Frogs by Mo Yan.

Translated by Howard Goldblatt.

I have to admit that, though I did not make it public, I was personally opposed to my
Aunty’s marriage plans. My father, my brothers and their wives shared my feelings. It
simply wasn’t a good match in our view. Ever since we were small we’d looked
forward to seeing Aunty find a husband. Her relationship with Wang Xiaoti had
brought immense glory to the family, only to end ingloriously. Yang Lin was next,
and while not nearly the ideal match that Wang would have provided, he was, after
all, an official, which made him a passable candidate for marriage. Hell, she could
have married Qin He, who was obsessed with her, and be better off than with Hao
Dashou . . . we were by then assuming she’d wind up an old maid, and had made
appropriate plans. We’d even discussed who would be her caregiver when she
reached old age. But then, with no prior indication, she’d married Hao Dashou. Little
Lion and I were living in Beijing then, and when we heard the news, we could hardly
believe our ears. Once the preposterous reality set in, we were overcome by sadness.

Years later, Aunty starred in a TV program titled ‘Moon Child,’ which was supposed
to be about the sculptor Hao Dashou, though the camera was always on her, talking
and gesturing as she welcomed journalists into Hao’s yard and gave them a guided
tour of his workshop and the storeroom where he kept all his clay figurines, while he
sat quietly at his workbench, eyes glazed over and a blank look on his face, like a
dreamy old horse. Did all master artists turn into dreamy old horses once they
became famous? I wondered. The name Hao Dashou resounded in my ears, though
I’d only met him a few times. After seeing him late on the night my nephew Xianquan
hosted a dinner to celebrate his acceptance as a pilot, years passed before I saw him
again, and this time it was on TV. His hair and beard had turned white, but his
complexion was ruddy as ever; composed and serene, he was a nearly transcendent
figure. It was during that program that we learned why Aunty had married Hao
Dashou.

Aunty lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and began to speak, sadness creeping into her
voice. ‘Marriages,’ she said, ‘are made in Heaven. By this, I’m not promoting the
cause of idealism for you youngsters, for there was a time when I was an ardent
materialist, but where marriage is concerned, you must trust in fate. Just ask him,’
she said, pointing to Hao Dashou. ‘Do you think he ever dreamed of one day getting
me as his wife?’

‘In 1997, when I was sixty,’ she said, ‘my superiors told me to retire, whether I
wanted to or not. I was already five years past the retirement age, and nothing I said
would have made any difference. You know the hospital director, that ungrateful
bastard Huang Jun, the son of Huang Pi from Hexi Village. Just who do you think
dragged that little shit – they called him Melon Huang – out of his mother’s belly?
Well, he spent a couple of days in a medical school, and when he came out, almost as
stupid as the day he went in, he couldn’t find a vein with a syringe, couldn’t locate a
heart with a stethoscope, and had never heard the terms ‘inch, bar, and cubit’ when
checking a patient’s pulse. So who better to appoint as hospital director! He was
admitted into the school thanks to my personal recommendation to Director Shen of
the Bureau of Health. Only to be ignored by him when he was the man in charge. The
wretched creature has limited talents: playing the host, giving gifts, kissing ass and
seducing women.’

At this point, Aunty thumped her breast and stomped her foot. ‘What a fool I was,’
she said angrily, ‘letting the wolf in my door. I made it easy for him to have his way
with all the girls in the hospital. Wang Xiaomei, a seventeen-year-old girl from Wang
Village, had nice, thick braids, a pretty oval face, and skin like ivory. Her lashes
danced like butterfly wings, her eyes could talk, and anyone who saw her would
believe that if film director Zhang Yimou discovered her, she’d be a hotter
commodity than Gong Li or Zhang Ziyi ever were. Sadly, Melon Huang, the sex fiend,
discovered her first. He rushed off to Wang Village, where, with a glib tongue that
could bring back the dead, he talked Xiaomei’s parents into sending her to his
hospital to learn from me how to treat women’s problems. He said she’d be my
student, but she never spent a single day with me. Instead, the lecher kept her to
himself, his daily companion and nightly lover. If that weren’t bad enough, he even
took her during the daytime; people had seen them. Then once he’d had enough fun
with her, he was off to the county seat, where he hosted banquets for high officials
with public funds, in hopes of being transferred to the big city. Maybe you haven’t
seen what he looks like: a long, donkey face with dark lips, bloody gums, and toxic
breath. Even with a face like that, he figured he had a chance of becoming assistant
director at the Bureau of Health! Each time he dragged Wang Xiaomei along to drink
and eat and entertain the officials, probably even offering her up as a gift for their
pleasure. Evil! That’s what he was, pure evil!

‘One day the little wretch called me to his office. Other women who worked in the
hospital were afraid to be in his office. But not me. I kept a little dagger handy, and
wouldn’t have hesitated to use it on the bastard. Well, he poured tea, smiled, and laid
it on thick. “What did you want to see me about, Director Huang? Let’s get to the
point.” “Heh-heh.” He grinned. “Great Aunt” – damned if he didn’t call me “Great
Aunt” – “you delivered me the day I was born, and you’ve watched me grow into
adulthood. Why, I could be your own son. Heh-heh”. “I don’t deserve such an
honour,” I said. “You’re the director of a big hospital, while I’m just an ordinary
woman’s doctor. If you were my son I’d die from the honour. So, please, tell me what
you have in mind.” More heh-heh-heh, before he got around to revealing the
shameless reason he’d summoned me. “I’ve made the mistake all leading cadres
make sooner or later – through my own carelessness Wang Xiaomei got pregnant.”
“Congratulations!” I said. “Now that Xiaomei is carrying your dragon seed, the
hospital is guaranteed leadership continuity.” “Don’t mock me, Great Aunt, I’ve been
so upset the past few days I can’t eat or sleep.” Can you believe the bastard actually
said he had trouble eating and sleeping? “She’s demanding that I divorce my wife,
and if I won’t she’s threatened to report me to the County Discipline Commission.”
“Really?” I said. “I thought having ‘second wives’ was popular among you officials
these days. Buy a villa, install her in it, and you’ve got it made.” “I asked you not to
make fun of me, Great Aunt,” he said. “I couldn’t go public with a ‘second’ or a ‘third’
wife, even if I had the money to buy a villa.” “Then go ahead and get a divorce,” I
said. He pulled that donkey face longer than ever and said, “Great Aunt, you know
full well that my father-in-law and those pig-butcher brothers-in-law of mine are
violent thugs. My life wouldn’t be worth a thing if they found out about this.” “But
you’re the Director, an official!” “All right, that’s enough, Great Aunt. In your old eyes
the director of a hospital in a piddling, out-of-the-way town is about as important as
a loud fart, so instead of mocking me, why don’t you help me come up with
something!” “What in the world could I come up with?” “Wang Xiaomei admires
you,” he said. “She’s told me that many, many times. You’re the only person she’ll
listen to.” “What do you want me to do?” “Talk her into having an abortion.” “Melon
Huang,” I complained through clenched teeth, “I will never again soil my hands with
that atrocious act! Over the course of my life I’ve already been responsible for more
than two thousand aborted births, and I’ll never do it again. Just wait her out until
you’re a father. Xiaomei is such a pretty girl, she’s bound to present you with a lovely
boy or girl, and that should make you happy. You go tell her that when the time
comes, I’ll be there to deliver the child.”’

‘With that, I turned on my heel and walked out of the office pleased with myself. But
that feeling lasted only till I was back in my own office and had drunk a glass of
water. My mood turned dark. No one as bad as Melon Huang deserved to have an
heir, and what a shame that Wang Xiaomei was carrying his child. I’d learned enough
delivering all those children to know that a person’s core – good or bad – is
determined more by nature than nurture. You can criticize hereditary laws all you
want, but this is knowledge based on experience. You could place a son of that evil
Melon Huang in a Buddhist temple, and he’d grow up to be a lascivious monk. No
matter how sorry I felt for Wang Xiaomei or how unwilling I was to put ideas in her
head, I simply couldn’t let that fiend find an easy way out of his predicament. If the
world had another lascivious monk, so be it.

‘But Xiaomei herself came to me, wrapped her arms around my legs, and dirtied my
trousers with her tears and snivel. “Aunty,” she sobbed, “dear Aunty, he tricked me,
he lied to me. I wouldn’t marry that bastard if he sent an eight-man sedan chair for
me. Help me do it, Aunty, I don’t want that evil seed in me.”’

‘So that’s how it was.’ Aunty lit another cigarette and puffed away savagely, until I
couldn’t see her face for all the smoke. ‘I helped rid her of the fetus. Once a rose
about to bloom, Wang Xiaomei was now a ruined, fallen woman.’ Aunty reached up
and dried her tears. ‘I vowed to never do that procedure again, I couldn’t take it any
longer, not for anyone, not even if the woman was carrying the offspring of a
chimpanzee. I wouldn’t do it. The slurping sound as it was sucked into the vacuum
bottle was like a monstrous hand squeezing my heart, harder and harder, until I
broke out in a cold sweat and began to see stars. The moment I finished I crumpled
to the floor.

‘You’re right, I do digress when I’m talking – I’m old. After all that chatter, I still
haven’t told you why I married Hao Dashou. Well, I announced my retirement on the
fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, but that bastard Melon Huang wanted to
keep me around and urged me to formally retire but remain on the payroll at eight
hundred Yuan a month. I spat in his face. “I’ve slaved away enough for you, you
bastard. You have me to thank for eight out of every ten Yuan this hospital has
earned all these years. When women and girls come to the hospital from all around,
it’s me they’ve come to see. If money was what I was after, I could have made at least
a thousand a day on my own. Do you really think you can buy my labour for eight
hundred a month, Melon Huang? A migrant worker is worth more than that. I’ve
slaved away half my life, and now it’s time for me to rest, to go back home to
Northeast Gaomi Township.” He was upset with me and has spent much of the past
two years trying to make me suffer. Me, suffer? I’m a woman who’s seen it all. As a
little girl I wasn’t scared of the Jap devils, so what made him think I was scared of a
little bastard like him now that I was in my seventies? Right, right, back to what I was
saying.

‘If you want to know why I married Hao Dashou, I have to start with the frogs. Some
old friends got together for dinner on the night I announced my retirement, and I
wound up drunk – I hadn’t drunk much, less than a bowlful, but it was cheap liquor.
Xie Xiaoque, the son of the restaurant owner, Xie Baizhua, one of those sweet-potato
kids of the ‘63 famine, took out a bottle of ultra-strong Wuliangye – to honour me, he
said – but it was counterfeit, and my head was reeling. Everyone at the table was
wobbly, barely able to stand, and Xie Xiaoque himself foamed at the mouth till his
eyes rolled up into his head.’

Aunty said she staggered out of the restaurant, headed to the hospital dormitory, but
wound up in a marshy area on a narrow, winding path bordered on both sides by
head-high reeds. Moonlight reflected on the water around her shimmered like glass.
The croaks of toads and frogs sounded first on one side and then on the other, back
and forth, like an antiphonal chorus. Then the croaks came at her from all sides at
the same time, waves and waves of them merging to fill the sky. Suddenly, there was
total silence, broken only by the chirping of insects. Aunty said that in all her years as
a medical provider, traveling up and down remote paths late at night, she’d never
once felt afraid. But that night she was terror-stricken. The croaking of frogs is often
described in terms of drumbeats. But that night it sounded to her like human cries,
almost as if thousands of newborn infants were crying. That had always been one of
her favorite sounds, she said. For an obstetrician, no sound in the world approaches
the soul-stirring music of a newborn baby’s cries. The liquor she’d drunk that night,
she said, left her body as cold sweat. ‘Don’t assume I was drunk and hallucinating,
because as soon as the liquor oozed out through my pores, leaving me with a slight
headache, my mind was clear.’ As she walked down the muddy path, all she wanted
was to escape that croaking. But how? No matter how hard she tried to get away, the
chillingcroak – croak – croak – sounds of aggrieved crying ensnared her from all
sides. She tried to run, but couldn’t; the gummy surface of the path stuck to the soles
of her shoes, and it was a chore even to lift up a foot, snapping the silvery threads
that held her shoes to the surface of the path. But as soon as she stepped down, more
threads were formed. So she took off her shoes to walk in her bare feet, but that
actually increased the grip of the mud. Aunty said she got down on her hands and
knees, like an enormous frog, and began to crawl. Now the mud stuck to her knees
and calves and hands, but she didn’t care, she just kept crawling. It was at that
moment, she said, when an incalculable number of frogs hopped out of the dense
curtain of reeds and from lily pads that shimmered in the moonlight. Some were jade
green, others were golden yellow; some were as big as an electric iron, others as small
as dates. The eyes of some were like nuggets of gold, those of others, red beans. They
came upon her like ocean waves, enshrouding her with their angry croaks, and it felt
as if all those mouths were pecking at her skin, that they had grown nails to scrape
her skin. When they hopped onto her back, her neck, and her head, their weight sent
her sprawling onto the muddy path. Her greatest fear, she said, came not from the
constant pecking and scratching, but from the disgusting, unbearable sensation of
their cold, slimy skin brushing against hers. ‘They covered me with urine, or maybe it
was semen.’ She said she was suddenly reminded of a legend her grandmother had
told her about a seducing frog: a maiden cooling herself on a riverbank one night fell
asleep and dreamed of a liaison with a young man dressed in green. When she awoke
she was pregnant and eventually gave birth to a nest of frogs. Given an explosion of
energy by that terrifying image, she jumped to her feet and shed the frogs on her
body like mud clods. But not all – some clung to her clothes and to her hair; two even
hung by their mouths from the lobes of her ears, a pair of horrific earrings. As she
took off running, she sensed that somehow the mud was losing its sucking power,
and as she ran she shook her body and tore at her clothes and skin with both hands.
She shrieked each time she caught one of the frogs, which she flung away. The two
attached to her ears like suckling infants took some of the skin with them when she
pulled them off.

Aunty screamed and she ran, but she couldn’t break free of the reptilian horde. And
when she turned to look, the sight nearly drove the soul out of her body. Thousands,
tens of thousands of frogs had formed a mighty army behind her, croaking, hopping,
colliding, crowding together, like a murky torrent rushing madly toward her. As she
ran, roadside frogs hopped into the path forming barriers to block her progress,
while others leaped out of the reedy curtain in individual assaults. She told us that
the loose-fitting black silk dress she was wearing that night was being shredded by
the assault. Attacking frogs swallowed the strips of silk, and were thrown into a
frenzy of cheek scraping before they rolled on the ground and exposed their white
undersides.

She ran all the way to a riverbank, where she spotted a little stone bridge washed by
silvery moonlight. By then hardly anything remained of her dress, and when she
reached the bridge, stark naked, she ran into Hao Dashou.

Thoughts of modesty did not enter her mind at that moment, nor was she aware that
she had been stripped naked. She spotted a man in a palm-bark rain cape and a
bamboo coned hat sitting in the middle of the bridge kneading something in his
hands. ‘I later learned that he was kneading a lump of clay. A moon child can only be
made from clay bathed in moonlight. I didn’t know who he was, but I didn’t care.
Whoever he was, he was bound to be my salvation.’ She rushed into the man’s arms
and crawled under his rain cape, and when her breasts came into contact with the
warmth of his chest, in contrast to the damp, foul-smelling chill of the frogs on her
back, she cried out, ‘Help, Big Brother, save me!’ She promptly passed out.

Aunty’s extended narration called up images of frog hordes in our minds and sent
chills up and down our spines. The camera cut to Hao Dashou, who still sat there like
a statue; the next scenes were close-ups of clay figures and of the little stone bridge,
before returning to Aunty’s face, focusing on her mouth. She said:

‘I awoke to find myself on Hao Dashou’s brick bed, dressed in men’s clothes. With
both hands he handed me a bowl of mung bean soup, the simple fragrance of which
cleared my head. I was sweating after a single bowlful, and was suddenly aware of
how much I hurt and how hot my skin felt. But that cold, slimy feeling that had made
me scream was already fading. I had itchy, painful blisters all over my body, I spiked
a fever, and I was delirious. But I had passed an ordeal by drinking Hao Dashou’s
mung bean soup; I’d shed a layer of skin, and my bones had begun to ache. I’d heard
a legend about rebirth, and I knew I’d become a new person. When I regained my
health, I said to Hao Dashou: “Big Brother, let’s get married.”’ ■