Free Frog by Mo Yan Page B

the ward.
    Like someone who has performed heroically under brutal circumstances, Huang Qiuya handed the crumpled remains of the handbill to the director and then got down on her hands and knees to feel around for her glasses, which she found and put back on, holding them to her face since one of the arms was broken. When she saw the torn pieces Gugu had thrown away, she frantically scooped them up, as if she’d found hidden treasure.
    What’s this? asked the director as he smoothed out the handbill.
    A reactionary handbill, said Huang as she handed him the torn fragments, as if they were treasured gifts. Don’t forget these, they’re the rest of what the defector Wang Xiaoti sent to Wan Xin.
    The curious doctors and nurses were transfixed.
    Suffering from a case of far-sightedness, the director held the handbill out at arm’s length so he could read it. The doctors and nurses crowded around him.
    What are you people looking at? What’s there to see? Get back to work, he scolded as he put away the handbill. Come with me, Dr Huang.
    The doctors and nurses wasted no time in sharing their views of the incident as Huang followed the director to his office.
    Gugu’s heart-rending wails erupted from the obstetrics ward, and I was suddenly aware of what a destructive thing I’d done. I stepped nervously into the ward, where I saw Gugu sitting with her head down on a table, crying and pounding her fists on the tabletop.
    Gugu, I said, Mother sent me over with some rabbit for you.
    She ignored me, just kept crying.
    I laid my bundle down on the table, opened it, and placed the bowl of rabbit meat next to her head.
    Gugu swept the bowl off the table with her arm. It shattered on the floor.
    Get out of here! Go! Go! She raised her head to scream at me. Get out of my sight, you little bastard!

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    It wasn’t until later that I realised just how terrible the thing I’d done was.
    After I fled from the health centre, Gugu slit her left wrist, then dipped her right index finger in the blood and wrote:
I hate Wang Xiaoti! I have always been a Party member, and I will die a Party member!
    When Huang Qiuya returned triumphantly to the ward, Gugu’s blood had seeped all the way to the door. Huang shrieked before crumpling to the floor.
    Gugu was saved, and placed on probation by the Party. The reason was not that her relationship with Wang Xiaoti remained suspicious, but that she had tried to use suicide to show the Party what she was capable of.

12
    Northeast Gaomi Township enjoyed an unprecedented harvest from its thirty thousand acres of sweet potatoes in the autumn of 1962. After putting us through three abominable years, soil that had refused to grow anything regained its bountiful generosity and its innate ability to nourish. Each acre produced a record of more than ten thousand jin of sweet potatoes that year, and the mere recollection of that year’s crop made me sense a stirring for some reason. A rich yield of sweet potatoes lay beneath the ground. The largest potato unearthed in our village came in at thirty-eight jin. A photo of Yang Lin, the county’s Party secretary, holding it appeared on the front page of
Masses Daily
.
    Sweet potatoes are wonderful, truly wonderful. It was not only a bumper crop in terms of quantity, but the potatoes were rich in starches, they cooked up with a perfect texture, and they tasted a bit like chestnuts, delicious with high nutritional value. Sweet potatoes were piled in every family’s yard, wire was strung along every wall to hang slices of drying sweet potatoes. We had enough to eat, finally enough to eat. No more days of eating grass or the bark of trees; the days when people starved to death were gone, never to return. Before long our legs stopped suffering from oedema; the skin around our middle thickened, and our bellies flattened out. A layer of fat began forming under our skin, light returned to our eyes, and our legs no longer ached when we walked; we started to grow, to