Abstract
This is a collection of feminist writings on the matter of Family Planning in the People’s Republic of China from the 1970s to now. Fragments of academic essays, testimonies, and snippets of life writings pieced together to weave multidirectional memories of Chinese women in this collective yet fractured form. (Rothberg) A melange of readings of Moyan’s prose fiction Frog (蛙) – a work which the author himself describes as all about “procreation” and which I will challenge – and translations of women’s writings will offer intimate yet critical lens to look at the poetics of memory-writing. (Moyan 2021) This website, therefore, demands new ways to look at a troubled yet overlooked history in pushing back the rigid and reductionist definitions of genre and form. This space breaks down the limitations of history as stale, immobile, and cohesive. Feminist writing realizes its potential through disruption, convolution, mixing, and recontextualizing in response to the patriarchal necessity of being tamed. Here lingers a feminist sensibility that refuses to be summarized in grand and official narratives of the nation-state.
- Xiaoyang Hua, 2025
About
Xiaoyang (Sunny) Hua is a PhD student in English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was born and raised in Nanjing, China. Sunny is interested in novel form, global anglophone literatures, and Chinese women’s life writings.
Poetics of Confession in Moyan’s Frog
At first pitch, Moyan’s Frog (2009) is a collection of letters that chronicles memories of an overburdened past. The narrator – Wanzu – addresses himself under the pseudonym Tadpole, writing five letters to his Japanese “sensei” Sugitani Akihito. These letters denote detailed history of the villagers in Gaomi, China from the early 1950s before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, all the way to decades after the implementation of China’s One Child Policy. In particular, Tadpole zooms in on the stories of Gugu (his aunt) – a village doctor who performs expertise in helping local pregnant women with delivering their children. As a student of the renowned Canadian doctor Norman Bethune and believer of modern medical methods, Gugu gained fame from her excellence in service. Because of her advanced medical techniques, Gugu gradually replaced the local non-professional helpers “old midwives,” or “old witches” as the villagers refer to jokingly. (Moyan, Frog 12) History moves forward as Tadpole writes on. He then covers Gugu’s transformation from the benevolent village Nightingale to the notorious goon of the family-planning team. Tadpole also includes episodes of other locals throughout the years when China experienced great social-economic changes, especially in rural areas. These memories were indeed traumatic. After recovering from food shortages during the Great Chinese Famine and political turmoils of the Great Leap Forward, China’s rural population skyrocketed. Then the shadow of population control projects quickly loomed around in the countryside. In Tadpole’s letters, children were forcibly aborted, mothers died in operation accidents, families separated, houses torn down, and properties destroyed. It is easy to spot the gravitational force of history that pulls the narrative of the novel backward.
Yet two attributes mark out the formal quality of Moyan’s Frog as more than a fixation on the past. First, its engagement with time as non-linear through fragments . Second, its first-person narration through epistolary form. Both these narrative aspects of the novel make the writings of memories a crossover between past and present, personal and collective.
Many see Moyan’s writing as a reflection of social issues that depict the “realistic” lives of lower-class villagers in Gaomi, China. Historical accuracy becomes an anchor of reference. However, there lacks an affective study of Frog, regardless of the blatant emotional charge and haunting imaginations that permeate the work. This is not to say that no critics pay attention to the novel’s emotional aspect. In fact, Meanwhile one would argue that Frog fits itself into the genre of magical realism as it is convenient to bracket Mo Yan with other Western writers who loosely blend supernatural elements with realistic settings. I would suggest approaching Frog not as a creative depiction of history, but as a personal confession.
Formally, by recounting the past as preparation of future work, Frog speaks to a poetics of remorse that paradoxically demands generative therefore speculative mode of writing of looking ahead. Rather than seeing guilt as a reservoir of historical backwater, reading the novel mirrors the experience of creating new works from memories. This temporality-bending nature of guilt narratives plays a crucial role in unpacking the ways we look at writings of memories, in which the linearity of time collapses.
In this rather formally non-traditional of Frog, I examine textual examples of when violence becomes generative, or vice versa, when speculations become a haunting fantasy of loss, and eventually situate the wounds of memories in affinity to heal until they cannot break after time. This chimerical result even resists the male, heteronormative positionality of Moyan, whose work, I would argue, transcends the author’s intent of depicting “social reality” if read and recontextualized via a feminist sensibility. (Moyan, Interview) The ultimate goal, therefore, is to treat discursive evidence as organic and not only subjected to a singular mode of analysis. The interests of this modular essay lie not in discussing the author’s responsibility or to what extent do their works bear any moral liabilities, but rather to reposition poetics of memory writings in a female space for further mobilization, reclaiming, and repurposing. If Moyan states that the title of “Frog” (Wa) points to the cultural connections of frogs to procreation and phonetic closeness to mythic imagery of Nu Wa – the goddess of fertility, this essay treats the author’s representation of frogs not as a metaphor, but as a method. The fertility of frogs and the transformation of their offsprings can be more than symbolic. In zeroing onto few seemingly cultural examples of reproduction and change, this essay seeks to stimulates these edifice of representations and turn them an ongoing motion.
From Trees to Coal
“[…] Instead, we stood in front of the pile of coal, heads down and bent at the waist like geologists who have discovered an unusual rock formation. We sniffed the air like dogs searching for food in a rubbish pile. At this point I need to first thank Chen Bi and then Wang Dan. It was Chen pondering a weighty question. His big, high-bridged nose was a source of laughter for us. After a thoughtful pause, he smashed the coal in his hand against a much parger piece, like shattering glass, releasing a strong aroma into the air. Both he and Wang Dan picked up shards. He licked his taste to taste it and rolled his eyes as he looked our way. She copied him by tsating hers and looking our way. They exchanged a glance, smiled, and as if on cue, cautiously took small bites; they chewed briefly before taking bigger bites and chewing like crazy. Excited looks burst onto their faces. Chen Bi’s nose turned red and was beaded with sweat. Wang Dan’s little nose turned black with coal dust. We were entranced by the sound of coal being chewed and shocked when they swallowed it. They’d actually swallowed coal! […] He pointed to some slightly transparent, amber-like pale yellow coal. That was the source of the pine aroma. From our nature study class we’d learned that coal formed over millennia from buried forests. […] We hadn’t believed him or what the textbook said. How could green forests turn into black coal?” (8)
In this passage, Moyan sets out the significance of food and land in Tadpole’s first letter, in which he describes this absurd episode of coal-eating. While extreme hunger can be a rather unfamiliar situation for many modern readers, especially those in the Global North, the horrifying history of famine and national food shortage from 1591 – 1961 struck as the most detrimental periods of tragedy in the history of the newly established People’s Republic of China. In his book Tombstone, Yang Jisheng describes those years as “a tragedy unprecedented in human history” (这是一场人类历史上空前的悲剧), which he writes, “Tens of millions of people died out of starvation and widespread cannibalism broke out during the years with normal climate, without wars, without plague. This was an anomaly unparalleled in human history.” (在气候正常的年景，没有战争，没有瘟疫，却有几千万人死于饥饿， 却有大范围的“人相食”，这是人类历史上绝无仅有的异数。)”（Yang) Yang Jisheng points out that the struggle of food disrupts the “normal” rythms of basic human lives. Here, Tadpole’s early childhood memories in eating coal echoes this severe scarcity of food. But it is not only the aftermath of famine that this passage highlights, but it also presents an almost grotesque imagery when the human bodies are pressed closely to the pulses of nature that humans painfully recognize their dependence of. The motions of feasting and acts of devouring lead to several intense close-up shots to the children’s body parts – “their faces”, the expressions, as well as Chen Bi and Wang Dan’s noses that vary in sizes. While nose size has been a running gag in the book about Chen Bi (his name literally means Chen nose), body parts become more hyperbolized in this movement-charged scene. In juxtaposition of the biology lessons where the children learn about the evolution of coal from decayed trees, the narrator then exclaims, “How could green forests turn into black coal?” This question aptly captures human’s attempts to grasp of how nature process drastic changes through time. When these children ingest these chunks of coals, they are gulping long history of the soil’s organic transformation that predates their existence. There presents a nearly sublime beauty in this episode of pure indulgence because it is in this moment where children’s bodies merge with History which is volatile, puzzling, and unfathomable. How do children become coal-eaters? Why would they think they taste good? Or why does Tadpole choose to narrate this odd memory as a grown-up? How do humans turn from little toddlers to adults and eventually have their own children? These are questions as simple yet as complex as the question of the turning of forests into coal. It is arguably true that land is a crucial motif that occupies modern Chinese literature. Yet Moyan’s engagement with the earth suggests more than a preoccupation with the nation’s food crisis if seen through collapse of time. The looping patterns of nature – from forests to coal, coal to children’s bodies, and eventually children to adults – all call for a poetics of the past that unfolds a tantalizing future.
From trees to coal
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