Free Frog by Mo Yan

Wang Xiaoti incident, she returned to work at the obstetrics ward in the health centre. Over a two-year period, however, not a single infant was born in any of the more than forty villages that made up the People’s commune. The reason? Famine, of course.
    Hunger disrupted women’s menstrual cycles. Hunger turned men into eunuchs. The obstetrics ward included only Gugu and a middle-aged doctor named Huang. Dr Huang was a graduate of a prominent medical school, but because of a questionable family background and her own history as a rightist, she’d been exiled to a rural health centre. Every time she mentioned the woman’s name, Gugu could barely contain her anger. The woman had a strange disposition. Some days she might not say a word to anyone, on other days she’d be bitterly sarcastic, talking a blue streak. She could give a lengthy speech to a spittoon.
    Gugu stopped going home so often after her mother died, but whenever there was something special on the table, Mother had my sister send some over to Gugu. One day my father got his hands on half a rabbit in the field, probably the remnant of a hawk’s meal. Mother went out and picked half a basket of wild greens and cooked them together with the rabbit. She wrapped up a bowlful of the meat and told my sister to take it over to Gugu. When she said she wouldn’t do it, I volunteered. You can go, Mother said, but don’t sneak some of it for yourself on the way. And keep your eyes open while you’re walking. I don’t want you breaking that bowl.
    The health centre was about ten li from our house. I started off trotting, wanting to get there while the rabbit meat was still warm. But my stomach began to growl at the same time as my legs began to ache, and I was sweating and light-headed. In short, I was hungry. The two bowls of porridge with greens I’d eaten that morning had passed through my stomach and the smell of the cooked rabbit was seeping through the wrapping. A debate, soon to develop into an argument, between me and myself broke out. Have a bite, one me said, just one bite. No, the other me countered, you have to be an honest boy and do what your mother said. My hand came close to undoing the wrapping more than once, but the image of Mother’s face flashed into my mind.
    Mulberry trees lined both sides of the road from our village to the health centre, all stripped bare of leaves by famine victims. I broke off a branch and began gnawing on it, finding its sharp, bitter taste hard to swallow. But then I spotted a cicada that had just emerged from its cocoon, a nice soft yellow, its wings not yet dry. Ecstatic, I flung down the mulberry branch, scooped up the cicada and popped it into my mouth. Cicadas were a nutritious delicacy to us, but only after they were fried. By eating this one raw I saved on fuel and time. It had a fresh taste and, I was willing to bet, was more nutritious than if it had been fried. I searched all the trees as I walked along, but found no more cicadas. I did, however, find a fancy coloured handbill showing a young man with a glowing face holding a lovely young woman in his arms. The text read:
Communist Air Force pilot Wang Xiaoti has left the dark side and flown into the light, where he is now a Nationalist Air Force Brigadier General. He has received five thousand ounces of gold, and is the glorious mate of the famed songstress Miss Tao Lili.
My hunger abruptly forgotten, I experienced a strange and powerful emotion. I felt like screaming. In school I’d heard that the Nationalists sent reactionary handbills across the Strait by balloon, but I never thought I’d actually see one or that it could be quite so flashy. And I had to admit that the woman in the photograph was better-looking than Gugu.
    Gugu and Dr Huang were having a heated argument when I walked into the ward. Dr Huang wore a pair of dark glasses over a hooked nose, thin lips, and exposed, badly stained teeth – in future years Gugu would often remind us that