Frog

In rural Gaomi, Wan Xin—known within her family as Gugu, or Aunt—is a gifted Communist-trained midwife whose modern methods replace dangerous traditional childbirth practices. Her standing collapses after her fiancé defects, and she responds by demonstrating uncompromising loyalty to the state. When national family-planning policy hardens, the woman who once devoted herself to bringing children safely into the world becomes an aggressive enforcer of birth quotas, sterilisation and abortion.

Her nephew Tadpole recounts Gugu’s career through letters, memories and a dramatic final section, while confronting his own complicity in the choices imposed on his wives. The novel follows the collision between a village culture that values large families and a bureaucracy that treats reproduction as a political target. Gugu’s later remorse, and the illicit surrogacy economy that develops around the policy, turn the book into a tragicomic examination of obedience, guilt and the commodification of birth.