After a long stretch of slow reading, I finally finished Frog by Mo Yan. It’s a difficult book to recommend, not because it isn’t good, but because it demands a very specific kind of patience. The pace is deliberately slow, even sluggish at times, and the prose can feel dense. But if you’re willing to sit with it, Frog slowly unfolds into a deeply affecting and morally complex story. At the center is Gugu, a rural midwife whose early career is marked by skill, compassion, and a kind of local heroism. She helps deliver thousands of babies, offering modern medical care in a countryside still tethered to tradition. But after her fiancé defects to Taiwan, her loyalty to the Party is called into question and in her effort to prove herself, Gugu becomes a strict enforcer of the one child policy. The transition is devastating. The same hands that once saved lives now become agents of control and destruction. Gugu even refers to herself later in life as “a destroyer of fetuses.” She is a character trapped between roles, healer and executioner, sinner and morality. Her arc is haunting, and the guilt she carries in old age punctuated by the imagined cries of lost children is one of the most emotionally disturbing elements of the novel. And yet, I found myself deeply moved by her, I really really loved Gugu. Not in admiration of her actions, but in awe of how fully she gives herself over to what she believes is necessary. Gugu is fearless, merciless, even hated but never uncertain. Her descent into this hardened new self is astonishing, not because it’s justifiable, but because it feels terrifyingly human. She embodies the quiet tragedy of someone who goes too far and can never come back. If anyone wants to discuss this book with me, please send me a message 😊 these are some of favorite passages.