Wang Renmei, even succumbs; after secretly becoming pregnant and going into hiding, she dies during the abortion she finally allows Gugu to perform. In the search for the pregnant Wang Dan, the whole village is enlisted in the effort and paid five Yuan a day; once again death comes in the river, although in Wang Dan’s fatal attempt to escape, her daughter, Chen Mei, is born. Guan perceptively analyzes Gugu’s behavior by observing that “in the grand modernist view that Gugu holds so close to her heart, she firmly believes that the policy of family planning is for the good of all humanity. This ‘holy’ sense of mission lends her a sort of inhuman coldness” (Yang 2012, p. 225).45 Gugu’s extreme actions therefore demonstrate the disconnect between her abstract ideals of a greater human good and a practical, quotidian embodied reality.

The apex of the novel’s first crisis is thus reached when Gugu implements the family planning policy so fiercely that she brings heartache and death to all of those who exceed the government restrictions on life. While the introduction of modern medical science to childbirth was at first intended only to preserve and foster life, it at the same time introduced a separation between the biological and the unquantifiable human aspects of birth. Once this separation was introduced, the biological, scientific elements of childbirth became isolated and coopted by the state’s grand narrative of modernity. Through Gugu’s idealistic implementation of the birth control policy, every individual human and family situation becomes reducible to birth numbers, which in turn are directly accountable to the singular goal of slowing population growth.

In this way, a definitive and clear-cut distinction between human and animal has been introduced within the human. While the goals of the Chinese government are ultimately to promote the flourishing of Chinese civilization, this paradoxically incorporates not only the total management of biological life but also its controlled destruction. Time and again, Mo Yan reminds us that “as soon as the child ‘comes out of the oven,’ it’s a life”; once the child is born, however, “it becomes a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, and will receive all due protection; the child is both a flower of the nation and the nation’s future” (Mo 2009c, p. 172).46 In the cases of “excessive” pregnancies, the lives of mothers and their families become caught in the infinite chasm between, on the one hand, the fetuses’ official government status as biological waste and, on the other, the potential of their officially sanctioned, poetic (as the nation’s flowers) and boundless (as the nation’s future) human existences should they be born. Significantly, though, Mo Yan’s depiction of this split between human and animal becomes ever more pronounced only after he has already destabilized the notion of such a disjuncture by depicting a multifaceted and reintegrated unity of biological and spiritual life through references to traditional culture, Buddhism, and Gugu’s emotional connections to the natural world.

3.2. Biopolitics and Neoliberalism

The novel’s fourth section marks the transition from the modern/socialist/state-dominated era of the previous sections to the postmodern/postsocialist/market-dominated setting that is contemporary China. Mo Yan begins this latter part of the novel by describing the extreme changes Gaomi has undergone. Tadpole, who is Gugu’s nephew, and Gugu’s apprentice, Little Lion, whom he married after the death of his first wife, decide to leave Beijing and return to their rural homeland. They find that it has been transformed by capitalism into a prosperous area characterized by a cosmopolitan pastiche, including golf courses, BMWs, and biracial babies wearing seersucker. While this image of contemporary Gaomi presents a standard picture of the rapid changes brought on by global capitalism, it is distinguished in particular by three new institutions related to childbirth: a rebuilt fertility temple, a gynecology hospital, and a frog hatchery. Traditional religion has returned in the form of the temple of the fertility god, which had previously been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Now, however, it shows just one way that childbirth becomes caught up in a bewildering postmodern milieu. The rebuilt temple is now a lucrative tourist enterprise, and people come from all over to visit it and buy clay dolls in the hope of some sort of spiritual, or at least extra-medical, connection with their fertility. The contemporary temple exists only as a copy of the idea of the temple it once was—it is now a conglomerate of competing notions of traditionalism, modernity, and capitalism, centered on the theme of fertility.

Directly across from the temple is a new state-of-the-art gynecological hospital built from joint Chinese and American funding, juxtaposing the contemporary spiritualism of the temple with the universal power of modern science, technology, and global capital. When Tadpole and Little Lion first go in, Tadpole observes that

it didn’t really feel like a hospital, but more like an exclusive club. Although it was the middle of summer, a cool, refreshing breeze floated through the lobby. Pleasant background music softly fluttered in the air, as did the scent of fresh flowers.47

(Mo 2009c, p. 217)

The hospital’s cosmopolitan atmosphere comes not only through its international source of funding but also through its advertised mission, which adheres to the World Medical Association’s Geneva Manifesto. This combination of luxury and internationalism gives the hospital a distinctly neoliberal air that replaces a more state-centered notion of bio-power—that is, the idea of the hospital as a government-run institution with the goal of caring for the lives of its citizens.

The bullfrog hatchery, operated by Tadpole’s former classmate Yuan Sai, constitutes the third of Gaomi’s postsocialist institutions related to birth, and it is here that the various competing aspects of birth and the mystery of life coalesce in a way that forces immediate ethical questions to precipitate out of the murkier theoretical issues that have been building throughout the course of the novel. While frogs in Gaomi traditionally symbolize fertility, in the hatchery, they are depicted in strictly scientific terms, and the breeding pond is filled with frogs engaging in a graphic mating process:

The females expelled viscous clouds of transparent eggs from their reproductive orifices, while the males simultaneously released their clear semen into the water. “Frogs engage in external fertilization,” someone said…, “females can release anywhere from around 8000 to 10,000 eggs at a time.” This was much greater than humans’ capability. […] “In order to make the females produce even more eggs, we add nutritional supplements to their food.”—Wa wa wa—wa wa wa.48

(Mo 2009c, p. 197)

Here we see that the idea of fecundity traditionally associated with frogs has been placed in a modern capitalist, scientific setting in which the frogs’ activity has been precisely quantified and strictly managed. The entire mating process is so transparent that even fertilization is described visually in its occurrence outside the frogs’ bodies: everything has been laid bare and can thus be measured and manipulated. The frogs are raised not only to be sold as meat but also to be turned into anti-aging products:

Korean scientists have recently extracted and refined a kind of extremely valuable peptide from the skin of bullfrogs. It has anti-oxidation properties that can eliminate free radicals in the human body, so it is a natural anti-aging substance…. Of course, it also has many other kinds of mysterious properties, especially its ability to increase the likelihood that a woman will give birth to twins, or even greater multiple births.49

(Mo 2009c, p. 197)

Again, we are confronted with the global authority of modern science, which not only has the ability to counteract the natural process of aging but also promises to be “extremely valuable” in an economic sense. At the same time as the frogs can be utilized for humans to overcome nature, however, they also retain their traditional “mysterious properties” related to fertility.

The bullfrog hatchery is clearly an appropriate cover for the illegal business in surrogate pregnancies that Yuan Sai is operating. Customers with enough money can pay for the artificial insemination of a surrogate mother, while poverty and desperation render the surrogates as helpless as the bullfrogs. In this underground operation, modern science pairs with neoliberal desires to skirt not only the one-child policy but also, like the extract from the frogs’ skin, the natural restrictions of age and menopause. The latter eventually turns out to be the case for Little Lion, whose secret collection of Tadpole’s semen in a blindfolded sex game mirrors the external fertilization of the bullfrogs.

The surrogacy business both extends and exacerbates the division within the human between an abstract notion of human life and its animal grounding in the physical body. In doing so, it serves as an example of the dire consequences of both “biotechnological progress without any legal framework” (Zhang 2011, p. 56) and the collision of neoliberalism with an abstract idea of “the human” that has become disembodied from its natural, animal origins and escaped the bonds of materiality. In her commentary on the global reproductive egg market, Melinda Cooper argues that in this industry, “capital’s dream of promissory self-regeneration finds its counterpart in a form of directly embodied debt peonage. What embryoid capital demands is a self-regenerating, inexhaustible, quietly sacrificial source of reproductive labor—a kind of global feminine” (Cooper 2008, p. 150). Frog’s image of the hatchery demonstrates the animalization of this “global feminine,” which is the powerless source of biological material traded to serve a more abstract notion of human life, represented by human reproductive desires that are completely detached from the provenance of this material.

Such an idea of the human, abstracted from its physical base, is adopted by all parties involved. Tadpole and Little Lion take Chen Mei, their surrogate, as nothing more than a means for them to get what they want: another child. The situation in which Tadpole learns of the surrogacy business from the driver of a ferry raft while crossing the river stands as an allegory for Tadpole’s decision making. Calling to mind the sixth chapter of the Diamond Sutra, which explains that “a dharma teaching is like a raft” (5),50 Tadpole is at first horrified by his suspicion that Chen Mei has been paid to carry his baby, but he ultimately comes to thank Little Lion for arranging the pregnancy. Comparing his suffering to the travails of Journey to the West’s Tripitaka on his mythical quest to retrieve Buddhist scriptures, Tadpole experiences an enlightenment about life (顿悟人生) and decides that having the baby is ultimately the right choice. Tadpole describes this as “the most dignified of human emotions […] the love of life” (Mo 2009c, p. 265). The paradox, of course, is that he achieves this Buddhist-inflected enlightenment through a dharma path that arrives at his “love of life” through a poor woman renting out her body to act as an incubator for the rich.

Chen Mei, for her part, submits herself to surrogacy on the basis of an abstract ideal of Confucian humanism: filial piety. Her father, Chen Bi, is in the hospital, and she rents out her womb to pay his bills. The story of Chen Mei demonstrates how “advanced capitalism,” as Rosi Braidotti explains, “both invests and profits from the scientific and economic control and the commodification of all that lives,” which includes “exploit[ing] the generative powers of women, animals, plants, genes and cells” (Braidotti 2013, pp. 59, 95). Severely disfigured in a factory fire, Chen Mei is one of the budget options the surrogacy business has to offer: “They look terrifying,” Tadpole is told, “but they weren’t born with such horrible looks. They were originally very beautiful girls, which is to say their genes are excellent” (Mo 2009c, p. 230).51 Because Little Lion is too old to furnish her own eggs, Chen Mei’s genetic material gains economic value.

The whole scenario resonates eerily with a passage from David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Harvey discusses an industrial accident in Shanghai, where a Taiwanese businessman operated

a textile warehouse “in which 61 workers, locked in a building, died in a fire”[…]. Women…bear the brunt of this sort of degrading, debilitating, and dangerous toil. The social consequences of neoliberalization are in fact extreme. Accumulation by dispossession typically undermines whatever powers women may have had within household production/marketing systems and within traditional social structures and relocates everything in male-dominated commodity and credit markets. The paths of women’s liberation from traditional patriarchal controls in developing countries lie either through degrading factory labour or through trading on sexuality […].

(Harvey 2005, pp. 169–70)

Not only does Chen Mei “bear the brunt of this…dangerous toil,” but she is then forced to trade on her sexuality, as her biological matter becomes her only capital once she is too injured to work. Having already been exploited by global capitalism (it is hardly much of an extrapolation to assume that a factory in Guangdong was backed by foreign capital, making goods for export, or both), Chen Mei then falls victim to biotechnology, considered by Braidotti to be “one of the four horsemen of the posthuman apocalypse” (59).52 Exploited for her reproductive capacity as well as her genes, Chen Mei’s situation demonstrates how, under the conditions of the hatchery/surrogacy business, frog and human bodies essentially become commensurate as a biological matter to be manipulated and profited upon.

3.3. Life as Wa

Here, however, we arrive at the point where Braidotti’s “posthuman apocalypse” coincides with Mo Yan’s skillful response to this crisis. Through the hatchery/surrogacy operation, frog and human are united through their complete commodification as biological matter, subject only to the ethics of money and technology. Mo Yan, however, undermines the authority of these forces by reimagining an existential unity of human and frog through the depiction of Gugu in her post-obstetrician years. In other words, instead of the negative unity of human and animal in their shared vulnerability in the market, the relationship is reformulated in a positive construction that sees human life as something other than the idealized and disembodied rational subject.53 Through the story of Gugu, Mo Yan depicts a conceptualization of life that offers an alternative to the postsocialist, neoliberal nightmare in which the other characters are trapped.

By the fourth section of the novel, Gugu has retreated from her role as ideological goon of the party and enters into a contemplative and spiritual period of reflection and repentance. This change in attitude is brought about by a horrifying and transformative experience when Gugu is attacked by frogs one night on a muddy path.54 The passage is worth quoting at length:

Gugu said she stumbled away, intending to return back to the hospital dorms, but somehow ended up coming to a marshy depression. […] Toads and frogs were croaking, gua gua. […] For a time they would call out from all directions, gua gua gua gua, their croaks continuous and united, reaching straight up into the heavens. Then they would suddenly stop, and everything would be silent except for the sound of insects. Gugu said that in her years of walking to the hospital, she’d made countless trips at night without being the least bit afraid. That night, however, she experienced a feeling of dread. It’s often said that frogs sound like drums, but that night, said Gugu, they sounded like wails, like the crying of thousands and thousands of newborn babies. Gugu said that normally she loved to hear the cry of newborn babies, and that to the ears of an obstetrician a newborn’s cry was the greatest music in the world. But that night the sound of the frogs carried a sense of resentment and grievance, as if the spirits of innumerable injured babies were voicing their plaints. […] Gugu followed the small muddy path in an effort to escape the encircling croaks. But to where could she flee? No matter how fast she ran, the forlorn and accusatory sound of the frogs—wa, wa, wa—rose from all directions and ensnared her. She wanted to run but couldn’t move, the mud on the path…adhering so firmly to the soles of her shoes that each time she raised a foot, it required the effort of her entire body. She saw that her shoes were being pulled down to the road by a number of silver silken threads, and each time she would break free from them, new ones would appear wherever she replaced her foot. […] Gugu said she knelt down on the ground like a giant frog and began to crawl forward. […] At this point, Gugu said…a countless number of frogs began jumping around. Some were emerald green and some were golden yellow; some were as big as an electric iron while others were as small as date seeds; some had eyes like a pair of gold stars while the eyes of others were like red beans. They came forth like a wave, angrily croaking and surging forward until they completely surrounded Gugu. Gugu said she could feel their firm little mouths pecking at her skin, and they clung to her as if they had grown talons. They hopped on her back, neck, and head until her body could no longer bear the burden, and she collapsed entirely on the ground. Gugu said her greatest fear was not from their nibbling and scratching, but arose from the unbearable repulsion she felt when their cold, soft, sticky bellies came into contact with her own skin. “They kept pissing all over me,” she said, “or maybe they were ejaculating.”55

(Mo 2009c, pp. 214–15)

At this point, Gugu says she remembers a story her grandmother told her about a woman taking a nap by a river who dreams of having sex with a man dressed in green. She wakes up pregnant and eventually gives birth to a brood of frogs. This thought causes her to get up and run as fast as she can toward a figure she sees on a bridge, who turns out to be Master Hao. She is nearly naked when she reaches him, the frogs having torn off her skirt, and he takes her home with him.

Once I got through this period by drinking Master Hao’s soup, my body molted off a layer of skin and there was an indistinct pain in my bones. I’d heard stories of people who had shed their skin and changed their bones, and I knew that this is what had happened to me. Once I had recovered, I said to Master Hao: Elder Brother, let’s get married.56

(Mo 2009c, pp. 216–17)

This bizarre passage depicts a pivotal moment in Gugu’s life, and the transformation it brings about is not only allegorical but also physical and ontological. After marrying Master Hao, the two pass their days making dolls: with closed eyes, Gugu describes the child the doll is to become, while Master Hao produces it out of clay. Haiyan Lee understands this drastic shift in the trajectory of Gugu’s life as the novel’s celebration of “the magic of a pluralistic universe in which no single truth reigns supreme” (Lee 2023, p. 208)

In her reading of the novel, Andrea Riemenschnitter notes that “frogs…require critical attention as symbols of an atavistic force,” representing “a category of no-yet-humans” or “a figure of the abject” (Riemenschnitter 2014, p. 17). Beyond this symbolic understanding, I would like to see the frogs as part of a broader notion of wa, which I suggest the novel develops as an ambiguous reconceptualization of life as a generative force incorporating both biological and mystical elements. In the above passage, we see Gugu confront the ambiguous notion of wa in all its fullness. After being physically engulfed by countless frogs (wā, 蛙), she loses herself in a therapeutic reverie, which allows her to create representations of babies (wá, 娃) out of clay, much like the goddess Nüwa (wā, 娲) did when she created the human race. Mo Yan interweaves these figures of wa as much as possible, melding them into one generative force of life. Although Gugu never gives birth to a child herself, this force of life converges on Gugu here in the form of wa. Kneeling down on the ground like a big toad on that frightful night, Gugu is skin-to-skin with the sticky little creatures and even ejaculated on. She then undergoes a metamorphosis herself that parallels the transition from tadpole to adult frog. The frogs, furthermore, are also babies, or the spirits of babies. Not only does she describe the sound of their croaking as the crying of newborns, and their varied shapes and sizes mirror that of the clay dolls, but the play that constitutes the final section of the novel also features children dressed as frogs who live in a cave and haunt Gugu at night. Through her transformation, Gugu demonstrates a fundamental rethinking of the human, which returns to a basic notion of life—wa—conceived simply as a generative and primordial force connecting all living things.

Braidotti’s idea of zoe—“the dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself” (Braidotti 2013, p. 60)—can provide a useful starting point for opening up a certain understanding of Mo Yan’s notion of wa. In her posthumanist vision,

Zoe…stands for generative vitality. It is the transversal force that cuts across and reconnects previously segregated species, categories and domains. Zoe-centered egalitarianism is, for me, the core of the post-anthropocentric turn: it is a materialist, secular, grounded and unsentimental response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of Life that is the logic of advanced capitalism.

(Braidotti 2013, p. 60)

This sort of “generative vitality” can describe Mo Yan’s idea of wa, the various meanings of which Little Lion explicitly synthesizes several pages after Gugu’s frog encounter.

Why are “frog” and “baby” pronounced the same? Why is it that as soon as newborns emerge from their mothers’ wombs, their crying sounds exactly like the calls of frogs? Why are so many of the clay statues of babies in our northeastern villages holding frogs at their chests? Why is the ancestor of humankind called Nüwa? This “wa” and the “wa” meaning “frog” have the same pronunciation, which shows that the progenitor of the human race was a giant mother frog. This also shows that humans are evolved from frogs, and that the idea of evolution from apes is completely mistaken….57

(Mo 2009c, p. 223)

By viewing wa as an idea akin to zoe, we can see its potential for reconceptualizing human existence at a time when the separation between human and animal has reached a crisis in this postsocialist articulation of global capitalism. This reconfigured connection of human with animal throws a wrench in the otherwise increasing commodification of life. It does so by indicating an existence in which meaning is not solely produced by a desiring neoliberal subject but arises from life itself and the connections between lives and life forms. The novel is not concerned with offering any more specific suggestions of what this reconceptualization of life should entail, but its notion of wa effectively posits a reconfiguring of the human that no longer enables the idea of a disembodied rational subject to continue the increasing commodification of all biological matter.

While the monist foundation of Braidotti’s zoe is likewise present in wa through the images of sperm and tadpoles, Mo Yan’s wa does not perfectly coincide with zoe but extends beyond it to ambiguously incorporate an otherworldly, religious, or supernatural element into its posthuman ontology. Dismantling the hegemony of rational subjectivity, wa retains a space for a metaphysical “beyond”, which departs from zoe’s “vitalist materialism [that] rests solidly on a neo-Spinozist political ontology of monism and radical immanence” (Braidotti 2013, p. 115). Not only does Frog’s idea of wa incorporate the traditional notion of the heavenly creator Nüwa, but the hallucinatory nature of the final play, in which Gugu is tormented by frog children living in a cave, points to the very real effects of a fabricated symbolic reality. Although they are presumably created exclusively in her own mind, the frog children trap Gugu in an inescapable sense of guilt to the extent that her entire life is completely ruled by their imagined and symbolic existence. It is this self-created yet supernatural dimension that pushes Gugu to constantly reflect upon and repent for her former actions.

Kept from sleep by the frog children, Gugu enters a liminal existence in which she is neither sleeping nor fully awake, and her only concern is the creation of new life, continuing to make dolls with Master Hao and Qin He. Desperate to atone for her crimes, she suggests that Tadpole and Little Lion give their new child back to Chen Mei, which will perhaps help to free Gugu from the frog children’s relentless torment. “A guilty person has no right to die,” she says, “they must go on living. They must endure their suffering and stew in it, like a simmering fish turned over and over….only when their crimes have been atoned for using this method are they free to pass away” (Mo 2009c, p. 339).58 When Gugu immediately follows these words by hanging herself, she is presumably killing her former self after having stewed in her guilt for so many years. As she positions herself at the threshold of life and death, Tadpole runs up to save her while Master Hao and Qin He continue to make dolls. “Have I died?” she asks, to which Tadpole responds, “You can think of it this way, but a person like you doesn’t die.” “Then I’ve been reborn,” Gugu replies (Mo 2009c, p. 340).59 Having come to understand the full truth of wa, as represented by her Nüwa-esque creation of baby dolls and her accountability to the frog children, Gugu may now presumably be reborn as someone with an entirely different and new understanding of what life is. Beyond its new basis in this multidirectional wa flow of life, which crosses species boundaries as well as realms of existence, there is little to suggest what Gugu’s new life will entail. At any rate, it is meant to be revolutionary: Tadpole’s final letter to a Japanese author, which introduces the play, is dated 3 June 2009, the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 Tian’anmen incident. We might, therefore, read the ending of the novel as Mo Yan’s arrival at a revolutionary, fundamental reformulation of human existence.

4. Conclusions: Wa as a Concept Beyond Frog

In Frog, it is ultimately only through wa, which offers a reconciliation of human with animal, that true atonement can occur, and Gugu can finally be reborn. As a conception of life that rejects definitive biological or rational articulations of the human, wa offers an open horizon of possibility for humans that theoretically circumnavigates the dead ends we’ve seen the disembodied rational subject face under the various biopolitical regimes depicted in the novel. While Frog presents the most comprehensive theory of wa in Mo Yan’s works—demonstrating the conceptual ruptures between human and animal in modernity while simultaneously constructing an alternative notion of life based on references to classical philosophy, tradition, folk religion, magical realism, and an inherent physical commensurability of life forms—we can see wa as a theory of life widely operating throughout Mo Yan’s works. Many of his novels juxtapose human and animal life in ways that reveal the detrimental effects of the increasing separation of these conceptual categories while also offering a more broadly reconfigured notion of human life. Red Sorghum, for example, includes gruesome depictions of the town butcher skinning Uncle Arhat alive, followed by packs of dogs eating village corpses, all while establishing a primal, vitalistic, and Daoist-inflected sense of life emanating from the fields of wild sorghum and the narrator’s grandfather’s virile masculinity. Big Breasts and Wide Hips opens with the protagonist’s birth coinciding with that of his family’s donkey and ends with the bizarre capitalist enterprise of an exotic bird park, while along the way, one of the protagonist’s sisters believes she is a clairvoyant bird spirit. The protagonist of Pow! narrates the story of his meat-obsessed life in his abattoir village from a Buddhist temple after his death, and Life and Death are Wearing Me Out traces the story of an executed landlord through his subsequent reincarnations as various animals before he is finally reborn as a human. The list could go on. By outlining Mo Yan’s concept of wa in Frog, I hope to have demonstrated a particular philosophical response the novel proposes to many of the problems faced in modern Chinese society, which can so often be traced to a conceptual rupture between human and animal. I also hope the idea of wa can help open new critical perspectives on Mo Yan’s oeuvre in general and even beyond.